The mountain air was thinner by the time Rulan made her way back toward the tier-three housing.

  The sun had begun its slow descent behind the western ridge, spilling long streaks of amber and rose across the stone paths. A wind moved through the higher pines, whistling low through branches like the breath of something ancient.

  Rulan kept her hands tucked in her sleeves, thumb brushing the faint smudge of ink that had dried along the web between her fingers.

  She didn’t know what she’d touched that afternoon.

  But it had felt like something. Like starting.

  Shen Li had only nodded when she thanked her—short, quiet, and dismissive in the way people are when they don’t want praise to settle between them. Rulan had murmured something awkward and half-formed in return. She hadn’t used the right form of address. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to bow. She didn’t.

  But Shen hadn’t corrected her.

  So she left it.

  The house looked smaller than she remembered. Less clean-lined. Less safe.

  The mist had burned off now, and what remained were shadows along the corners of the eaves and a faint, cold breeze under the door.

  She pushed it open.

  The front room was empty, but not still.

  Lantern light flickered from the wall sconce. A folded mat lay near the table, its edges crisp. A pot of tea—fresh—sat untouched, steam barely rising.

  And from the far bedroom, the door not hers, came the soft, unmistakable sound of controlled breath.

  Even Rulan—new to all this—could tell it was deliberate.

  Someone inside was meditating. Or had been.

  The door opened a moment later.

  And out stepped her housemate.

  Rulan didn’t know the name.

  Not yet.

  She just knew that the girl who stood before her now was everything she wasn’t.

  Tall. Composed. Skin pale as first frost. Hair coiled high in an intricate knot, strands glossy and straight, pinned with a silver clip shaped like a descending eagle. Her robe was blue-gray silk, the inner lining a pale, glimmering white like snowlight. Even her belt was smooth, uncreased, marked at the knot with a faint stitched seal.

  And her presence—it pressed.

  Not like a shout. Like altitude.

  Like being reminded how small your breath really was.

  She looked at her.

  Not up. Not down. Just… through.

  Rulan shifted.

  “Uh,” she said. “Hi.”

  She blinked. Slowly.

  There was a silence that followed—not long, but sharp, like the pause before a blade drops.

  “I was not aware we were speaking now,” she said, her voice clear and cool.

  Rulan frowned. “I live here.”

  Her expression didn’t change. “So do birds in temple rafters.”

  It took Rulan a second.

  “Are—” she started, then stopped. “Are you trying to insult me?”

  The pale girl arched a brow. “If I were, I wouldn’t need to try.”

  Rulan felt her spine stiffen.

  This was familiar. The rhythm of jabs and retorts. Of people who thought they could keep you down by pretending you weren’t already flat.

  But something about her tone made it worse. Because she wasn’t trying to hurt her.

  She was just… stating facts.

  “You know,” Rulan said, arms crossing, “you could at least pretend to be polite.”

  She took a slow step forward, the sleeve of her robe brushing the edge of the table as she passed.

  “You’re in a cultivation sect,” she said. “Not a market stall. Politeness is not a shield. It is a measure of your place.”

  She stopped in the middle of the room, her gaze cool.

  “You haven’t found yours yet.”

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  Rulan stared at her.

  She didn’t know what clan this girl came from. She only knew she didn’t like the way she said your place, like Rulan was a stain on the corner of a scroll.

  “Well,” Rulan said, stepping past her towards her door, “then I guess I’ll just have to figure it out.”

  She didn’t move. “Do it quietly.”

  Rulan’s hand tightened on the doorframe.

  She didn’t answer.

  But the door shut—firmly—between them.

  The sound echoed slightly in the small stone room, and she let out a sharp huff, loud in the quiet.

  It wasn’t much.

  But it was hers.

  A petty, childish exhale—like slamming a pot down or kicking a bucket for the sound it made. The kind of thing you did when your pride was scraped raw but your hands weren’t allowed to bleed for it. No one heard it, not really. But that wasn’t the point.

  The point was the release.

  Rulan crossed the room in quick, stiff steps, the pads of her feet whispering against cool stone. Her jaw was tight. Her hands were clenched into the wide folds of her sleeves, fingernails biting into cloth.

  She’d held herself together all the way down the path.

  And now, safely alone, she could admit it: she hated that girl.

  She didn’t know her name until now—didn’t know who her housemate was or what it meant to be what she assumed was the heir of some fussy clan. She didn’t know the shape of the ice eagle sigil stitched into her belt, or the long lineage of cultivators who could turn breath into blizzards.

  But she felt it.

  She had felt it.

  That chill.

  That composure so sharp it could have sliced flesh. The way she had stood—no tension, no aggression, just poise, like someone born in the centre of the world and raised never to question it.

  Everything about her said: you do not belong here.

  And maybe Rulan didn’t.

  But that girl didn’t get to decide.

  She dropped to her mat with a thump that didn’t quite count as graceful. Her legs folded beneath her with more irritation than ease, her robe tangling briefly around her knees. She exhaled, sharp and audible, and reached up to snatch her scroll off the shelf with a little more force than necessary.

  The parchment crackled as she unrolled it across the floor, edges curling slightly where it had been tied too long.

  The characters still looked like they were written in water and stone—fluid and unknowable. They sat on the page like closed doors, every stroke sharp, final, and absolute.

  She stared at them a moment.

  Nothing moved inside her. No recognition. No stirrings of understanding.

  It could have been a curse or a recipe. She couldn’t tell the difference.

  But the diagrams—those, at least, offered something.

  Shapes. Lines. Bodies in motion.

  A path.

  She studied the brushwork with the intensity of someone who had learned to survive by watching, by noticing what others overlooked. The figure drawn was simple: seated, cross-legged, hands folded. But the movement was there in the lines that wrapped around the figure’s chest and spine—spirals of breath, curls of qi drawn like ribbons winding through the silhouette.

  There were arrows. Cycles. Points marked in black along the limbs, the abdomen, and the chest.

  She didn’t need the characters to tell her what they meant.

  She remembered.

  Not from books.

  From her own body.

  From the moment on that meditation platform when breath had finally felt full, and her fingers had trembled with something almost electric, almost alive. The feeling of stillness, like warmth curling through the hollow of her bones.

  It hadn’t lasted.

  But it had been real.

  She reached out without thinking and brushed her fingertips over the inked lines of the scroll.

  And her fingers itched.

  Not from restlessness.

  But from longing.

  She wanted it back.

  The breath, the weight, the moment where she had felt—not safe, but whole. She wasn’t going to let that girl across the hall be the only one in this house who could sit in silence and feel the mountain breathe.

  She wasn’t going to let her past—dirty sleeves, cracked hands, hair masked in soot—be the only story she carried forward.

  Not now.

  Not when something inside her had finally whispered: You are allowed to try.

  She shifted on the mat.

  Spine tall.

  Shoulders rolled down and back.

  Her body didn’t know what good posture was supposed to feel like. But it remembered balance. It remembered bracing against cold. It remembered the moment between hunger and movement—stillness born of necessity.

  She could work with that.

  She closed her eyes.

  And drew in a breath.

  Four counts.

  Held.

  Two.

  Exhaled.

  It caught unevenly. Her back ached from holding too tight.

  Another breath.

  Still wrong.

  Another.

  She followed the shapes in her mind—the ones from the scroll, the ones Shen Li had spoken aloud in that soft, dry voice like pages turning: the breath falls to the dan tian, the body does not chase it, the body only holds.

  She didn’t need to understand every metaphor. She needed to feel it.

  She breathed again.

  And this time—

  The rhythm settled.

  And she knew: it wasn’t fear that moved her anymore.

  It wasn’t panic in her chest or the ache of need in her belly.

  It was something else.

  Hunger.

  She inhaled again, slower this time.

  The air passed through her like water settling into dry earth—quiet, weightless at first, then gathering. It wasn’t resistance she felt, not quite. More like… presence. Something just beneath the surface, barely distinct from the breath itself.

  The room didn’t change.

  The lantern on the shelf still flickered softly in its bronze bracket. The mat beneath her knees was still slightly uneven, worn at the edge. But the space between those things—the empty air, the silence—had begun to feel less empty. Not full, exactly. Just... waiting.

  A breath, drawn in again.

  And this time—faintly, uncertainly—something shifted at the edges of her hands. Not a spark. Not even warmth. More like a shiver in the nerves, a tension that wasn’t pain. A quiet stirring beneath her skin, like the twitch before motion or the echo of a thought not yet formed.

  She almost didn’t notice it.

  Almost dismissed it as fatigue.

  But it was there. Lingering. Familiar in a way she couldn’t name.

  Like the pause in the city streets just before a storm broke. The weight of sky and dust and heat pulling inwards, waiting to fall.

  Her fingers curled slightly on her knees.

  Another breath, and her lungs drew in more easily than before. The rhythm no longer felt foreign. The exhale slipped from her lips like silk.

  And then—just beneath the breastbone, behind the place where hunger used to live—a sensation opened.

  Small.

  Delicate.

  Uncertain.

  Like the moment before you catch your balance on uneven ground, when gravity hasn’t decided what comes next.

  It wasn’t a light. It wasn’t power.

  But it was there.

  And for that single moment, Rulan wasn’t thinking of the scroll she couldn’t read. Of the elegant disdain in Wang Feiyan’s voice. Of the alley-stale ache that had lived in her belly since she was old enough to steal.

  She wasn’t hungry.

  Not for food.

  Not for protection.

  Not even for safety.

  She was simply—

  Full.

  Of breath. Of stillness. Of something beginning.

  The feeling didn’t last.

  It slipped away like water through fingers, fading before she could hold it. But the impression remained, like the heat left on skin after standing near a fire.

  When she finally opened her eyes, the room looked the same. Cold stone. Shelves. Bare floor.

  But something in her—small and unsteady—was no longer quite the same.

  She exhaled.

  And for the first time since arriving, the silence didn’t press in.

  It simply was.