The morning came quiet and grey, the air damp with mist that clung to the rooftops like silk.

  Rulan stepped through the house gate, apple in hand, sleeves loosely tied. The stone beneath her feet was cold, even through the soles of her borrowed shoes, and the mountain air bit a little sharper than the day before—but she didn’t mind.

  She liked it better this way. When the world was soft-edged. When the sharp lines of buildings blurred and the quiet didn’t feel like judgement.

  She crunched into the apple, letting the tartness fill her mouth as she scanned the path.

  Shen Li was already waiting.

  She stood just beyond the gate, arms folded in the wide sleeves of her robe, hair still damp at the ends like she’d bathed in the stream and hadn't bothered to dry it fully. Her eyes moved calmly across the slope below them, watching as other disciples emerged in ones and twos, drifting towards the outer training pavillions like leaves caught in a lazy wind.

  Rulan jogged the last few steps to meet her, chewing, swallowing, breath clouding faintly in the morning chill.

  “You’re early,” she said, mouth half-full.

  “I always am,” Shen Li replied.

  It wasn’t boast. Just fact.

  Rulan nodded, wiping her hand on the inside of her sleeve, and walked a few paces besides her.

  They started towards the spiritual training garden—less steep than the physical field, but quieter. More watched. More inward.

  They didn’t speak for a while.

  The crunch of her apple was the only sound between them, and Shen didn’t seem to mind.

  — — —

  Rulan waited until they were halfway there—far enough from the house, close enough to the edge of the platform where mist still pooled in the hollows of the courtyard tiles.

  Then, carefully, as if the words might be sharp:

  “Hey… do you know the name of the girl in my house?”

  Shen Li glanced over, not breaking stride. “Wang Feiyan.”

  Rulan frowned. “Is that… someone important?”

  “Yes.”

  She waited.

  Shen didn’t elaborate.

  Rulan made a face and took another bite of her apple.

  “You going to make me ask?”

  “I was curious if you would,” Shen said, just dry enough to make it a tease.

  Rulan groaned under her breath. “You’re awful.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Shen’s tone remained unreadable, but her steps slowed slightly as they reached the garden platform—just enough that they walked in at the same pace.

  “She’s the youngest daughter of the main Wang line,” Shen said finally, voice lower now, meant for Rulan alone. “Ice-affinity. Born in Jaiyuan. Their clan’s one of the oldest still aligned to the imperial throne.”

  “Oh.” Rulan tried to remember the name. “She said something about… birds in rafters.”

  “That sounds like her,” Shen said.

  Rulan made a small noise of agreement. “She hates me.”

  “She doesn’t know you.”

  “Yeah, well. She looked at me like I was going to steal the dishes.”

  Shen Li didn’t argue. Rude.

  But she added, “Her whole life has been rules, probably. Status. Clean lines. She’s been taught her name is worth more than yours.”

  Rulan’s grip tightened on the apple core.

  “She’s not wrong, here. Not yet.”

  Rulan swallowed the last bite, jaw tense.

  Shen glanced at her.

  “Names matter,” she said. “But they’re not everything. Not in a sect. Not forever.”

  They stepped onto the garden platform, mist curling around their ankles like a low tide drawn back towards the trees.

  The platform itself was broad and open to the sky, ringed with smooth slate benches and low lanterns that glowed faintly despite the daylight. The outer disciples filtered in with the kind of careful quiet that always accompanied formal training—robes straight, hair bound, expressions measured.

  Shen Li moved towards one of the stone benches near the edge, where the moss hadn't quite been swept away. She lowered herself smoothly, back straight, hands folded in her lap.

  Rulan followed a beat behind, slightly awkward in her footing, sleeves too loose, the apple core still warm in her palm. She tucked it away into her sleeve with a faint grimace and dropped onto the bench besides Shen with a muted huff.

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  Then Shen spoke, low enough that no one else would hear.

  “Speaking of your housemate.”

  Rulan looked over. “What now?”

  “You should pick up a surname.”

  Rulan blinked.

  “What?”

  “A temporary one, at least,” Shen said, adjusting the edge of her sleeve. “Something to put on scrolls. On your record. Otherwise, you're going to run into problems.”

  Rulan stared at her. “I don’t—what kind of problems?”

  Shen glanced at her sidelong. “You’ll be listed last in every grouping, if listed at all. You’ll be challenged more, doubted more. You’ll attract the wrong kind of attention. Names mean history. Position. Even if it’s just on paper.”

  Rulan frowned. “That’s stupid.”

  Shen nodded. “Yes. And true.”

  The mist stirred faintly as another group of disciples arrived—three of them, walking in step, robes pristine, voices low and polite. Rulan watched them pass, quiet.

  “What do people usually pick?” she asked, eventually.

  Shen shrugged. “Some take the name of their town. Some pick a virtue. Some name themselves after the sect. Or the season they joined.”

  Rulan was silent.

  There was something in her chest—something brittle and tense. The idea of picking a name felt like stealing. Like pretending. Like claiming something she didn’t earn. Just because she didn't know the family she was born from doesn't mean she could so easily abandon who they were, make a new person from herself.

  She didn’t even know what she wanted it to say about her.

  She wasn’t brave. She wasn’t good. She wasn’t from anywhere she wanted to remember.

  Shen added, quieter now, “You don’t have to do it today. But you should think about it. Before someone else does it for you.”

  Rulan looked down at her hands.

  Then out at the platform, where disciples were beginning to kneel in neat rows, their sleeves falling into place like ripples on still water.

  “I’ll think about it,” she muttered.

  Shen said nothing more.

  But she nodded once.

  And that was enough, Rulan more than happy to have the subject dropped.

  The garden platform was nearly full now, as she glanced around.

  The mist had mostly cleared, leaving the morning sharp-edged and bright against the slate. Outer disciples knelt in two loose rows, spread across the clean stone with measured spacing. Some sat with perfect posture—hands folded, breath already slowed—while others fidgeted, exchanged glances, or whispered behind sleeves.

  Rulan sat somewhere between the two states. Her back was straight. Her hands were still. But her jaw ached slightly from clenching, and her thoughts refused to quiet.

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  Besides her, Shen Li was silent.

  Then a hush passed through the platform—not sudden, but slow, like the air itself held its breath.

  A figure approached from the eastern path, where the stone curved inward and pine shadows stretched long.

  They moved without haste.

  Not a ripple in their step, not a robe out of place. No fanfare. No trailing disciples or tokens of status.

  Just presence.

  The kind that didn’t need to be announced.

  The inner disciple stepped onto the platform, and the quiet deepened, sharpened. Rulan wasn’t sure how she knew they were different—more—but she did.

  They were tall, their robe the deep verdant green of the inner sect, edged in glimmering silver thread that caught the light when they moved. Their hair was bound in a topknot, streaked through with grey, not from age, but from cultivation. From depth. Their gaze swept the rows without urgency, and when it passed over Rulan, she felt her shoulders straighten before she even realised it.

  They stopped at the head of the group.

  And spoke.

  Their voice wasn’t loud. But it carried. Every syllable struck the air with precision, like a bell that didn’t ring so much as resonate.

  “I am Lin Yujing,” they said. “Inner disciple. I have trained under five masters, served three provinces, and spent the last seventeen years on this mountain.”

  They paused t let silence settle into the room like dust into cloth.

  “I do not care where you come from.”

  Their eyes passed over a boy in jade-trimmed robes, a girl with golden cuffs, a cluster of students whose backs straightened with inherited pride.

  “I do not care who your clan is. I do not care who your parents bribed. I do not care how well you fared in the draft.”

  A beat.

  “I care about one thing.”

  The quiet held its breath.

  “If you waste my time, I will dismiss you.”

  There was no cruelty in the words.

  Only certainty.

  “If you have not activated your qi within the week, you will be dismissed. If you cannot hold a breath form for nine full cycles without interruption, you will be dismissed. If I believe you are not pulling your weight, not trying, not reaching—you will be dismissed.”

  Their gaze swept over the crowd again. Rulan could feel it. Not resting. Weighing.

  “And if you are dismissed from this class,” Lin Yujing continued, “you will not be accepted into the physical path training, either. Your instruction ends here.”

  A ripple of tension passed through the rows.

  One student shifted.

  Another swallowed.

  Rulan’s heartbeat had risen without her noticing.

  Lin Yujing folded their hands.

  “This is not cruelty. This is the truth of cultivation. You are outer disciples. You are not owed anything. You are tested.”

  A pause.

  And then, quieter: “Some of you will rise. Most of you will fall.”

  They turned slightly, adjusting the fall of their robe.

  “Two groups will form.”

  They raised a hand, fingers spread like the petals of a flower.

  “Those who have not yet touched their qi—your instruction begins in the first half of the hour. Breathing. Stillness. Anchoring.”

  They lowered their hand.

  “The rest—those who have felt it, even once—will stay after. You will begin the first cycling forms of the Jewel Lotus Art.”

  Another beat of silence. Then: “Do not lie.”

  The final words were flat. Cold. Like frost sliding down a blade.

  “If you lie to gain more instruction, I will know. And I will remove you from this sect entirely.”

  Shen Li stood quietly beside her, unreadable in that way only Shen Li could be. But as Lin Yujing finished speaking, she offered Rulan a slight smile—tilted, apologetic, with a glint of dry humor that said well, here we are. Then, without a word, she stepped away, crossing the polished stone to the opposite side of the platform, where the other students—those who had touched their qi, even once—were beginning to settle into a separate formation. There were more of them than Rulan had expected, nearly half the class, and all of them moved with a confidence she didn’t yet know how to name.

  Lin Yujing watched her go.

  Watched all of them, really, with an expression as still and sharp as glass cooled in water. They said nothing for a time, only let the division settle, the shape of the groups now clear. One seated closer to the garden’s edge, still and waiting. The other, slightly higher on the platform, where the sun had begun to warm the slate. Rulan remained in the lower tier.

  Lin Yujing’s gaze passed over her once. Did not pause. Did not narrow. But something in it seemed to note her, as though weighing the presence of a question that had not yet been asked.

  Then, at last, they spoke.

  “The first lie you must unlearn,” Lin Yujing said, voice level and unhurried, “is that qi is power.”

  They turned slowly, facing the seated students without grand gesture, hands folded behind their back, the long fall of their robe brushing over the stone.

  “Qi is not strength. It is not heat. It is not something you have, in the way a coin can be spent or a weapon drawn. Qi is motion—a pattern, a pressure, a language the world has been speaking long before you were born.”

  Their voice did not rise to meet the size of the group. It did not need to. Every word landed with the weight of ceremony, as though drawn from memory rather than breath.

  “You cannot see it,” they continued. “You cannot smell it. You cannot place it in a jar and name it. But it moves through all living things. Through wind and fire, through soil and stone. Through blood and breath. When your thoughts go quiet, and your body no longer scrambles for control, you will begin to feel its outline. A pressure in the lungs that doesn’t match your breath. A warmth behind the sternum that no fire caused.”

  They stepped lightly across the platform, robes whispering over stone.

  “Qi originates from three roots,” they said. “The heavens, the earth, and the self. It flows from the stars, from the sun and the shifting void beyond. It pulses in rivers, sleeps in mountains, curls in the roots of trees and the cracks of stone. And within you—within every cultivator—it waits. Dormant. Asleep. But waiting.”

  Rulan listened, shoulders tight, trying to fold the words into something that made sense. The shape of it reminded her of Shen Li’s quiet explanations, but Lin Yujing's voice was colder, more precise. Like carved stone. Like a gate that did not open just because you knocked.

  “The body contains qi naturally,” they said. “Just as it contains blood, or breath. But to cultivate it, you must first awaken your awareness of it. You must learn to feel what you are taught to ignore. You must stop chasing it, and let it find you.”

  A pause.

  “Begin with stillness.”

  They let that word hang, long enough for the wind to shift through the pines.

  “Let the breath fall to its root. Let the motion of thought subside. Let the noise of your mind go quiet.”

  Rulan drew in a breath—not too fast, not forced.

  The words pulled something in her, though she didn’t know why.

  “Your qi cannot be commanded. It does not obey shouting. It does not move for desperation. It will not answer you because you are hungry or alone or cold. It answers rhythm. It answers patience. It answers presence.”

  Their gaze drifted over the students seated around her.

  “Let your breath follow the cycle: four counts in, two held, four released. Again. And again. Until the breath is not something you do. Until it becomes something you are.”

  Rulan tried.

  Tried not to think about Feiyan. Not to think about scrolls she couldn’t read or people whose names carried weight like iron. She tried not to think of hunger, not to think of years lost in alleys and forgotten doorways.

  She tried to breathe.

  “To awaken your qi,” Lin Yujing said, “you must first remember what it is to be still. Not in body. But in intention. To stop pressing against the world. And let the world move through you.”

  They stopped then.

  Not to wait for questions.

  But because that was the end of the truth they were willing to offer—for now.

  The rest, Rulan knew, she would have to find in breath.

  And silence.

  And the slow, careful motion of something unnamed beginning.

  Lin Yujing turned once more to face the seated group, their gaze narrowing ever so slightly, as though taking in the rows not as individuals but as a single unfinished sculpture—something rough and untested, full of wasted potential.

  “You will begin now.”

  The words fell like a curtain drawn across a stage.

  “Petal Breath Anchoring. Nine full cycles. No movement. No correction. If you fall out of rhythm, do not chase it. Let it pass. Begin again.”

  Their voice did not rise. It did not need to.

  Each syllable struck with the quiet finality of a sealed tomb.

  “You are not here to perform,” they continued. “You are here to learn.”

  That, too, sounded like an admonition. Without another word, Lin Yujing turned and walked away, crossing the platform with steps so soundless that they might have left no impression at all. They ascended the low stone stair to the upper platform where the awakened disciples waited—those who had already drawn qi into themselves, even if only once, and been changed by it. They did not look back.

  The air on the training platform shifted.

  Not louder. Not heavier.

  Simply expectant.

  The sound of rustling robes stilled. The shallow coughs and nervous shifting came to a halt.

  And then, slowly, the group began to breathe.

  Rulan closed her eyes.

  The world narrowed.

  She let her hands come to rest on her knees, palms down, fingers curling slightly as if to hold something she didn’t yet have. The stone beneath her was cold, seeping up through her borrowed robes in thin, merciless threads. The morning air pressed cool against her cheeks, curling into the hollow beneath her jaw, slipping along the edge of her collar.

  She breathed in.

  Four counts.

  The air filled her lungs unevenly, but she tried not to notice. She held it.

  Two counts.

  Released.

  Four more.

  She repeated the cycle again. Once. Then twice. Her spine tall, her shoulders relaxed in the way Shen Li had taught her, though the pose still felt like a borrowed coat—too fine, too stiff, not made for her body.

  The rhythm was there. She knew it.

  She had practiced it just last night, her legs folded on the mat in the small room she barely believed was hers. She had felt warmth then—delicate, fleeting, like something brushing the inside of her bones. She had wanted it back ever since.

  She tried now.

  Not to summon it.

  Not to chase it.

  But to allow it.

  She tried.

  And then—

  Her thoughts strayed.

  Not with intention. Not even sharply. But sideways.

  She thought of the girl behind her. Two rows back. Small, with a downturned mouth and quick, shallow breath. The kind of girl who never looked people in the eye, but always bowed too deep. What if she had felt her qi already? What if she was called to the higher tier next? Would anyone be surprised?

  Would they miss Rulan, if she failed?

  Would they notice?

  Her knee twinged—an old ache, the kind you earned from too many nights on stone and frozen earth.

  She shifted, just barely. A breath. A lean.

  Her awareness fractured.

  The shape of her body became real again, the way it always did when her mind slipped: the stretch in her calf, the knot between her shoulder blades, the raw place on her ankle where the borrowed boots didn’t quite fit.

  The breath was still moving, but the shape of it had broken.

  The count had vanished.

  The rhythm was gone.

  She forced herself to focus.

  She dragged her mind back with both hands, like hauling a weighted net from cold water.

  Inhale.

  Four counts.

  Hold.

  Two.

  Exhale.

  She called up the memory of the scroll’s diagrams—the soft inked lines mapping out breath through the figure’s torso, curling around the heart, spiralling low to the dan tian, that space just beneath the navel where everything was meant to begin.

  She tried to feel it.

  To catch the echo of what had stirred in her last night, the warmth like a held candle, flickering in the chest.

  But it wasn’t there.

  Not yet.

  All she felt was breath and the faint burn of lungs working harder than they should for something that shouldn’t be this difficult.

  Her thoughts slipped again.

  She remembered Jie.

  Not the smile, not his clever hands—just the sound he made when he tried not to cough at night. How he curled in on himself like he thought he could cough quieter that way. Like being small would keep him from getting dragged off when the gangs started talking about who ate more than they earned.

  She remembered the soup pot they cracked over a hearth that wasn’t theirs, the one they used until it leaked out slow, broth thick with root scraps and bone. The way she learned to break ginger with her teeth to dull the cold in her fingers.

  She remembered the sound her own stomach made when it had been too long without.

  She remembered too much.

  Her eyes stayed shut.

  But the breath stumbled.

  And in that moment, it was gone.

  All of it.

  Above her, a voice cut the air.

  Measured.

  Unmistakable.

  “Third row. Right side. Too much movement.”

  Her spine stiffened.

  Her hands curled in on themselves. Her fingers felt too large.

  She didn’t know if it was her.

  She didn’t dare open her eyes to find out.

  She stayed still.

  So still.

  “Begin again.”

  Lin Yujing’s voice didn’t waver. It didn’t pierce. It simply was.

  “Anchor. Or be pulled apart.”

  There was no judgement in the words. No softness either.

  It was a warning.

  A law.

  A truth.

  Rulan breathed in again.