Qu Rulan pushed—not with elegance or precision, not with the fluid ease of a well-trained prodigy—but with every scrap of hunger her body had ever learned to hoard. There was no beauty in the movement, no graceful shift of qi. It was ugly, halting, and too much all at once, a battered will that had already burned past the edges of exhaustion, clinging to the only thing she had left: the need to be more than what she had been.

  The qi within her surged again, pressure building with dangerous insistence. It had pooled at the same blockage again and again, just beneath her ribs, coiling behind a wall that would not yield—until, at last, it did. It was not a crack or a snap, not a dramatic rupture, but a subtle shift, like a knot of silk pulled loose after days of strain. And in that instant, everything changed.

  The qi flooded forward, not in a neat flow but in a torrent, as if something in her had shattered open. It tore through the freshly cleared meridian like water rushing through a dam that had finally broken, spreading fast and hot through her chest and shoulders, down through her limbs, alive with motion. Her body seized with the sheer magnitude of sensation. For a moment, Qu Rulan couldn’t breathe. Her chest expanded, not with panic, but with something fuller than breath—qi, unfiltered and unburdened, moving inside her like a second bloodstream, singing against her nerves.

  The world around her sharpened. The heat from the nearby brazier no longer registered merely as warmth but as layers—smoke, flame, the faint shift of air currents above it. The faint cloth of her training robes clung to her skin with a precision she had never noticed before, each fold, each damp line of sweat an individual sensation. Her hearing was clearer. The air was clearer. It was as if the world had been wrapped in a thin veil all her life, and now, suddenly, that veil had lifted.

  Inside her, her thoughts did not slow or quiet—they simply aligned. She could feel the minute trembling in her fingers from strain, the dull ache in her thighs from kneeling too long, the echo of effort lingering in her jaw from grinding her teeth against failure. But it was all background now. Her mind was unclouded. Her senses were not overwhelmed, just... awake.

  And beneath all of it, her dantian remained—real, anchoring, and fuller than it had ever been. The qi that rushed into her did not merely pass through. It gathered. It deepened. It shaped itself into the reservoir that had been growing slowly over days and nights of failure. It felt stronger now, more complete, like a pool finally reaching its natural depth. The pressure no longer pressed against it. Instead, it nestled there, warm and contained, waiting to be used.

  The change came with cost. Qu Rulan’s body convulsed as something caught at the back of her throat. She choked, then coughed hard enough to fold over herself, and a thick, clinging blackness poured from her mouth and onto the stone floor. It splattered like tar, reeking of rust and ash, heavy and wrong. Her fingers braced against the ground as her whole frame shook with another coughing fit. Sweat slicked her spine. Her skin prickled with heat, and she realised—dimly, distantly—that the impurities weren’t just rising from within her lungs.

  They were pouring out through her pores.

  A slow film of sticky, dark fluid bled from her arms, her back, the sides of her neck. It crawled down her skin like old smoke turned solid. Her body rejected it all—the remnants of malnourishment, of sleepless years on stone streets, of fear eaten like gruel. The dregs of what she had been. It stank, and it burned faintly, and still, she stayed kneeling, steady despite the tremor in her arms and the hollow thud of her heartbeat behind her ribs.

  Somewhere, distantly, Qu Rulan remembered the phrase—impurities of the flesh, purged by the fire of the first breath. Shen Li had said it during a lesson once, patient and quiet, her hand resting on an old scroll.

  Now, Qu Rulan understood what it meant.

  And more than that, she understood what it cost.

  It hurt. Her muscles were scorched from within. Her lungs scraped with every breath. Her hands were still slick with sweat and black sludge, shaking despite her best efforts to hold still. Her vision flickered—but it was clear. Gods, it was so clear. Not in the way she’d dreamed of, not as some radiant revelation or flood of heavenly light. But in the raw knowledge of her own body, her own self. She had broken through.

  Somewhere to her right, she heard a faint shift in cloth, then the muffled voice of Shen Li behind a raised sleeve.

  “You really had a lot of impurity.”

  The words were dry, matter-of-fact, and utterly unbothered, as if Shen Li were commenting on the weather or the number of weeds in a training field. When Qu Rulan turned her head, slow and unsteady, Shen Li was still crouched at a distance—not far, but not crowding her either. The younger cultivator’s arm was raised against her face, shielding her from the worst of the smoke and stench, but her eyes—her eyes were bright. Not with amusement, or judgement, but with something gentler. If Qu Rulan had been anyone else, she might have said it looked like pride.

  If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Shen Li didn’t offer a hand, nor did she move to clean the mess. But she didn’t look away either.

  Qu Rulan did not laugh—not exactly. The sound that came from her throat was too ragged for that, too close to sobbing, though no tears came. Her face was too hot, her chest too full. But she made a noise, something half-strangled and deeply, deeply alive. She had not been rescued. She had not been saved.

  She had survived.

  And not like she had on the streets, by clinging and bargaining and enduring. This survival was different. This survival was a step forward, not a step back. For the first time, the path ahead was not only visible but possible. Her body had not failed. Her qi had not fled. She had broken a meridian open and lived through it.

  The black slick still clung to her, sour and cloying. Her hands were stained with it. But her breathing was steady now, her core warm and anchored, her spine straight. The pressure was gone. In its place—something new.

  When Qu Rulan tilted her head back and opened her eyes, the world had not changed.

  But she had.

  Qu Rulan sat back with effort, her arms trembling as she shifted her weight away from the centre of the mess. The movement sent a slow ripple through the puddle beneath her, the dark slick of expelled impurity clinging wet and viscous to her thighs, her calves, the back of her hands. She winced as she settled, shoulders hunching unconsciously at the feel of it pressing into her skin. It was sticky, sour, still warm in places. It reeked of iron and ash and something older—like rot left to fester in the hollows of a corpse.

  Her nose wrinkled sharply. The disgust was immediate, visceral, and unguarded. This—this had been inside her. Thick and clotted, clinging to her bones and breath. She could almost feel it still writhing beneath her skin, even though it was already cooling on the outside. No wonder people had turned up their noses at her in the city. No wonder Instructor Lin had looked at her like something that didn’t belong when she’d first entered the hall. If this was what she had been carrying...

  She shifted again, grimacing more at the sensation than the soreness, trying to edge her knees out of the worst of it. The slime dragged against her robes and pulled at the backs of her legs, and every inch of her skin recoiled. But her senses—gods, her senses were so clear. Every shift of fabric scraped against her awareness; every shift of air around her felt sharp and whole. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was real.

  The taste in her mouth hadn’t gone away. Bitter, metallic, with an undercurrent of something sourer still. She made a face, turned her head slightly to the side, and spat again—unapologetically, inelegantly. The thick tang of it lingered on her tongue anyway, but the act helped, if only symbolically.

  Behind her, Shen Li moved without comment. She had risen during the worst of it and now stepped towards a low shelf set against the side of the room, as if she had always known it was there. Her movements were calm, unhurried, with a familiar sort of precision that Qu Rulan had come to associate with her. No flourish. No hesitation. Just certainty.

  The robe she returned with was folded with care, a soft grey with paler lining—unmarked, unembroidered, but finer than the ones given out to new disciples. Shen Li held it out without a word, her sleeve still half-raised to her face, the other hand steady.

  Qu Rulan took it gratefully, the fabric cool and clean against her fingers. She clutched it to her chest for a moment, then exhaled—a long, shuddering breath that felt like it belonged to someone else.

  “I am,” she said, hoarse but steady, “in dire need of a bath.”

  The words came out rough, scraped raw from her throat, but there was laughter in them—real, unguarded. Her shoulders shook with it before she could stop herself, the exhaustion making her giddy, the weight of success lifting something sharp and unbearable from her spine. Her chest still ached. Her head was still spinning.

  But she had never felt more alive.

  Shen Li didn’t laugh. But the corner of her mouth curved, just slightly, as she took a half-step back and gestured towards the door.

  “There’s a washroom past the east stairs,” she said, dry as ever. “I suggest you go before someone else comes in here and mistakes this for an alchemical accident.”

  Qu Rulan made a face at her, nose scrunching up in exaggerated offence as she hugged the clean robe to her chest. She didn’t have the strength to reply with anything clever, not when her skin still felt tacky with tar and her bones ached with the deep, echoing wear of what she had just done. But the look she gave Shen Li was plain enough.

  The smirk didn’t reach Shen Li’s mouth, but her eyes didn’t look away.

  Still grimacing, Qu Rulan pushed herself upright on unsteady legs, the slickness pulling at her robes one last time as she stepped free of the worst of the mess. Her limbs were trembling. Her head was light. But she didn’t look back.

  She turned and made her way towards the east stairs.

  She was going to bathe until she could no longer smell the old self that had clung to her skin, and she had a long overdue date with a warm washbasin and some pine soap to do just that.