Bang. Bang. Bang.

  The sharp crack of the night watchman's wooden mallet rang through the darkness and roused Gu Yue Village from its sleep. The sound traveled along the beams and crept into even the most isolated of the pillar houses. Fang Yuan opened his eyes.

  He lay still for a moment and savored what was there: a night without nightmares. In his previous lives, mornings like this one had always arrived loaded with plans to form and contingencies to arrange, but every strategic corner, every hidden path, every secret buried in Qing Mao Mountain was already mapped inside him. There was nothing left to calculate. He pushed aside his silk blanket with a fluid motion and got up.

  The rain had stopped. He opened the window and found cool air waiting, carrying the scent of damp earth, pine sap, and wildflowers, the smell of a world that had cleaned itself in the night. The sun hadn't yet risen, leaving the sky a deep, unclouded blue.

  Around him, the village assembled itself in the half-light. The great dwellings of green bamboo and dark wood offered a sharp contrast to the mountain slopes behind them, which in this light resembled a pale green, misty sea. These imposing buildings rose to at least two stories without exception, an architectural response particular to mountain clans, born of necessity. The steep incline and persistent damp made ground-level living impractical, so the first floor of every structure was nothing but a network of stilts and thick wooden stakes driven into the rock, and the second floor, raised, protected, dry, served as the actual living space. It was in one such upper room that Fang Yuan and his brother had grown up.

  — Young Master Fang Yuan, are you awake already? I'll come right up and join you.

  A young woman's voice drifted up from the ground floor. He glanced down and recognized his personal maid, Shen Cui, already dressed and composed in the early morning.

  Her appearance was only slightly above average, but she had an instinct for making the most of what she had. Dressed in a long-sleeved green dress with fitted pants, embroidered shoes, and a pearl hairpin, she carried herself with a youthful vitality that was genuinely difficult to ignore, and which she had no intention of wasting.

  She came upstairs carrying a basin of hot water. Fang Yuan washed his face and rinsed his mouth, then cleaned his teeth with a willow twig and snow salt while she set about preparing his clothes with practiced efficiency. As she helped him dress, she found occasions to press herself against his back, brief, deliberate, a seduction tactic deployed with the subtlety of a drawn blade.

  Fang Yuan's face remained still throughout. To him, she was nothing more than a weed that would be cut down at the first change of season. He knew exactly what she was: a plant, placed there by his uncle's housekeeper, vain and hollow, the kind of person who wouldn't waste a breath of hesitation before switching her allegiance the moment his standing slipped. She was a variable that would resolve itself in due course.

  Fang Zheng arrived just as Shen Cui was smoothing the last wrinkles from Fang Yuan's collar. His eyes went to the maid and lingered there a moment too long before he looked away. Throughout all the time he'd spent in his elder brother's shadow, he too had been assigned a servant, but not a young and pretty one. He'd been given a stout, severe woman of middle age, chosen entirely for utility and offering nothing beyond it.

  When will a girl like Shen Cui ever be assigned to me? The thought surfaced before he could stop it, though he kept it carefully behind his teeth. His uncle and aunt's favoritism toward Fang Yuan was an open secret that everyone in the household understood and no one discussed. What Fang Zheng didn't know, what stung most in its irony, was that it was Fang Yuan himself who'd insisted on his brother receiving a servant at all. Left to their guardians, Fang Zheng would've had no one.

  — That's enough, said Fang Yuan at last, setting Shen Cui's hands aside with the same mechanical ease one uses to move an overhanging branch off a path.

  His clothes had been ready long ago. She was simply manufacturing reasons to stay. For Shen Cui, Fang Yuan represented a trajectory, becoming his concubine would carry her beyond the station she'd been born into, and she'd decided that this was worth whatever investment the pursuit required. His heart was a glacier she hadn't begun to touch. She pouted faintly, thought better of pressing the matter, and withdrew with practiced grace.

  Fang Yuan turned to his brother.

  — Are you ready?

  Standing near the door with his head lowered, Fang Zheng answered with a barely audible yes. He'd been awake for hours, the dark circles beneath his eyes made that clear.

  The two brothers left the house together. The village was already in motion. All along the path, teenagers their age moved in clusters of two and three toward the same destination, their steps carrying the particular energy of people walking toward something they can't turn back from.

  As the Fang brothers passed, voices dropped on either side of the road and then resumed in their wake.

  — Look, it's the Fang brothers.

  — The one in front, that's Fang Yuan. The poet...

  Fang Zheng kept his gaze on the ground and followed his brother's footsteps, as he always had.

  The sun finally crested the ridge and caught Fang Yuan full in the face, bathing him in gold. That same light, falling from the same angle, threw a long shadow back across Fang Zheng's face, a shadow that moved exactly as he moved and went where he went, inseparable from him no matter how fast or far he walked.

  Perhaps I'll never step out of my brother's shadow in this lifetime, he thought.

  Fang Yuan perceived everything around him with the crystalline clarity of someone who'd long since stopped being surprised by anything a human being could do. His brother's quiet corrosion, Shen Cui's transparent calculations, his uncle's measured patience, none of it required his attention. They were figures in the background of a story he'd already read to its end. As long as none of them stepped directly into his path, he had no reason to spare them more than a glance.

  The path ended at the Clan Pavilion. More than a hundred teenagers their age had already gathered before it, and the crowd was still growing.

  The Clan Pavilion was the most important building in Gu Yue Village, not merely the residence of successive chiefs, but the sanctuary of the ancestral tablets, the nerve center of Gu Yue authority, the place where every significant decision in the clan's history had been ratified or reversed. Every stone in its walls seemed to carry the weight of generations.

  — Good. You're all on time.

  The Elder of the Academy stepped forward to address the assembly. His hair and beard were white as snow, but his eyes held a brightness that had resisted the years, and the genuine pleasure with which he surveyed this new generation of recruits was unmistakable.

  — Today is the awakening ceremony, the most important turning point in your lives. I won't waste your time with long speeches. Follow me.

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  He led them through the pavilion's great hall and behind a heavy hidden door, where a stone staircase descended steeply into the mountain's interior. When they emerged into the cave below, the sound that rose from the group was unguarded and unanimous, a ripple of genuine wonder that moved through them all.

  The vault above was studded with stalactites, each one a natural jewel with iridescent reflections that scattered the available light into shifting spectrums of color. Fang Yuan, moving with the crowd, took in the spectacle with his customary stillness.

  The Gu Yue clan migrated from the Central Continent to Qing Mao Mountain a thousand years ago, he thought. It was the discovery of the spiritual source buried in this cave that allowed them to take root here. Without the spring that produces Primeval stones, the very foundations of the clan would cease to exist.

  They advanced another hundred meters into the mountain. The brightness of the stalactites thinned and faded, giving way to a darkness broken only by the low roar of moving water. They rounded a final column of rock and the river appeared.

  It was roughly ten meters wide, and its waters carried no reflection of anything above them. They shone with their own cold light, as though something deep beneath the surface had absorbed starlight once and was only now releasing it, slowly, steadily, a glow that belonged to the water itself rather than to any source outside it.

  On the opposite bank lay the field of Moon Orchids.

  The clan cultivated them with obsessive care, and the result was this: flowers whose blue and pink petals curved in perfect crescents, their stems a translucent green that caught the river's light like the purest jade, their floral hearts radiating a soft, pearl-like luminescence. In the dim of the underground cave, that turquoise carpet scattered with points of living light seemed to belong to another world entirely, too precise, too beautiful to be accidental, as though it had been placed here deliberately as proof that the world could still produce things beyond calculation.

  — Wow... it's beautiful.

  — I've never seen anything like it.

  The exclamations moved through the teenagers in a wave. For most of them, it was the first time they'd ever been admitted to the sacred interior of the mountain.

  The Elder of the Academy allowed them their moment, a faint smile on his lips. Then his voice came down like a closing door.

  — Listen carefully. When I call your name, you will cross this river and walk through the field of flowers as far as your strength allows. The closer you approach the source, the stronger the spiritual pressure becomes. Is everything clear?

  There were no questions. Without exception, every person in that cave had heard about this trial from a parent or an older sibling. The rule was simple and merciless: fewer than ten steps meant no cultivation talent; ten to twenty steps, Grade D; twenty to thirty, Grade C; thirty to forty, Grade B. Beyond forty, Grade A, a threshold that had become something close to myth in this clan.

  The distance you covered today would determine your cultivation rank and, by extension, the shape of your entire life within the clan.

  The air in the cave, which had felt luminous and almost magical only moments ago, compressed into something else entirely. The young people's eyes drifted from the flowers to the far bank. The futures waiting there were fixed quantities, already determined. They just didn't yet know what they were.

  — Gu Yue Chen Bo!

  The first boy stepped forward, his face tight with the effort of composure. He waded into the river, wide but shallow, the icy water reaching only to his knees, and climbed the far bank. The moment his foot touched the earth among the flowers, something invisible met him like a wall rising from the ground. The orchids at his feet ignited with a pure white glow, and particles of light seeped into his body, granting him a brief reprieve from the pressure. Under their influence the wall seemed to soften. He set his jaw and drove himself forward, three lurching steps before the barrier became absolute and wouldn't yield another inch.

  The Elder noted the result without expression.

  — Gu Yue Chen Bo. Three steps. No talent for cultivation. Next, Gu Yue Zao Xie!

  Chen Bo walked back. Whatever had been in his face before the crossing was gone, replaced by something gray and empty. Zao Xie stopped at four steps. The pattern of the morning had established itself.

  Becoming a Gu Master isn't a right, it's a condition of birth. Across the wider population of this world, roughly five in ten individuals possessed the capacity. Among the Gu Yue, whose founding bloodline carried unusual strength, that fraction climbed to six in ten, and yet the ceremony's opening results were making the elders on the ledge above look older by the minute.

  — Gu Yue Mo Bei!

  — Present! came the reply, sharp and immediate.

  Mo Bei was broad-shouldered with an elongated face, and he moved with the easy confidence of someone who'd decided in advance that this would go well for him. Dressed in a simple linen robe, he crossed the river at a pace that said he'd been preparing for this day for a long time. As soon as he entered the orchid field and began to walk, a swarm of spiritual light rushed into his body with each step, ten steps, twenty, thirty, the flow steady and substantial, only stopping when he reached the thirty-sixth and found he couldn't press past the next barrier.

  — Excellent! The Elder's voice recovered warmth. Gu Yue Mo Bei, Grade B talent! Come here, let me examine your aperture.

  He placed a firm hand on the boy's shoulder and closed his eyes, extending his awareness inward. The cave fell silent around them, broken only by the soft movement of the underground river. After a long, still moment, the Elder nodded with unmistakable satisfaction.

  — Gu Yue Mo Bei. Primeval Sea filled to sixty percent. Grade B. A solid talent, one that does credit to his ancestors.

  A murmur of approval moved through the cave. A Grade B talent meant a secure and meaningful future, the path to becoming a clan Elder, capable of reaching Rank 3 within a decade and taking a genuine role in the clan's affairs. Mo Bei had secured his position among the ruling class before he'd even received his first Gu.

  In the dimness of the upper ledge, the other elders allowed their attention to drift pointedly toward Gu Yue Mo Chen. The old man, who shared with his grandson those same distinctive equine features, straightened his back and squared his shoulders, directing a slow and deliberate smile across the darkness at his longtime rival.

  — Well, Chi Lian? What do you make of that? My grandson isn't doing too badly, now, is he?

  Gu Yue Chi Lian, recognizable even in shadow by the vivid red of his hair, produced a low, dismissive grunt. His face had gone tight, and beneath his sleeves his fists had closed. The competition between their two lineages had just shifted in a direction he hadn't wanted.

  An hour passed. More than half the teenagers had made the crossing by now. The results had settled into the mediocre range, Grade D and C for most, with too many falling short of any talent at all and joining the growing group of those whose futures had just narrowed to almost nothing.

  — The lineage is thinning, murmured the Clan Chief from the shadows, the words pulled from him like something heavy being set down. It's been years since we produced a Rank 4 Master to reinforce the bloodline. Since our fourth chief, the only Rank 5 Master this clan has ever produced, perished and left no descendants, the talent of every generation since has been giving a little more ground.

  — Gu Yue Chi Chen!

  Chi Lian's grandson came forward: slight in build, his face dotted with pimples, his hands clenched at his sides and his forehead already sheened with the sweat of someone who'd been dreading this moment for weeks.

  And yet against everything his appearance suggested, he walked through the orchid field to the thirty-sixth step.

  — Another Grade B! The Elder's enthusiasm surged back into his voice, genuinely renewed.

  Chi Lian's laugh filled the cave from wall to wall.

  — Thirty-six steps! How about that, Mo Chen?

  He turned on his rival with a predatory smile, slow and savoring. Mo Chen's jaw had tightened enough to answer for him.

  In the middle of the assembled teenagers, Fang Yuan watched the exchange with the detached attention of someone observing a performance he'd seen before. He knew something that no one else in the cave did: Chi Chen had cheated. His grandfather had procured for him a secret and costly method that had artificially inflated the boy's apparent potential for the duration of this single ceremony. It was a measure of how badly the old man needed this.

  The Chi and Mo branches were the two great counterweights to the clan chief's authority, the only bloodlines with enough accumulated power to push back against the center. Chi Lian couldn't afford to let Mo Chen's line establish dominance tonight. He'd been willing to pay whatever was asked.

  That secret cost me last time, Fang Yuan thought, his gaze settling on the old man. This time, I'll know exactly when to press.

  He was already laying out the architecture of what would follow when the Elder's voice cut through the noise.

  — Gu Yue Fang Yuan!