Li Xuan’s breath misted faintly in the cold air as he watched Jiang desperately try to hit Mistress Bai.

  The ball of Qi – pale and tight and properly formed, for once – snapped from Jiang’s palm and clipped past her side by a finger’s breadth, hissing into the snow and vanishing with a soft puff. The impact was more than cosmetic; he could feel the small disturbance in the ambient Qi even from where he stood. An impressive sign – most disciples would be happy to have attained half that effect.

  Perhaps there are advantages to not letting students know what a typical result is supposed to look like, Li Xuan thought to himself. Then again, most don’t have the motivation required to keep pushing themselves like Jiang has.

  They had fallen into a pattern over the last few days. Travel until the sun was high, find a defensible hollow or a rise with clear lines of sight, make camp, and train until dark. It was a compromise between urgency and preparation that satisfied no one entirely, but it was the best he and Mistress Bai had been able to arrange.

  Greywood was close. Too close, now, for him to pretend that they had plenty of time.

  Jiang hit the ground with a thud, looking vaguely resigned to his loss. Say what you would about the boy – and the Elders would no doubt have a lot to say about his lacking manners – he didn’t let defeat get to him.

  “Better,” Mistress Bai said. “You’ve finally learned how to build a foundation. Which means you are now qualified to do something actually difficult.”

  Jiang groaned. “You are a terrible person.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, already reaching into her ring. “I’ve heard it before.”

  Li Xuan let his gaze drift away from them, scanning the treeline out of habit. No Qi signatures nearby beyond the faint, muddied presence of distant mortals on the road. Good. For now.

  They were too close to Greywood for his liking. He and Mistress Bai had seen it from a distance two nights ago, a stain of activity in the forest where there should have been nothing but snow and trees. Slipping away at night to scout out their surroundings had let them slip past several spots of trouble, though his two junior brothers likely had no idea. Dozens of bandits clustered in a ramshackle sprawl of rough palisades and half-rotten buildings. Too many for comfort, each of them stinking faintly of Qi that did not belong to them.

  Elder Lu’s notes on Gao Leng’s expulsion had been sparse, but accurate. The man’s methods were unmistakable.

  Worse still, there had been other lights in the dark – at least three cultivators of varying strength moving through the camp. None of them individually impressive, but that wasn’t the point. Where there were three, more could come. Unorthodox cultivators did not gather in numbers unless someone with leverage – or something to offer – was binding them together.

  They could not afford to give them time to grow.

  “Here,” Mistress Bai said, tossing a thin jade slip toward Jiang.

  He fumbled it, almost dropping it, then caught it awkwardly. “What’s this?”

  “A basic water-aspected spear technique,” she said. “Low-level, common, and entirely useless to you as written. Which is exactly why you’re going to study it.”

  Jiang stared at the slip as if it had insulted him, clearly having no idea how valuable the gift was. Most cultivators had to make do with reading from scrolls – proper technique slips like that were quite rare. Interesting that Mistress Bai apparently had a collection of them – she’d given Jiang one for the unaspected Qi ball technique as well.

  “I don’t have water affinity,” Jiang pointed out.

  “I am aware,” she said dryly. “Unfortunately for you, shadow-aspected techniques are quite rare, and I therefore never saw a point in collecting any. This will be something of a recurring problem for you, I suspect, so best you get used to it early. The point is to understand how it works – the underlying structure, the way the Qi is moved, the principles it was built upon. Once you do that, you can try to adapt it to work with your own affinity. Water flows. It curves, compresses, pierces, disperses. Those properties are not entirely dissimilar to your shadows.”

  “Not entirely dissimilar,” Jiang repeated. “That’s comforting.”

  “If you wanted comforting, you chose the wrong path,” she said bluntly, turning away.

  Jiang muttered something unkind under his breath but did as he was told, dropping cross-legged into the snow and pressing the jade to his forehead. His brow furrowed almost immediately, his lips thinning as the information flowed into his mind.

  Li Xuan watched him struggle and couldn’t quite keep the sigh from his chest.

  In purely technical terms, Jiang’s progress was… obscene. The simple, unaspected projectile Mistress Bai had given him was supposed to be a foundational exercise, which meant it was easy to pick up by nature. Despite that, outer disciples at the Sect took two weeks, sometimes three, to reach the level Jiang demonstrated. Even Inner Disciples took time to refine their control to that point, and any who could manage it in the span of a week were fought over by Elders hoping to claim them as personal disciples.

  Jiang had gone from clumsy, wobbling constructs to reliable, breath-formed shots in the span of a handful of evenings.

  And then there were the shadows.

  Li Xuan’s grip tightened slightly on the scabbard of his sword as he remembered the fight with the Thousand Petal Grove patrol. He had watched from the trees as Jiang’s unstructured shadows failed, again and again, against the disciples’ natural Qi wards. It had been exactly what he had expected – ambient, mutable Qi simply could not bite into someone who had learned to push back with their own. A necessary lesson for the boy to learn, and clearly he wasn’t the type to just accept wisdom from his seniors, so it was a good chance for him to feel how hopeless it was.

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  And then, suddenly, Jiang had changed the rules.

  Attaching a shadow to physical objects should not have worked. Qi did not care if it was wrapped around a stone or the empty air; unstructured energy was still unstructured energy. The passive resistance of another cultivator’s Qi would normally smother it all the same.

  Except Jiang’s hadn’t smothered. Thin spikes of darkness had clung to pebbles and steel and somehow held together just long enough to cut. It was as if the physical weight had given the shadows a… hook. A way to cheat the rules.

  Even Mistress Bai, for all her experience, couldn’t even begin to explain how it worked.

  That kind of innovation was valuable. Dangerous, yes – any advantage was dangerous in the wrong hands – but valuable. If Jiang ever learned to do it properly on purpose, instead of by raw instinct and desperation, he would be terrifying.

  If he lived that long.

  On the other side of the camp, Zhang sat with his back against a tree, eyes closed, hands resting on his knees. The faint, steady pulse of his Qi cycling through his meridians brushed against Li Xuan’s senses. His foundation was solid. His swordwork, while still rough, had sharpened since Qinghe. The encounter with the patrol had not broken him. If anything, it had stripped away the last of his illusions.

  Li Xuan was no longer particularly worried about Zhang.

  Jiang, however…

  “Staring at them won’t make them improve faster,” Mistress Bai said quietly, coming to stand beside him. He glanced over to see an identical copy of her still leaning against a tree, keeping an eye on Jiang. The copy met his eyes and winked, and it was only when he strained his Qi senses to their limits that he was able to spot the hollow nature of the clone.

  He suppressed a shiver. A technique like that had limited use in actual combat, but it was a good reminder that, for all they may ostensibly be at similar advancements, Mistress Bai was far more experienced than he, and had reached her level of power without the aid of a sect.

  “It doesn’t hurt to check,” Li Xuan replied, keeping all hints of his thoughts from his voice. “Greywood won’t wait for them.”

  “It will,” she said. “Gao Leng thinks he is secure. That makes him predictable. It’s not the settlement I’m worried about. It’s what might be moving toward it.”

  He inclined his head slightly. They had spoken of this already. Three minor cultivators in the camp implied a network. If too many more answered Gao Leng’s call before they struck, the balance would shift. At a certain point, even he and Mistress Bai would have to consider retreat.

  And retreat, with Jiang and Zhang in tow, through a forest of half-strengthened bandits and opportunistic demonic cultivators, was not a scenario he wanted to test.

  “Zhang is steady,” Li Xuan said. “He’ll do his part.”

  Mistress Bai’s gaze flicked toward Jiang, who was scowling at nothing, the jade slip still pressed to his forehead. “And him?”

  “That,” Li Xuan said, “is the problem.”

  Jiang had talent in spades. He was even gaining a measure of skill.

  What he did not have, and what Li Xuan could not simply beat into him with sparring drills, was commitment.

  He didn’t want to be here. Not really. He wanted to be on the road to Birigawa, hunting down leads on his family. Greywood, Gao Leng, the Sect politics that had dragged him into this – all of it was, to Jiang, an obstacle.

  And if the fight went badly enough, if panic or simple self-preservation took hold at the wrong moment…

  Jiang was clever. Clever and sneaky, when he wanted to be. If it were a choice between staying and dying or running and living, he would vanish into the trees and never look back. Losing a Pact-bearer would be… inconvenient, to put it mildly, when he returned to the Sect. Losing Jiang in the middle of a battle would be worse. Zhang’s sense of loyalty was strong enough, not to mention his faith in the sect had recently been shaken enough that he might try to follow – whether to capture Jiang or help him was anyone’s guess – or throw himself into danger to cover the retreat.

  Li Xuan let out a slow breath, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Was that truly likely? No. Zhang was a good disciple, rigid and dependable almost to a fault. But Qinghe had been a disaster. A Nascent Soul, five dead Elders, a city half-ruined... he had been caught completely unprepared, and the sheer, unbridled chaos of it grated on him. He was off his balance, and he knew he was overcompensating now, planning for eventualities that were barely possible. But he had been blindsided once by a foe he didn’t understand; he would not let it happen again.

  Before he could think further on it, a mortal stumbled into the hollow.

  Li Xuan had sensed him a few minutes back, naturally, but had dismissed it. Mortals wandered. Lost hunters, woodsmen, the occasional poacher or even just another traveller – though, admittedly, those were rather rare in winter, particularly alone. Either way, none of them was a threat worth interrupting training over.

  But the man who burst into their camp now was pale, shaking, and half-collapsing as he skidded to a halt. His breath showed in frantic bursts, and he all but sagged with relief when he saw their robes.

  “C–cultivators,” he gasped, bowing so quickly he nearly pitched face-first into the snow. “Heavens—thank the heavens—you’re cultivators. You must help us. Please.”

  Li Xuan resisted the urge to sigh. This was exactly the kind of distraction he didn’t need. He glanced at Mistress Bai. She looked bored.

  “Help you with what?” Zhang asked, stepping forward. His voice was steady, earnest.

  The man swallowed hard. “Our village – Shanmei – we’ve been trapped for three days. A spirit beast. A big one. It came down from the hills after the last snow. Tore apart two of our shepherds. We barred the gates, but it’s been circling the walls ever since. We can’t go out. We can’t tend the fields. If we lose the winter crop—”

  His voice cracked. He scrubbed at his eyes with both hands. “Please. We sent a runner before me, but I don’t know if he made it.” He bowed his head, his forehead touching the snow. “We have no one else. Please.”

  Li Xuan glanced at Zhang, who was looking back at him with determination brightening his eyes.

  He looked like he was about to volunteer personally. Of course he was. He was still trying to wash the blood of that Thousand Petal Grove disciple off his conscience. He wanted to play the righteous cultivator, to find a clean, simple problem he could solve and feel good about.

  Then Li Xuan looked at Jiang.

  The boy’s expression was harder to read. He was staring at the mortal, his jaw tight. There was sympathy there, yes – Li Xuan recalled the boy’s peasant background. He would understand what a failed harvest meant. But beneath it, he saw a familiar, banked impatience. A frustration that was so profound it was almost a physical presence. This was, to Jiang, another obstacle. Another delay on the path to Biragawa. Jiang didn’t want to help. He wanted to move on.

  And in that moment, seeing Jiang’s impatient stillness, Li Xuan saw the solution. Not just to the mortal’s problem, but to his own. He needed to know if Jiang was ready. If his commitment was anything more than words.

  He let the silence stretch for a moment longer.

  “We will help,” Li Xuan said.

  Zhang looked massively relieved. Jiang’s expression didn’t change, but his scowl deepened almost imperceptibly.

  Li Xuan turned his full attention to Jiang. “Or rather, you will.”

  Jiang’s head snapped up, his eyes narrowing. “What?”

  “This is not a mission for a full cultivator. It’s a pest,” Li Xuan said, his tone flat and final. “You are a cultivator now, Jiang Tian, and that comes with responsibilities. You claim to be ready for what comes next. You want to hunt Gao Leng? Prove it. A single spirit beast should be trivial for you.” He gestured to the waiting mortal.

  “He needs a champion. Go hunt his monster. Alone.”

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