Wei stood with the half-bow still bent into him, waiting.

Xuan took the last steps onto the platform and answered him directly.

"Yes. Actually, I was looking for you."

He let Wei come out of the bow.

"You remember what I told you before I left for the scout."

Wei’s eyes shifted — the small twitch of a man catching up to a sentence he had half-forgotten and now needed to find again.

"That you would have something for me when you came back. Yes, Young Master."

"The mission is in two weeks and you are coming with us."

Wei looked at his master a long beat. The training platform creaked once underfoot in the evening wind.

"Are you sure of that, Young Master? I do not know if I will be capable of something like this."

"You do not need to worry about doing it wrong, Wei. You need to do it if you want to keep growing. That is why I took you in to begin with."

He let the bamboo on the slope answer him for one breath of wind before he kept going.

"Getting it wrong is not the worst thing. The worst thing is standing here a year from now and wondering what would have happened if you had come. People do not regret what they tried and failed. They regret what they never gave themselves the chance to try."

Wei’s shoulders had not yet decided what to do with all of that.

"I think you are going to do well."

"Are you certain of that, Young Master?"

Xuan put a hand on Wei’s shoulder. He had never been an arm-around-shoulder man. This body kept surprising him with how comfortable the gesture felt in its frame.

"In all the time you have been at my side, have you seen me wrong about anything?"

Wei thought about it. He thought about it longer than Xuan had expected. That, in itself, was a compliment.

"Honestly, Young Master. No. Whatever you have done or said, it has been the right thing."

"Good. Then in two weeks, we will leave."

He let his hand drop.

"Now. Let me see how you have been keeping yourself while I was up on the cliffs. I want to know what the sect has done to you."

Wei brightened the way men brighten when handed something with a clear ending to it. He stepped back, drew his blade, and slid into the opening guard of the first Nine Dragons form.

Xuan circled into position across from him, Marrow Dragon riding his hip, the evening light catching the bronze-gold line under the central ridge.

The training went late.

The days closed up over the conversation the way water closes over a thrown stone.

A week. A real one, measurable.

The outer disciples kept showing up. They kept showing up on time. They kept holding their forms past the point where a tired man would let his elbow drop. By the end of the week, watching them run the third form without a single instructor on the floor, Xuan caught himself doing something he had not done since this body had been his: he caught himself proud.

His own work moved alongside theirs. Cloud Step pushed past Intermediate proficiency another stubborn percentage. The Seven Dragon forms had stopped feeling like Yun Hai’s hands worn over his own and started feeling like his. Marrow Dragon was answering to him in ways Plain Steel had only suggested at. Mira, where she could, dropped a panel of correction into the corner of his vision while he ran a form, a single white line tracing where the cut was a hair off.

[ Two fingers wider on the third pivot. ] [ Hip too low on the opening. ] [ Better. ]

She was running out of things to correct, which was probably the most generous compliment she had ever paid him.

He thought about new techniques. He shelved the thought. The mine first.

Lian had a week of her own. Master Fu put her on a refining sequence three grades above her station and she came out of it with rings under her eyes and a faint shimmer along the meridians of her hands that he caught when she handed him a cup of tea one evening and pretended not to notice. She did not say a word about the new pills she had folded onto his desk before leaving. He counted them, recognized the seal, and gave her the dignity of not commenting either.

It was one of those weeks that closed up before he noticed it had.

Now he stood in a corridor neither the current owner of this body nor the previous one had walked in a long while.

The lacquer on the doorframe was older here. The light fell differently. The household had quietly stopped routing maids past this wing except for the one who came three times a day with a tray.

Under the door, the tray rested. Lacquered wood polished to a brown that ate the corridor’s lamp-light. Rice. Pickled vegetables. A small dish of fish he could smell from where he was. Untouched.

The head maid kept bringing them. Lin Kai kept letting them die at his threshold.

Xuan looked at the door.

The original tenant of this body, who had been Lin Kai’s brother in name for ten years and never in much else, kept a small archive of memories about him. Xuan let them surface one at a time, the way a man lets a dog smell his hand before the introduction.

Lin Kai had been competitive. He also had carried a tongue that could open skin and had spent more hours on the training ground than any son of the household and made sure everyone knew which hour and which form. None of these were the worst that could be said of a young man.

Lin Kai had never, in the years they had shared a roof, tried to put a blade in his brother’s back. Whatever Madam Mei had built around him, she had not built that. And when the choice had finally been put in his hand — the sword she had given him, the throat of the father she had told him to despise — he had made the only answer a son of his name could have made and lived to be hated for it.

He had stayed with the sect afterwards. He could have walked away in the wrong direction but in the end he had stayed.

Xuan weighed the talent inside that room. He weighed what an unspent Qi Refining Seven at nineteen could become in five years if someone put the right hands underneath it. He weighed, too, the promise he had given a five-year-old over a wooden tiger that bit the worst ones twice. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

He raised his hand and knocked.