’Tears of blood, my ass.’

Lin Xuan, currently flat on his back, currently the proud owner of a body that could not sit up without a formal invitation — opened his eyes again.

The incense was still burning.

The sun had moved, very slightly, across the wooden floor.

The panel was gone. The room was quiet.

Somewhere under his ribs, the curse turned over in its sleep like a dog that hadn’t been fed in a while.

’Okay,’ he thought. ’Okay. Mira.’

[ Yes, host. ]

’Six hours, two killers, one broken body. I need a plan.’

[ Run. ]

’That’s not a plan. That’s a noun.’

[ It’s a very good noun. Try it. ]

’I can’t even sit up.’

[ Right. About that. ]

The panel flickered back into existence above him. Smaller this time. More serious. No pink edges.

[ Host. I have a proposal. ]

"Oh no."

[ That’s not a fair reaction. You haven’t heard it yet. ]

"I’ve been in this body for two hours and I already know that every time you will say ’proposal’ I’m going to bleed out of something."

[ ...That’s fair. ]

The panel sat there for a second. Considering.

[ I can break the first layer of the curse. Right now. It’ll take about thirty minutes. ]

[ It will hurt. ]

[ A lot. ]

"Define ’a lot.’"

[ Two years of blocked meridians opening at the same time. ]

[ Imagine every muscle in your body cramping at once, while someone pours lava through the cramps. ]

[ For thirty minutes. ]

Ethan stared at the ceiling.

"...And if we do it?"

[ You’ll be able to walk. Slowly. ]

[ Lift things. Small ones. ]

[ Run, if the alternative is dying. ]

[ Basically: you’ll be a normal, very underfed twenty-one-year-old. No cultivation or Qi. Just a regular guy in a xianxia world. ]

"A guy against two Qi Refining assassins."

[ A guy with me, host. ]

"Right. Forgot. A guy with a floating chat window that blushes."

[ ...I’m going to let that one go because you’re about to be in a lot of pain. ]

Ethan laughed. It came out quiet and dry.

"Do it."

The first thirty seconds were fine.

The thirty seconds after that were less fine.

By the end of the first minute, Ethan discovered, in the way one discovers that the floor has been on fire the whole time, that he had underestimated Mira’s definition of "a lot."

His spine arched off the bed. His hands clawed the sheets. His jaw locked so hard he tasted copper. Every meridian in his body — channels he hadn’t even known he had — was being dragged open by something that felt less like healing and more like renovation. The cold knife under his stomach turned into a cold wire, and then into a cold cable, and then into something that was no longer cold at all.

He didn’t scream.

He wanted to. The old Lin Xuan would have. The body still remembered that scream, and he could feel it waiting in his throat, worn smooth by two years of use.

He swallowed it. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

’Mira.’

[ Here. ]

’Talk to me.’

[ You’re doing great. ]

’Lie better.’

[ You’re doing terribly. Your meridians are approximately the structural integrity of wet paper. Your left lung is holding a grudge. Your dantian is — oh, there we go — stabilizing. Very brave of it. ]

[ Twelve minutes in. Eighteen to go. ]

Twelve minutes.

Ethan, in his head, did the math on how many seconds were in eighteen minutes, got to 600, gave up at 720, and decided to just count Mira’s voice instead.

She kept talking.

She rambled, mostly. About nothing. About the stitching of his blanket. About the way the incense was burning unevenly. About how whoever had picked the incense had actually pretty good taste for a household that was actively trying to kill him.

About how "crippled" was a rude word and she refused to use it in official system notifications. About how, technically speaking, she had been awake in this room for six hours with nothing to look at and had, at one point, started counting the ceiling beams ("There are twenty-three. One of them is crooked. I have opinions about it.").

She talked him through it.

He did not, afterwards, remember most of what she said.

He remembered the tone.

At minute twenty-seven, something deep in his chest gave.

It wasn’t a crack neither it was a pop. It was the feeling of a door that had been wedged shut for two years finally — quietly, almost politely — coming loose.

Black sweat rolled out of his pores.

It smelled like iron and old blood and something else, something rotten and green, the way a forgotten cup of tea smells after it’s been left on a windowsill for a season.

Ethan choked on it.

[ Don’t breathe that in, host, that’s the curse leaving. ]

"Now you tell me—"

[ Turn your head. ]

He turned his head. The sweat ran off his face and dripped onto the wooden floor, where it hissed like spit on a hot pan.

The hissing, the pain stopped. Everything stopped.

═══════════════════════════════

[ Withered Meridian Curse: Level 3 → Level 2. ]

[ Physical baseline: restored (severely malnourished). ]

[ Mobility: functional. ]

[ Combat ability: still basically zero. ]

[ +200 Origin Points. ]

═══════════════════════════════

Ethan lay in the dark stain of his own expelled curse, panting, every muscle in his body loose in a way that felt obscene after two years of being locked up.

"Mira."

[ Mm? ]

"I look like a guy who got dumped at a bus stop."

[ You look like a guy who got un-poisoned after two years of being marinated. Drink water. ]

He drank water.

Lian had left a cup on the tray. His hand shook when he lifted it, but it lifted. The water went down. It sat in his stomach like something his body had forgotten existed. Half of it came back up into the basin next to the bed. The other half stayed.

He laughed, quietly, for a long time.

----------------------------------------------

He got up.

That sentence took him about four minutes to execute.

First he sat. He had to use his elbow. Then his arm. Then the edge of the bed. Then he waited for the room to stop tilting, because apparently standing up after two years of lying down was something the inner ear had opinions about.

Then he put one foot on the floor.

Then the other.

Then he stood.

He stood.

For the first time in two years, Lin Xuan’s body stood on its own feet.

Ethan — who had been, when he died, six feet tall and slouching — looked down at the thin, pale, shaking legs that now belonged to him and felt, for one second, something he did not have the time to process.

’Later,’ he told himself. ’Cry later. Fight now.’

[ Good instinct. Sun is two hours from the ridge. ]

"Plan," he said.

[ I’ve been working on one. ]

The Silent Peak — that was what the household called his pavilion, though only when being polite; when not being polite they called it the Rotting Peak — was the furthest, smallest, most forgotten pavilion in the Skyedge Sword Sect’s residential cluster. It was surrounded by a tiny, neglected courtyard. At the back of the courtyard, behind a screen of dead bamboo, there was a dry well.

The well had been dry for decades. Nobody used it or checked on it. The stones around its mouth were loose. Inside, about eight feet down, the walls narrowed into a tight bottleneck before opening into a lower chamber, probably an old storage shaft, half-collapsed.

Ethan stood at the edge of the well, swaying slightly, and thought ’yes.’

Mira, floating a small schematic of the well in the corner of his vision, thought the same thing.

[ Host. ]

"I see it."

[ Let me walk you through it. ]

"I’m listening."

He worked until his hands bled.

Mira, in the corner of his eye, kept a running list of every task: move the heavy stone to the lip of the well; loop the torn strip of his own bedsheet through the stone’s base; run the line behind the bamboo screen; select three smaller stones, sharp-edged, and stash them under the lip of the inner chamber; memorize exactly how many steps from the pavilion door to the well mouth; memorize where the shadows would fall at sundown; memorize the single wheezing gap in the collapsed wall below that a thin, malnourished twenty-one-year-old could just barely squeeze through, if he had no dignity left.

Ethan had no dignity left.

Ethan also did not have Qi. He did not have strength. He did not have speed. He did not have technique.

What he had was some hours, one dry well, a strip of bedsheet, three sharp rocks, a chat window that was actually quite good at trigonometry, and a very specific kind of anger he had not felt in twenty-one years of being a polite, tired economics student.

By the time the sun started leaning orange across the tiles of the Silent Peak, he was sitting at the bottom of the well, back pressed against the stone, breathing slow and careful the way Mira had told him to, eyes on the tiny circle of dimming sky above him.

He was, technically, bait.

[ They’re coming through the west gate. ]

"How do you know?"

[ Because only two servants left the compound at sundown, and they’re walking in the wrong direction for errands, and one of them is holding a sword he tried very hard to hide under his cloak. ]

"...You can see that from here?"

[ I can see a lot of things, host. I just pick my battles. ]

The footsteps came eventually. Lazy, unhurried, carrying the casual rhythm of two men sent to kill a cripple in his bed.

They crossed the courtyard, passed the pavilion, and found the door open and the bed empty. One of them said something in a low, annoyed voice. The other laughed.

They came toward the well.

’Okay,’ Ethan thought, pressing himself deeper into the shadow of the lower chamber. ’Mira.’

[ Ready. ]

’Don’t let me chicken out.’

[ Host. You have spent the last four hours building a murder well. You are not chickening out. ]

’Okay.’

A face appeared at the mouth of the well above him. Silhouetted against the dying sun. The man leaned over the rim, casual, bored.

"Young Master," he called down, and the word sounded disgusting in his mouth. "Are you hiding?"

Ethan, from the dark, said nothing.

The man sighed. He turned to his partner. "He’s in there. I’ll go get him. You watch the path."

The partner grunted.

The first assassin swung one leg over the rim of the well.

He was looking down. He was not looking at the loose stones under his boot, or the strip of bedsheet tied to the base of the other stone three feet behind him, or the very thin, very crippled, very patient hand that had been holding that strip for the last forty minutes.

Ethan pulled.

The big stone came down.

It had nothing to do with elegance or grace. Ethan slammed into the assassin’s lower back with eight feet of drop, a loose slope, and all the weight gravity was willing to lend him. The man made a sound Ethan had never heard come out of a human throat, short, wet, and horrified, before folding sideways into the narrow bottleneck of the well with both legs pinned under the stone.

He was still alive.

He was Qi Refining Stage Three. Of course he was still alive.

He was trying to push the stone off. He was hissing something — a curse, a call for help, Ethan didn’t care which.

Ethan stepped out of the shadow of the inner chamber.

He was holding one of the sharp rocks.

The assassin looked up.

For one second, in the red dusk light filtering down the well, the assassin saw what was in front of him: a thin, ragged, shaking boy with sweat and old curse-black still streaked down one cheek, eyes flat and tired and very, very awake, holding a piece of broken stone in a hand that should not have been able to lift a spoon.

The assassin’s face went through three expressions.

Confusion.

Fear.

And then — because this was still a man who had been sent to kill a cripple in a bed — contempt.

"You little—"

Ethan hit him in the throat.

The first hit did not kill him. He had underestimated how much force a malnourished body could generate, even from above, even with leverage. The stone glanced off the assassin’s collarbone and cut a short, ugly line along his jaw.

The assassin snarled. His hand came up.

Ethan hit him again.

This one landed.

It landed in the soft place right under the chin, where the throat was, where the voice was, where a man’s air lived. Something inside the assassin made a thin whistling sound and then stopped making any sound at all. His hand fell. His eyes stayed open. His legs, still pinned, did not move.

Ethan hit him a third time. Even if he didn’t need to. He just felt like the moment deserved it.

═══════════════════════════════

[ Hostile eliminated — Blood Fang Assassin (Qi Refining Stage 3). ]

[ +300 Origin Points. ]

[ First kill recorded. ]

[ Karma Celestial: +2. ]

═══════════════════════════════

He stared at the glowing letters. His hand, the one holding the stone, would not stop shaking.

"Mira," he said, very quietly. "What the hell is Karma Cele—"

[ LATER. ]

[ The other one heard. ]

The second assassin was not stupid.

The second assassin had been watching the path, which meant he had not been looking directly at the well when the first one fell, which meant he had not seen exactly how it happened. But he had heard the stone drop. He had heard his partner not answer. He had heard, very faintly, the wet sound of a throat breaking.

And now he was silent.

Ethan, still at the bottom of the well, felt his stomach turn over.

"He’s not coming down."

[ No. ]

"He’s smarter than the other one."

[ Apparently. ]

A shadow moved across the circle of sky above him. Not into it. Around it. The second assassin was pacing the rim of the well. Staying far enough back that Ethan couldn’t see him. Thinking.

"Mira, options."

[ The well has a back drain. You marked it before. There’s a collapsed section of wall on the west side of the lower chamber. You’ll have to crawl through it. It’s going to hurt. He won’t expect it. ]

"...Okay."

[ Also, host. ]

"Yeah?"

[ When you come out the other side, you will be behind him. ]

"Yeah."

[ You won’t have qi. You won’t have strength. You’ll have one sharp rock and surprise. ]

"Yeah."

[ If you miss, he kills you. ]

Ethan stared up at the shadow moving along the rim of the well.

"Then I won’t miss."

He crawled.

The drainage tunnel was worse than he’d estimated. It was older than he’d estimated. It was narrower than he’d estimated. At one point his shoulder caught on a loose stone and he felt something tear, in the hot shallow way that meant skin, not muscle — but it was still blood, and blood was still expensive.

He came out the other side into the thin strip of dead bamboo behind the courtyard.

He could see the second assassin’s back.

Thirty feet away. Standing at the rim of the well. Staring down into it. Bow partially drawn — he had a small, short-range Qi bow, the kind assassins used for confirmation shots. He was waiting for Ethan to show his face.

He was not looking behind him.

Ethan stood up.

His legs shook. The stone in his hand was slick with his own blood from the tunnel.

[ Host. ]

’I know.’

[ Quiet steps. ]

’I know.’

One step. Two. Three.

The wind moved the bamboo. The assassin’s head turned, one degree, toward the sound.

Ethan froze.

The assassin went back to watching the well.

Four. Five. Six.

Ten feet.

Five.

Ethan raised the stone.

He did not raise it very high. He could not raise it very high. His arms were noodles. His ribs were screaming. His vision was starting to blur at the edges from blood loss and exertion and the simple, inescapable fact that he had been, three hours ago, bedridden.

He brought the stone down toward the base of the assassin’s neck.

And the assassin —

— turned.

He’d heard it. Somehow. Maybe the blood dripping from the tunnel exit. Maybe a breath. Maybe just the instinct of a Qi Refining cultivator whose body, no matter how lazy, was still two whole realms above a starving boy with a rock.

His hand came up faster than Ethan’s arm could come down.

He caught Ethan’s wrist.

Ethan felt the bones in his own wrist creak. The assassin’s face, up close, was narrow and mean and honestly a little bit bored, which was the worst part, he’d been expecting difficulty and was now getting closure.

"You clever," the assassin said, "little cripple."

He twisted.

Ethan’s wrist broke.

The stone fell.

He didn’t scream, some muscle memory from the first Lin Xuan ate the scream before it could leave his throat, but his knees went, and the assassin rode him down to the dirt, and a boot landed on his chest, and the short Qi bow was already being drawn.

"Nothing personal," said the assassin, almost kindly. "You just picked the wrong family to be adopted into."

Ethan — flat on his back, wrist screaming, shoulder soaked through, a boot on his sternum and an arrow pointed between his eyes, did the only thing he could do.

He looked past the arrow, past the assassin. He looked at the small blue panel hovering quietly in the corner of his vision.

’Mira.’

[ I’m here. ]

’The emergency thing. The one you said might kill me.’

[ ...50/50. ]

’How long?’

[ Ten seconds. Maybe less. ]

’Do I have ten seconds?’

The assassin’s arrow drew back to full pull.

[ No. ]

’Do it anyway.’

There was a pause — the shortest pause Ethan had ever experienced in his short, increasingly eventful afterlife — and then Mira’s voice, for the first time since he had met her, came through not as a chat window or a floating panel or a song behind his ears, but as a whisper, very close, very quiet, very serious.

"Close your eyes, Lin Xuan."

He closed his eyes.

═══════════════════════════════

[ EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ENGAGED. ]

[ Forcing breakthrough: Qi Refining Stage 1. ]

[ Success probability: 47%. ]

[ ...Please don’t watch. ]

═══════════════════════════════

The arrow released.