The arrow released.

Ethan’s world went white, not the metaphorical white of pain, but the kind that lives behind closed eyelids when something very bright and very loud happens just six inches from your face. His body jerked once against the boot on his chest.

Then the white peeled back.

’Am I dead?’

[ No. ]

’Are you sure?’

[ Reasonably. ]

He opened his eyes.

The arrowhead hung in the air a hand’s width from his nose, moving so slowly he could count the grooves along its edge and watch the fletching turn one feather at a time. It wasn’t that the arrow had slowed. The world had. Or rather — for the first time in two lifetimes — he had caught up with it.

[ Breakthrough: successful. Qi Refining Stage 1. First meridian open. Dantian active, 0.2 percent. +500 Origin Points. ...Told you. ]

’You said forty-seven percent.’

[ I rounded down. It was forty-eight. Don’t ruin this for me, host, I’m proud. (¬＿¬) ]

The assassin above him hadn’t registered the change yet. His eyes were still locked on the arrow’s flight path, his bowstring still humming from the release. His boot still pinned Ethan’s sternum to the dirt.

Underneath that boot, Ethan felt something he had no word for.

A thread — thin, warm, alive — unspooled in through his chest, wound once around the inside of his ribs, and settled into the hollow place beneath his stomach that had been empty his entire life. It wasn’t much. It was, honestly, almost nothing. But the empty place had edges now, and something was sitting in it, and the something was his.

He jerked his head sideways.

The arrow passed over his ear close enough to shave three hairs and buried itself in the dirt next to his skull with a soft, mild sound, like a question being asked.

The assassin said, "What —"

Ethan didn’t let him finish the word. His right hand came off the ground — weak, shaking, still the hand of a starving nineteen-year-old in a stolen body — but a bright line of heat ran up the arm this time, and when his fingers closed around the assassin’s ankle, the man above him flinched. Not from pain. From the warmth of something that shouldn’t have been there.

[ Host. You have approximately four seconds of Qi before you pass out. ]

’Understood.’

[ Use them wisely. ]

Ethan pulled.

The ankle slid out from under its owner. Not because Ethan was strong, he wasn’t, but because a man standing one-footed with all his weight forward doesn’t need much to fall, and surprise does half the work of strength. The boot left his chest. The bow clattered sideways into the dirt. The assassin went down.

Ethan rolled with him.

His broken wrist hit the ground first and the pain almost took him out then and there; the edges of his vision folded in like a closing book. But his left hand, was already closing around the fallen arrow, and before the assassin had finished landing, the arrowhead was moving again, this time driven by two hands and a very short supply of desperation, and it went into the side of the man’s neck.

It didn’t go in cleanly. It went in the way anything goes in when pushed by an exhausted boy with a broken wrist and four borrowed seconds of Qi.

It was enough.

The assassin made a sound Ethan chose not to catalogue, and Ethan did not look — he rolled off, onto his back, arms open to the dusk sky, and the last thing he saw before his vision tunneled was the panel floating above him, very calm, very quiet.

═══════════════════════════════

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

[ +300 Origin Points. ]

[ Karma Celestial: +2. ]

[ Host vitals: critical. ]

[ Mira: please stop doing this to me. ]

═══════════════════════════════

Then the tunnel closed around him, and everything after that arrived in pieces. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

He wasn’t unconscious, not exactly. He was somewhere underneath it, in the soft layer where you could still feel the cold of dirt against your back and the slow wet rhythm of your own breath but couldn’t quite find your way up to your eyelids. The warm thread in his chest was curling in on itself now, thinner than before, settling down like a cat that had done its work for the day.

A hand landed on his forehead, small, shaking, cold.

"Young Master... oh gods... Young Master, please, please..."

Lian.

She wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be in the kitchens, somewhere safe and loud and public, and the sun had only just set, which meant —

Her voice cracked into pieces. "I couldn’t stay — I’m sorry — I came back — "

She was crying, and her hands were moving over him in the quick practiced way of a girl who had spent two years keeping a dying boy alive. She found the broken wrist and made a wounded sound in her throat. She found the torn shoulder and pressed her sleeve against it hard enough to hurt. She found the two bodies.

She went very still.

For one long second, Lian — sixteen years old, braid undone, sleeves stained — stared at the two dead men in the courtyard of the Silent Peak. Then she looked at the boy lying between them, alive, barely, and her face went through something Ethan wouldn’t have the vocabulary for until much later.

It wasn’t shock or horror. For the space of a breath, what crossed her face looked closer to pride.

Then it was gone, and she was crying again as she hooked her arms under his shoulders and dragged him across the courtyard toward the pavilion with a strength that had no business fitting inside a body like hers.

"You stupid, stupid Young Master... you said it would be dangerous, and then you... you..."

"Lian."

She froze.

His eyes were half open. His voice came out thin enough to snap. "Inside. Hide the bodies. Back of the well. Cover it."

"Young Master, you need a doctor..."

"No doctor."

She flinched, and he eased what little softness he had left into his voice.

"No one can know. Just you."

Her eyes filled, and she nodded, small, fast, the nod of a girl who had done what she was told her entire life and had decided, tonight, that she would do what he told her.

She got him inside. Laid him down on the same bed he had woken up in that morning, in another life, as another person. Then she disappeared into the dark courtyard, and came back, and disappeared, and came back. He didn’t see what she did out there.

Once, he heard her make a small retching sound and then keep working. Later, stones shifting at the mouth of the well. Later still, water being drawn and poured.

By the time she came back inside for good, the moon had cleared the Skyedge ridge and her sleeves were dark to the elbow and there was a streak of something she hadn’t noticed yet on her cheek.

She sat on the floor next to his bed, took his uninjured hand in both of hers, and didn’t speak.

Didn’t let go, either.

[ Host. ]

’Yeah.’

[ You should sleep. ]

’I know.’

[ She’ll be here when you wake up. ]

’...Will she?’

The panel glowed very softly at the edge of his vision.

[ She hasn’t let go yet. ]

Ethan turned his head a fraction on the pillow, just enough to see her. Her forehead was pressed against the edge of his mattress, eyes closed, braid loose, her small cold fingers wrapped tight around his. In the dim lamplight she looked even younger than she was.

He thought, quietly and without much fuss, that he was going to have to get strong very fast. Not out of revenge, or for the sect, or even for himself, but for this stupid, stubborn, terrified girl who had come back in the middle of the night with no weapon and no plan just because she had promised she would.

His eyes closed on their own.

The last thing he heard before sleep took him was her whisper, uneven, meant for no one.

"Please don’t die, Young Master. Please. Please."