The bone was growing.
Han Jiu watched it. It came out of the end of his left elbow very slowly. It was pale and thin, and it was cold. It grew until it was about as long as the first joint of his thumb.
Then it stopped.
He waited. Nothing happened. He pushed his Qi toward it, and still nothing happened.
’Flesh destroyed by cold can be rebuilt by cold,’ he thought. ’By cold. It needs cold to build with.’
There were twenty pieces of frostmarrow in his inventory. But dawn was two hours away, and he didn’t know if twenty pieces would be enough for two whole arms. And he had no hands to take them out with.
Then he looked at the snake.
It lay on the floor where it had fallen, split open along the belly. Sixty years in a cold spirit vein. Its skin, its bones, and whatever was left of its flesh had been soaking up cold Qi since before his grandfather was born.
And it was sitting in the middle of his room, in plain sight, with fourteen Yun cultivators asleep ninety feet away.
He needed to get rid of it anyway.
Han Jiu got down on his knees and pressed the end of his left arm against the snake’s scales.
Cold came into him.
It didn’t hurt. His body pulled it in the way a dry field pulls in rain. The scales under his arm went dull, and then grey, and then they started to crumble. The bone at the end of his elbow grew. It grew past the length of his thumb, and then past the length of his hand, and then it split into the two long bones of a forearm.
He pressed his right arm against the snake too.
The snake shrank. It went from white to grey to something like dry ash, and the ash sank into the floor as a thin mist of cold. On the other side of the room, his old frozen forearms started to change as well. They turned white, then clear, then they broke apart into frost and drifted across the floor toward him, like smoke pulled into a chimney.
The frost went into his new bones.
He watched his arms build themselves.
First the bones. Then something like pale threads wrapped around them, and he understood that those were muscles. Then veins, thin and blue. Then skin, smooth and white, spreading down from his elbows like ice forming on a pond.
Last of all, fingers.
When it was over, there was nothing left of the snake except a faint damp mark on the floorboards. His old arms were gone. So was the red silk they had been wrapped in, which had fallen apart into rags.
Han Jiu held up his new hands and looked at them.
They were paler than the rest of him. They were cold to the touch, and they were perfectly smooth, the way polished jade is smooth. There were no scars. There were no calluses from four years of cutting moss. There was no sign that anything had ever happened to them.
He closed his fingers.
They closed all the way.
It was the first time in two weeks that he had been able to make a fist. He sat there on the floor and opened and closed his hands, again and again, and he couldn’t stop.
’I have hands.’
He almost laughed. He didn’t, because Qingshuang was still sitting in her ring of frost, and he didn’t want to break her concentration.
The Frostheart Lotus in her hands had shrunk to half its size. Its light had gone dim. All of its blue was flowing into her, slowly and steadily, and none of it was leaking out.
He sat back against the wall and waited with her.
The window turned from black to dark grey. Somewhere in the compound, a rooster started to crow and then stopped, as if it had changed its mind.
The last petal of the lotus went clear, and then it was gone.
Yun Qingshuang didn’t move. She sat with her empty hands pressed against her chest and her eyes shut. The frost around her stayed exactly where it was.
Then Han Jiu felt it.
It was very faint. It was so faint that if he hadn’t been in the same room, and if he hadn’t been watching her the whole night, he would have missed it completely. It felt like a door closing somewhere deep inside a house.
Yun Qingshuang let out one long breath. It came out white.
And the system spoke.
[Recipient has advanced. Yun Qingshuang: Qi Gathering, eighth stage to Body Tempering, first layer, Skin.]
[System tier: 3. Return rate: one hundred-fold.]
Han Jiu read it and didn’t move.
One hundred.
’Don’t tell me...a breakthrough in each realm is requirement for tier increase. She broke through in first realm last time, and the system upgraded. Now she broke through into Body Tempering realm and it upgraded.’
She opened her eyes.
She just sat there and looked at the wall, like someone who had woken up in a room she didn’t recognise. Then she lifted one hand and pressed her fingers against her own arm. She pressed hard. She pinched the skin on the back of her hand and twisted it.
"It doesn’t hurt," she said quietly. "It should hurt. It doesn’t."
"Body Tempering?"
"Body Tempering." She said it like she didn’t trust the words yet. "Skin layer. Three years ago, I was three months away from this. Then I spent two years watching it get further away."
She looked up at him to say something else.
Then she saw his hands.
She went completely still.
"Show me," she said.
He held them out.
She got up, crossed the room, and knelt in front of him. She took his right hand in both of hers. She turned it over and looked at the palm, then the back, then the fingers, one at a time. She pressed her thumb into the middle of his palm, where yesterday there had been raw pink skin you could almost see through.
"They’re cold," she said.
"I know."
"They’re perfect. There isn’t a mark on them." She looked at the floor where the snake had been. There was only a damp patch left. "Where is it? Where are your old arms? Han Jiu, what did you do?"
He thought about how to answer. He couldn’t tell her about the system. But he could tell her something that was true.
"Something woke up in me," he said. "Down there, in the cold. When I held the flower’s power in my hands, something in my body changed. The cold doesn’t hurt me anymore. It feeds me. So I fed my arms with the snake."
Yun Qingshuang stared at him.
"An innate physique," she said slowly. "You’re telling me you have an awakened innate physique."
"I think so."
"People wait their whole lives for that to happen. Most of them wait for nothing." She was still holding his hand. She didn’t seem to notice. "And yours woke up in a mine shaft, in the middle of the night, while you were stealing from my clan."
"That’s about right."
She let go of his hand and sat back on her heels. Then she started to laugh. This laugh was quieter than the awful one from the night before. It sounded almost normal.
"You’re the strangest person I’ve ever met," she said.
"You’ve said that before."
"It keeps being true."
Somebody knocked on the door.
They both went still.
The knock came again. Then a voice spoke through the wood, low and quick.
"Ninth young master. It’s Auntie Fu. Open up."
Han Jiu got up and lifted the bar. Auntie Fu stood outside in the grey light with her sleeves still wet from the rice tubs. She looked past him at the room, at the frost on the floor and at Qingshuang, and she decided not to ask about any of it.
"The Whitegrass man," she said. "He rode in last night. Past midnight, with one servant and two horses nearly dead under them."
Han Jiu stared at her.
"The letter said six days before the assessment."
"The letter was wrong. Or he changed his mind." She wiped her hands on her apron. "He’s in the north rooms. He didn’t sleep. He’s been up since before the rooster, asking the stable boys questions."
"What questions?"
"About the frost pools. About who cuts the moss up there." She looked at him. "They told him it’s you. So now he’s asking for you. The boy who cuts moss."
She turned to go. Then she stopped, and looked down at his hands.
"Your hands are better," she said.
"They healed."
Auntie Fu looked at them. Then she looked at his face.
"Don’t keep him waiting," she said, and left.