Qian Xiaotian waited until his mother’s breathing settled.
It took longer than usual. The cold from the Su Clan’s visit had gotten into her chest, and she coughed twice before she finally slept, one hand resting on the folded coat that a vegetable seller had put over her shoulders in front of half the city.
He banked the fire. He counted the pills, which was a habit and a punishment at the same time. There are only two left.
Then he set his pouch on the shelf beside the box and counted that too. Seventy-seven coppers. A pill costs a hundred.
Three-quarters of one more day of his mother’s life, he thought, and did not let himself think about it again.
Then he took the book out into the yard.
The moon was up. The cracked outer wall threw a long shadow across the dirt, and the only sounds were insects and, somewhere across the compound, a dog having a debate.
Qian Xiaotian sat down cross-legged, opened the Iron Hide Tempering Manual across his knees, and turned to the first page.
* * *
He had been taught the clan’s basic breathing method when he was eight, in a group of forty children, by an instructor who did not even care to learn his name.
Breathe in for four counts. Hold for two. Push the qi down to the dantian. Repeat.
He had done it every single day for eight years. He had gotten nowhere.
The manual did not start with breathing.
The manual started with a diagram of a man’s arm, and a paragraph explaining that the body was not a jar to be filled, but a road network that has to be widened, and that most cultivators wasted years pouring water into a road where it just evaporates into nothingness.
Qian Xiaotian read it three times.
Then he put his hand where the diagram showed, pressed his thumb into the muscle below his elbow, and breathed the way that the second page told him to. Not four counts. Six, then a slow release, with the qi pushed outward instead of down. Into the arm. Into the flesh of it.
It hurts.
It hurt the way stretching hurts, the good way, the way that tells you something that was small was becoming bigger.
He kept going.
Fifteen minutes later, cold sweat was running down his back, his arms were shaking, and something in his forearm gave way like a knot coming loose.
Then suddenly, warmth flooded through it.
Qian Xiaotian opened his eyes and sat very still in the moonlight.
Two years, he thought.
Two years of pushing qi down into a dantian that wouldn’t even take it, of hitting the cold wall under his heart, of being told he was trash by every instructor who even bothered to look. And eight years of looks of scorn and pity because of his blocked meridians.
And the manual hadn’t even mentioned the dantian yet.
Suddenly, Qian Xiaotian realized. Whatever is wrong with me, this cultivation manual might actually just change my fate.
He turned the page and kept working.
* * *
By the time the moon reached the top of the wall, he had already opened both arms and one shoulder.
He was soaked in sweat. His hands shook when he tried to hold them steady. He had the specific, glorious exhaustion of a body that has finally been given something it could actually do.
He was also, according to the tightening heat in his chest and the strange new density that he felt in his limbs, halfway to the third layer of Body Tempering.
In one night. In one night, he jumped from a mere 2nd layer Body Tempering Stage into the 3rd layer Body Tempering Stage.
Qian Xiaotian wiped his face with his sleeves, bent over the book, and turned to the fourth page.
It was blank.
He frowned and turned back. The third page was there: dense characters, a careful diagram, the six instructions he had just followed. The fourth page was empty. So was the fifth. So was the sixth.
He held the book up to the moonlight. He tilted it. He ran his fingers over the paper, which was old and soft and completely, stubbornly bare.
Something was wrong with the book after all…
Then the words appeared.
* * *
They did not appear on the page.
They appeared in front of his eyes, hanging in the night air over the open book, glowing a soft, friendly blue, written in characters so clean and even that no human hands could have made them.
[Congratulations on your progress! 🎉]
Qian Xiaotian threw himself backwards so fast that he went over the log that he’d been sitting against and landed flat on his back in the dirt.
The words followed him.
They hung there above his face, patient and cheerful, while his heart slammed against his ribs and his mind produced, in rapid order: a demon, a spirit, a curse, an inheritance, a trap, and finally, horribly, the possibility that he had actually gone mad.
Books did not talk.
Treasures talked. Every story said so. Ancient swords held the souls of their masters. Rings held the spirit of the steward of the treasure vault of primordial emperors. Cauldrons held the ghosts of pill saints, who were always hungry and usually rude.
But this was a book from a vegetable cart. It had cost three coppers. A rat had eaten the corner.
“...Hello?” said Qian Xiaotian to the air.
The words did not answer. They simply waited, and then, when he had lain there long enough, they politely continued.
[You have completed the free portion of the Iron Hide Tempering Manual!]
[Layers 1-3: Unlocked and permanent. These are yours. 😊]
[Layers 4-9: Full access required.]
Qian Xiaotian sat up very slowly.
“Required?” he repeated.
[Unlock the full Iron Hide Tempering Manual: 30 silver taels.]
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. It came out cracked and wild and far too loud for the middle of the night, and he had to press his sleeve over his mouth.
Thirty silver taels.
He had seventy-seven coppers and two pills. Where would he get thirty silver taels?
[Option 1: Pay in Full — 28 silver taels (discount applied!) 😊]
[Option 2: Buy Now, Pay Later — nothing due today! 🎉]
Qian Xiaotian was dumbfounded and stopped laughing.
* * *
He sat in the dirt and read.
This would later on turn out to matter more than anything else he did that night—or better yet, his entire life, although he did not know it and perhaps would never be told.
The terms unfolded in front of him, line after line, and he read every single one.
[Payment Plan: 104 weekly installments.]
[Amount: 280 coppers per week.]
[First Payment Due: 14 days from acceptance.]
[Interest Rate: Minimum permitted for customer’s credit standing.]
Two hundred and eighty coppers a week.
He did the arithmetic without moving. Mending clothes brought in two hundred coppers a month. The stipend was one silver tael a month, and most of that went to the apothecary. Five pieces of embroidery a week at thirteen coppers was sixty-five, which had felt like a miracle six hours ago.
Sixty-five was not two hundred and eighty.
He kept reading.
[If payment is missed, a grace period of 3 days applies.]
[After the grace period, access to layers 4-9 will be suspended until payments resume.]
That, at least, was fair. Harsh, but fair. He had already expected worse.
Then he found the rest of it.
[Continued non-payment may result in the collection of: late fees; cultivation; fortune; lifespan; destiny.]
Qian Xiaotian has read that line four times.
Cultivation. Lifespan.
The last word he did not understand at all. Destiny was not a thing a person owned. You could not hand it over at a counter.
He looked up at the cracked wall and the moon above it, and thought about how a thing that could give you strength was obviously a thing that could take it away. Nothing in the world came without a price. His father protected his wife and son from enemies far too powerful, and the price had been everything.
He looked back down.
[Item: Iron Hide Tempering Manual. Guaranteed authentic.]
[The Buy Now, Pay Later System thanks you for your business! 😊]
“Who,” Qian Xiaotian said quietly, “are you?”
The words did not answer that either.
He had not really expected them to.
* * *
He thought about it until the moon crossed the wall.
He thought about sixteen years of being told he was trash by men who had never once experienced hardships in life.
He thought about his cousin Wudi whom had, for the longest time he could remember, been making his life hard and bullying him.
He thought about a girl in white saying, ‘your son’s path does not’, in front of the entire city, in a voice so calm it hadn’t even been cruel.
He thought about his mother, asleep inside with a borrowed coat on her shoulders, and two pills in a box, and a cough that is getting worse every winter that passes.
He thought: two hundred and eighty coppers a week is impossible.
And then he thought: so was the third layer; this morning, I was just at the second layer.
The manual had opened his arms in a single night. At the fourth layer, he could start taking low-grade bounties that the clan posted for spirit rats in the grain stores, two coppers a tail. At the fifth, the outer patrols paid forty coppers a night. At the sixth, hunters went outside the walls.
He wasn’t simply buying pages in a book.
He was buying his future; buying a future where his mother did not need to worry about his son; buying a future where his mother gets a second chance at life; buying a future where he can stand tall inside the clan that continues to push them away; and finally, buying a future where he can pursue the path of immortality like his father.
Qian Xiaotian picked up the book, set it on his knees, and looked at the glowing words.
“Option Two,” he said.
[Wonderful! 🎉]
[Please confirm acceptance.]
He didn’t know how.
So he did the thing that every cultivator in every story does when a treasure asks something of them. He bit his thumb hard and pressed the blood to the page.
The world went quiet.
Something settled over him, light and cool, and absolutely certain, like a hand set on his shoulder by someone standing behind him who had always been there.
[Contract accepted! ✨]
[Welcome, valued customer!]
[Full access granted. Enjoy your purchase! 😊]
The blank pages filled.
Characters spread across the paper like frost across a window, diagram after diagram, layer after layer, all the way to the ninth, and Qian Xiaotian sat in the dirt of his own yard at midnight with his thumb bleeding and stared at more knowledge than his entire clan had given him in sixteen years.
Then, because he was who he was, he went inside, found a scrap of the paper his mother used for patterns, and wrote at the top:
*Week 1: 280.*
He wrote out all one hundred and four lines. It took until the sky went gray.
He did not miss a single week.
* * *
Across the compound, in a small room with a plum tree scratching at the roof, Qian Fan sat bolt upright in bed.
[Ding! 🎉]
[Ding! 🎉]
[Ding! 🎉]
[Contract activated: Customer Qian Xiaotian]
[Product: Iron Hide Tempering Manual]
[Plan: Buy Now, Pay Later — 104 weeks]
[Quota Progress: 9%]
[QUEST COMPLETE: FIRST SALE! 🎉🎉🎉]
Qian Fan let out a breath he had been holding for four days.
He did it, he thought. He actually read the whole thing, and he did it anyway.
[Rewards are being issued, Host!]
[Starter Capital: 1 pouch of silver taels]
[New Shop Category Unlocked: CULTIVATION METHODS — Body Tempering]
[And, of course… 🎰]
A wheel of light unfolded in the darkness above his bed, painted in gold and red, its segments spinning slowly past.