"I wish everyone in this line would stop staring," I muttered.
Nobody did. I'd felt it settle between my shoulder blades the moment I shouldered through the heavy doors of District 9 Martial Hall: fifty pairs of eyes, tracking me the way you'd track a corpse that hadn't gotten the message and lain down.
Hard to blame them. I was fifteen, in a linen tunic three sizes too small that pinched under the arms every time I breathed, trousers patched at both knees, and shoes worn so thin I could count every pebble on the stone floor through the soles. The cold came up through them too, a damp mineral chill that had already worked its way into my toes. I probably smelled, though the hall had no room to judge. Every lower-sector tempering hall reeked the same: sweat, cheap liniment sharp enough to sting the back of your throat, iron dust, and fifty boys who hadn't washed their training wraps in a week. I'd been breathing it for years. Some days it felt like the only thing in my life that had never once changed on me.
"Next."
The proctor's voice sounded like two slabs of granite being dragged across each other. His badge said DUGAN, in case anyone had somehow missed the man-shaped wall in grey Bureau robes. He'd been running District 9's assessments since I was six. He glanced at his clipboard, then at me, and let out a long sigh through his nose. I knew his sighs by now. That one was reserved for me.
"Name," he said, without looking at the page. I told him "Adrian," and he followed it with "Family name" in the same flat tone, as if the answer might have changed in six months.
"Still don't have one."
"Still don't." One corner of his mouth twitched and flattened out again. "Procedure says I ask. Sector 4 ward, fifteen, last assessment six months ago. Here for the final check before the ceremony?"
"Rules say everyone gets one." I shifted my weight from one cold foot to the other, which did nothing for either of them. "I figured it was worth making sure the stone hadn't cracked since last time."
Someone behind me snorted. I didn't need to turn around to know who. Jax, whose dad owned a spirit-coal shop in the lower market, had never once passed up a chance to be loud. "Waste of stone energy," he told his friend, in the kind of whisper pitched for the back row. "You can't polish mud."
Heat crawled up my neck. I kept my eyes on the proctor's brass belt buckle, on the small nick in its edge, and ran through the things I could say. Every version ended the same way: me on the floor and Jax's friends laughing harder. The math never changed. His friends on one side of the ledger, my empty stomach on the other. I'd had fifteen years of practice swallowing this particular flavor of insult. It never went down any easier. I'd just gotten faster at it.
"Careful, Jax," I said evenly. "Mud sticks."
It wasn't much. A couple of people choked on their laughter, and for half a second Jax's face went blank. Dugan didn't smile. He did, however, take a very long time to look over my shoulder, and Jax developed a sudden, consuming interest in his own shoes.
"Step up," Dugan said. "Palm flat on the slate. Standard Ironhide test."
I stepped up and laid my right hand on the black slate. It was cold enough to make my fingertips ache.
The crystal cylinder mounted on top of the device was supposed to fill with pale green light if your skin and muscles had absorbed even a trace of physical Qi. Break into the first stage of the Body Refining path, the Ironhide Realm, and the needle would click onto the first notch of the dial. Proof that your flesh could finally resist something. One notch. That was the whole ask.
I took a breath, closed my eyes, and pushed.
Everything went into that arm. Every scrap of focus, every bit of stubbornness I had banked, until my knuckles went white and a bright, hot ache shot up through my elbow and into my shoulder. I waited for the warm tingle the public manuals always promised, that feeling of the world's energy settling into your skin like it belonged there.
Come on. Please.
Nothing.
When I opened my eyes, the cylinder was as clear and empty as a washed glass. The needle didn't so much as twitch. It lay against the left stop like it had given up on me years ago.
Dugan stared at it for three long seconds. Then he tapped the glass with one thick fingernail, the way he always did, in case the stone was feeling shy. Tick. Tick. The needle stayed where it was.
"Zero," he said quietly. He wrote it down, and the pen scratched louder than it needed to. "Nothing in the skin, nothing in the meridians. You're clear to go."
"Could I try again?" It came out smaller than I wanted. "Maybe my grip was off."
He looked at me for a while. There was pity in it, but not the cheap kind people hand out on their way past. This kind looked like it cost him something.
"Adrian. I was in the room when you sat under the Qi-pumps until your ears bled. I'm the one who filled out the incident report." He set the clipboard down on the table, which I had never once seen him do. "I'm not saying stop because I think you're lazy. I'm saying stop because I'm sick of writing a zero next to the name of the hardest-working kid who's ever walked into this hall."
Nobody had ever said that out loud. My throat locked up. I fixed my eyes on the slate, on a pale scratch near the corner where someone's ring had caught it, and held them there until I could breathe through my nose again.
"It's not you," he went on, lower now, pitched so the line couldn't hear. "Your body just doesn't hold energy. It's like pouring water into a net. That's no failing of character, whatever certain people in this room think."
"Right." I pulled my hand back and flexed my fingers. The cold of the slate stayed in them. "A net."
"Tomorrow, the System connects everyone. Talent or no talent." He rubbed the back of his neck. "If it hands you a labor slip, and I'm not saying it will, ask for Dock Six. Foreman Hale owes me a favor. Dock Six pays on time, and the foreman doesn't send boys into the mines before they're sixteen. Tell him Dugan sent you."
I should have been grateful. Part of me was. The practical part of me was already running the numbers: wages that showed up when they were supposed to, and close to a year before anyone could put me underground. For a Sector 4 ward, that was a good offer. Another part of me felt the floor tilt under my thin soles, because being handed a soft place to land is its own kind of verdict. It meant that even the man who'd watched me work for nine years had already made up his mind about how this ended.
But he'd looked right at me when he said it, like I was a person and not a line in a ledger. That was worth something.
"I don't need—" I started, and Dugan cut across me without raising his voice. "Nobody asked if you needed. I'm telling you."
"...Thank you, Proctor."
"It's Dugan. Proctor's for the ones who pass." He picked up the clipboard again, and his voice went back to granite. "Next!"
I walked the length of the line with my chin down. At the very end stood Tomas, a boy from my old library bench who'd spent a whole winter copying the same Ironhide manual at the table next to mine. He looked up as I passed. He didn't smirk. He looked about as nervous as I felt, his thumbnail working at a loose thread on his cuff. "Good luck tomorrow, Adrian," he said quietly.
I almost tripped over my own feet. Nobody in that room had said those words to me in years, and he'd said them like he meant it. "You too," I managed, and pushed out through the iron doors before my face could do anything embarrassing.
District 9 had been built directly beneath the concrete pylons that held up the upper sky-platforms. Down here, sunlight was more of a rumor. What you got instead was a dim yellow haze, strained through smog and the constant hum of ventilation shafts pumping stale air out of the rift-filters below. It sat thick and damp in the lungs and left a faint taste of metal on the tongue.
High over the crooked rooftops, a giant holographic screen was playing the news from Sector 1. A woman in a tailored silk robe stood in front of a live feed from a rift zone.
"...garrison units have successfully contained a minor Void Beast outbreak on the northern frontier," she announced, her voice bouncing down the alley. "Citizens are reminded that pre-awakening body tempering raises system synchronization rates by up to fourteen percent..."
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Fourteen percent. I'd have taken fourteen percent of anything.
I looked away and kept walking. The rift flickers seemed to be happening more often lately, even out here on the edge of the realm network, where nothing was supposed to matter. Not my problem. A guy with zero cultivation was never going to get anywhere near a Void Beast.
The alley smelled of burnt spirit-coal, wet rust, and noodles frying on the market strip. My stomach clenched so hard it hurt. I hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. My pockets held two copper credits and a bent paperclip, and neither one was going to turn into lunch.
I slowed at the corner of 4th Street. Old Man Chen stood over his iron vat, ladling dark broth into cracked bowls for a line of off-duty porters, the steam rolling up past his cap and into the haze. The stall had belonged to him and his wife once. Now it was just him, a stool, and a hand-painted sign with her name still on it, the paint flaking a little more every winter.
"Nothing for me today, Chen," I said, before he could start. It was a ritual by now. I said it every time, and every time, he ignored it.
He looked up over the steam, brows pulled low under his cloth cap. Then he grabbed a chipped bowl, scooped in a full ladle of broth, with radish, not just the clear stuff, and set a steam-bun down beside it. "Eat before it gets cold." He was already turning back to the vat. "You look like a skeleton someone forgot to bury."
"Chen, I can't pay for this," I said, and he spat into the gutter with great ceremony. "Did I ask for coin? It's yesterday's bun. Would've gone to the street-strays. Eat or don't."
I thanked him and sat down on my overturned crate, the one that was mine even if nobody had ever said so. The slats creaked under me. When I tore the bun open, steam rolled out of it in a hot, soft cloud that dampened my face.
Yesterday's bun. Right.
I looked at the back of Chen's cap. He was wiping the counter, very intently, with a rag that was already clean. Neither of us said anything. We'd never once said anything about it. That was how it worked.
It tasted mostly of salt and boiled radish, with hardly a trace of the spirit-herbs that went into the paying customers' bowls. It was also the best thing I'd eaten in days. I made myself eat slowly, so it would last.
"Thinking about tomorrow?" Chen asked, still not looking at me.
"Hard not to. It's all anyone's talking about."
"It's just an interface." He said it flatly, but he was scrubbing the same patch of counter. "Ninety percent of this district gets F-rank, very few get talents. They work the docks, clean the rift-chutes, farm spirit-grain. Life goes on." I told him I knew, and he nodded up at the faded sign over his head. "My Ling got F-rank. Best cook in four sectors. Thirty years, and she never once asked the System what it thought of her soup."
I ran my thumb along the chip in the bowl's rim while I looked for something to give back, and came up with the only true thing I had. "It was really good soup."
Something in his shoulders let go. "Damn right it was."
I scraped the last of the broth from the bowl and set it down. For a second I let myself look at my hands. Calloused, rough, crisscrossed with thin white scars. They'd hauled stone weights until my arms shook too hard to hold a spoon. They'd turned the pages of every basic cultivation manual in the public library until the spines gave out. I'd done everything the books said. I'd done it harder than the books said.
Years of input. Zero output. Not a bit of it had mattered.
"You survived the Sector 4 outbreak," Chen said, as if he'd been reading over my shoulder. "A babe, alone in a crater. That's more luck than most of us get."
I nodded, but I didn't feel lucky. Everyone knew the story, or at least the rumor. Fifteen years ago, a Void rift tore open in Sector 4 and flattened whole blocks. When the defense squads finally cleared the crater, they found a baby in the center, wrapped in charred cloth, without a scratch on him. No burns. No corruption. Nothing.
The elders had called me a miracle. For years there were grown men kneeling just to look me in the eye, and people saying he must have a hidden bloodline, just wait. I was six, and I loved it. I thought it meant someone was watching over me.
Then the tests started.
Age six, Qi sensitivity: blank. Age ten, muscle density: blank. Meridian fluidity, spiritual roots, soul spark: blank, blank, blank. By twelve, the elders had stopped looking at me like a miracle and started looking at me like a waste of shelter credits. I could still tell you, to the day, when the kneeling stopped.
"Go home, Adrian." Chen's voice was rough, but quiet. He took a second bun from the steamer, wrapped it in a square of brown paper, and slid it across the counter. "That one's for Lin, upstairs. Her mother's on night shift again, and that girl would live on air and pride if you let her."
"I'll take it up." The paper was warm against my palm.
"And Adrian." He finally looked at me. His eyes were red-rimmed from the steam, or maybe not. "Whatever that screen says tomorrow, you come back here after. Same crate. You hear me?"
My throat had narrowed to nothing, and I wasn't going to risk finding out what my voice would do. I nodded.
"Good. Now go. You're scaring off my customers."
I took the bun and left quickly, because I didn't trust my face.
My building was a six-story tenement at the end of a dark alley. The roof leaked, the elevator had been dead for six years, and the water ran for two hours each morning if you were lucky. I took the stairs slowly, bun in hand, my shoes slapping quietly against cracked concrete that had soaked up years of damp and never given any of it back.
On the fourth-floor landing, a small shape was curled against the wall with her knees pulled up to her chin. "You're late," Lin said, without lifting her head.
"I'm exactly on time. You just got hungry early." I crouched, knees popping, and held out the paper packet. "From Chen."
She was nine, with two uneven braids and a scab on one knee, and she took the bun with both hands as if it were something that might get away. She bit into it and closed her eyes. "It's warm."
"He says it's yesterday's," I told her, and she didn't bother opening her eyes. "He always says that." She chewed for a moment, and then her gaze dropped to my hands, to the red, scraped knuckles. "Was the test bad?"
I thought about lying. It would have been easy, and she was nine. "Same as always."
"Oh." She picked at the paper. Then, so quietly I almost missed it: "Are you scared about tomorrow?"
I could have said no. I could have said it's just an interface, the way Chen had, and let her think I had it all figured out. But she'd been sitting alone on a cold landing, waiting for a night shift to end, and she'd asked like she really wanted to know.
"Yeah," I admitted. "A little."
She nodded slowly, as if that were the most reasonable answer in the world. Then she dug into her pocket and pulled out a short piece of faded red thread, worn thin at the edges. Without asking, she grabbed my left wrist and started tying it on, her small fingers cold where they brushed my skin and working fast and serious. "My mom says red is lucky. It's not very good thread. But it worked for her."
"Lin, you don't have to—"
"Hold still." She pulled the knot tight and patted it like she was sealing a deal. "When you come back, you have to tell me what the System said. Every word. Even if it's bad."
"Every word," I said. "Promise."
She held up one hand, little finger crooked. "Pinky." I held out mine. She hooked hers around it, solemn as a judge, and then went back to her bun.
I climbed the last two flights feeling lighter and heavier at once: one less thing in my hands, one more person waiting on an answer.
My room was about the size of a supply closet. A narrow cot, a crate for a table, a rusted sink that hadn't worked since Sunday, and a single round window high on the wall that let in a smear of yellow city light. The door was a sheet of corrugated iron and a padlock. The air inside was stale and a shade colder than the stairwell.
I dropped my bag and pulled a battered wooden box from under the mattress. Inside were a handful of dried Blood-Root leaves I'd scavenged three days earlier from the trash behind an apothecary. They were stale and mostly spent, the edges gone brittle and brown, but I'd picked through that whole pile anyway, on my knees behind the bins.
I poured the last of my saved water into a tin pot, dropped in the leaves, and lit the little spirit-coal burner beside the bed. Ten minutes later, the water was a muddy red and the room smelled of vinegar and rust. The library manual said that soaking the forearms in boiled Blood-Root could wake dormant capillary meridians near the skin. It was a trick for street kids who couldn't afford real pills. I qualified on both counts.
I waited until it was cool enough not to peel skin, and then I plunged both arms in.
"Ow. Crap, crap, crap—"
It burned like a brand. The liquid turned my skin bright pink, a stinging ache crawling up toward my elbows. I sat on the edge of the cot and made myself stay there, eyes shut, jaw locked, pushing every ounce of attention down into my forearms.
Come on, I thought. One drop. Give me one notch on that dial tomorrow. Please. I don't want to disappoint them.
I hadn't planned on that last part. It just slipped out, and once it was out, I couldn't pretend it wasn't true. Failing alone had never scared me. I'd had so much practice. Failing in front of people who'd saved me a bun was new.
I stayed like that for twenty minutes, until the water was lukewarm and murky grey. When I finally pulled my arms out, my skin was raw and blistered around the wrists, throbbing with a dull, stupid pain that kept time with my pulse. I wiped them on my trousers, and the rough fabric dragged across the blisters, and I waited for that warm, pulsing feeling that meant the body had taken something in.
Nothing. The red faded back to pale, and all that was left was the sour smell of burnt leaves. Three days of scavenging and the last of my water, traded for a rash.
I looked at my left wrist. Lin's thread had soaked through and dyed a dark, ugly rust color.
"Well," I said to the empty room. "Red is red."
I dumped the water into the dry sink, shut off the burner, and walked to the window. I leaned my forearms against the frame. The metal was cold, and against the blisters, for once, cold helped.
Far in the distance, Sector 1 glittered, tier on tier of lit glass, every window burning power nobody down here could afford. That was where the high families lived, the kids who grew up on high-tier pills and liquid Qi baths and private tutors. Tomorrow, thousands of kids would crowd into district squares across the planet and press their hands to the crystal pillars. The System would read their bloodlines and their spirit roots, and every result would blaze across the giant screens. Geniuses would walk away with combat classes and guild contracts. Average kids would get decent trades.
And me?
I looked down at my blistered hands, the thread already fraying at the knot. Tomorrow I'd step up to that terminal, and the screen would show my name.
NAME: Adrian
STATUS: Orphan
CULTIVATION: Zero
TALENT: Zero
People would laugh or look away out of pity, same as always. Jax would have a story for months. Tomas would look at his shoes. Dugan would stand at the edge of the square with his arms crossed, not saying anything. Chen would have a bowl ready. Lin would be waiting on the landing.
Somehow, that last part was the worst. It would have been so much easier if nobody was watching.
I pressed my forehead to the glass. It fogged where I breathed.
"One chance," I whispered. "I'm not asking for much. Just one path. Anything."
The city lights flickered, vast and cold and completely uninterested. No one answered. Under the floorboards, the distant rift-ventilators rolled on, a low, steady pulse I could feel through the soles of my feet, like an enormous heartbeat that wasn't mine.
After a while, I crossed the room and lay down on the cot, pulling the scratchy blanket up to my chin. I held my left wrist against my chest, thumb resting on the stiff little knot.
Tomorrow, everything would change, one way or another.
I closed my eyes and let the weary quiet of Azure Star pull me under.