The notice arrived by hawk three days later, sealed with Azure Cloud’s cloud-and-sword crest, and Elder Bao read it aloud to the assembled outer disciples with the particular weariness of a man who already knew exactly how much trouble it would cause him.
“The Autumn Gathering,” he announced.
“Every minor sect within three days’ travel of Red Maple is invited to send outer disciples to compete.
Prizes include spirit stones, cultivation manuals, and—” he paused, reading ahead, one eyebrow rising slightly, “—apparently a favorable introduction to Azure Cloud’s inner sect for any outer disciple who places in the top three.” A ripple of excited murmuring ran through the courtyard.
“That’s Azure Cloud’s way of skimming talent off every small sect too poor to keep its best people,” Feng Li muttered to Tianyun, though he didn’t sound nearly as bitter about it as the words suggested.
“Doesn’t stop it from being the most interesting thing that happens around here all year.” “We’re going?” Tianyun asked.
“Cloudmist enters every year,” Elder Bao said, overhearing.
“We lose most years.
Occasionally we surprise people.” His eyes settled on Tianyun with something unreadable.
“This year, I suspect we might surprise people rather more than usual.” Chen Hao, arms crossed nearby, didn’t look thrilled by the implication.
“He’s been training three weeks,” Chen Hao said.
“I’ve trained three years.” “And you’ll both be entering,” Elder Bao said, in a tone that ended the conversation before it properly began.
“Along with Feng Li, and two others I’ll select by week’s end.
Cloudmist hasn’t placed top three in a decade.
I’d like this to be the year that changes, and I don’t much care whose broken root or bruised pride gets us there.” The next two weeks passed in a blur of aching muscles and increasingly inventive bruises.
Elder Bao drilled them from dawn until well past dusk, alternating between technique work, endurance runs up the hill path, and sparring sessions that left the training yard littered with exhausted disciples more often than not.
Tianyun’s nine-stream breathing method — Elder Bao’s name for it had stuck, mostly because nobody had thought of anything better — slowly began yielding results.
A second fragment stirred faintly beneath the jade’s cracked surface, not yet awake, but no longer entirely silent either, humming faintly whenever he pushed himself hardest.
“You’re getting better,” Chen Hao admitted grudgingly, after a sparring session that had ended with both of them flat on their backs in the dirt, equally exhausted.
“Still sloppy footwork on your left side.” “High praise, coming from you.” “Don’t get used to it.” But Chen Hao offered a hand up anyway, which was, Tianyun had learned, roughly the outer disciple equivalent of a heartfelt apology.
The lighter moments came in unexpected places.
Cook Deng, testing a new recipe involving spirit-beast offal that Feng Li insisted on calling “the crime against food,” managed to clear the entire mess hall in under a minute, earning Elder Bao’s grudging admission that even he wouldn’t touch it.
A junior disciple’s attempt to train a spirit hawk for the Gathering’s message-relay event ended with the bird stealing three separate lunches and roosting triumphantly atop the sect’s main hall for two full days, ignoring every attempt at retrieval.
And when Feng Li, showing off a new sword form for a group of visiting merchants’ daughters, tripped spectacularly over his own training weights, Tianyun laughed hard enough that his ribs ached worse than any of Chen Hao’s punches had managed.
Lin Yueqing came by most evenings, ostensibly to treat the day’s fresh bruises, though the treatments had grown steadily less necessary and considerably longer regardless.
They talked about everything and nothing — her strict but well-meaning teachers at the Nine Lotus Palace, his mother’s pickled plums, the particular indignity of Cook Deng’s cooking, the quiet ache of missing a home neither of them could easily return to.
On the evening before they left for the Gathering, she pressed a small paper charm into his palm, warm from her own pocket.
“A minor ward,” she said.
“Nothing that’ll stop a real attack, but it should ease the strain on your body when you push your Qi too hard.
I made it myself.” She hesitated, cheeks coloring slightly.
“For luck.
And because I’d rather you came back from this tournament with fewer bruises for me to fuss over, though I suspect that’s asking a great deal, given your history.” “I’ll do my best to disappoint you less than usual.” “That’s all I ask.” She smiled, soft and genuine, and for a moment neither of them moved to end the silence that followed — until Feng Li’s exaggerated coughing from somewhere nearby reminded them both that privacy at Cloudmist Sect was, at best, a polite fiction.
The Autumn Gathering was held on neutral ground outside Red Maple, a broad tournament field ringed with banners from a dozen minor sects, spectators packed three-deep along its edges by the time Cloudmist’s small delegation arrived.
Azure Cloud’s inner disciples watched from an elevated platform, robes immaculate, expressions carefully bored in the way of people who already assumed they knew how the day would end.
Tianyun’s first match came sooner than he’d hoped — an outer disciple from the Golden Pine Sect, a stocky young man named Duan Feng with a heavy iron staff and a reputation, according to the murmuring crowd, for ending matches in under a minute.
He nearly lived up to it.
Duan Feng opened with a brutal overhead strike that Tianyun barely dodged, the staff cracking the packed earth where he’d stood a heartbeat before.
The crowd’s murmur sharpened with interest as Tianyun scrambled back, Elder Bao’s stance-work the only thing keeping him upright through the next three strikes, each one heavier than the last.
Watch the feet.
Not the hands.
He found the rhythm on the fourth exchange — Duan Feng favored his right side slightly, overcommitting on wide swings in a way three years of formal training hadn’t quite trained out of him.
Tianyun let the fifth strike come, ducked beneath it instead of away, and drove forward inside the staff’s reach where its length became a liability instead of a weapon.
His fist connected with Duan Feng’s ribs, and for one dizzying instant, Spirit Vision flared unbidden — the world slowing just enough that he saw the exact moment his opponent’s balance shifted, weight rocking backward, staff dropping half a heartbeat too late to recover.
Tianyun swept his leg through the opening and put Duan Feng flat on his back, the same way he’d put Chen Hao down in the training yard weeks before, to a roar of surprised approval from the watching crowd.
“Match to Cloudmist,” the referee called, and Tianyun stood there a moment, breathing hard, half-disbelieving, as Feng Li’s whooping cheer rose above the general noise of the crowd.
Chen Hao, watching from the sidelines, allowed himself something that wasn’t quite a smile, but wasn’t far from one either.
High on the elevated platform, however, one figure hadn’t cheered at all — a slight, hooded observer standing apart from Azure Cloud’s celebrating disciples, watching Tianyun with an intensity that had nothing to do with tournament interest.
When Tianyun glanced up, catching the stranger’s gaze for just a heartbeat, the hooded figure inclined their head slightly, as though satisfied by something they’d confirmed, before melting back into the crowd and disappearing entirely.
The jade shard at his chest, still warm from the fight, went suddenly, briefly cold.
“You saw that too,” Feng Li said quietly, following his gaze, all trace of his earlier cheering gone.
“I saw it.” Tianyun’s stomach tightened, the victory’s warmth already cooling into something far more watchful.
“I don’t think we’re the only ones keeping track of how many fragments I’ve got left to wake.” Beside them, Lin Yueqing’s hand found his without a word, steady and grounding, even as her eyes stayed fixed on the empty space where the hooded stranger had been standing only moments before.
—————————————————- < Astranor Shinjitsu Note:- Hi guys, I hope you loved the first 10 chapters of this series and give your love and support to this series to motivate me to create more amazing chapters.
I will release 1 chapter daily from 2nd August, 2026 at 8:30 PM GMT+8 .
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