Without Xuan Zhen around to skip stones across every conversation, the sect settled into something almost like a normal rhythm.
Elder Bao took over the mornings himself, which meant less riddles and more direct insults about posture, and somehow Tianyun found he didn’t mind the trade.
There was something steadying about a teacher who told you exactly what was wrong with your stance instead of implying it existed somewhere just past your understanding.
“Left shoulder’s dropping again,” Elder Bao said, on the fourth morning, adjusting it with two blunt fingers.
“Every time you reach for that third fragment, you drop it.
Like you’re bracing for a hit that isn’t coming.” “Maybe I am.” “Then stop.
Nothing’s swinging at you in this courtyard except my patience, and even that’s more durable than you’d think.” Chen Hao and Feng Li had started sparring with him properly now, not the careful, half-effort matches from his first weeks, but real ones, the kind that left bruises in new places and occasionally ended with somebody flat on their back laughing about it instead of complaining.
Feng Li’s ribs had healed enough that he’d stopped favoring them, mostly, except when he thought nobody was watching.
“You’re still protecting that side,” Tianyun told him, one evening, after Feng Li flinched pulling a bucket up from the well.
“I am absolutely not.” “You just did it again.” “That was a completely unrelated wince.
Coincidence.
Happens to healthy people all the time.” Feng Li set the bucket down with theatrical care, like proving a point.
“See?
Fine.
Perfectly fine person, doing fine person things.” “You’re a terrible liar.” “I’m an excellent liar, you’re just an unusually suspicious audience.” But he let Tianyun carry the bucket the rest of the way anyway, which was answer enough.
Lin Yueqing split her time now between the sect and the border clinic, which meant fewer evenings but better ones when they happened.
She’d started teaching him small things about Qi-sensing in the gaps between her healer’s duties — nothing formal, nothing from any manual, just practical things she’d picked up over years of pressing her fingers to sick and injured wrists.
“You’re doing the thing where you push instead of listen,” she said, one such evening, guiding his hand to his own pulse point and holding it there.
“Qi doesn’t like being pushed.
It likes being asked.” “That sounds like something out of a very boring poem.” “It’s something out of my actual training, and also apparently a very boring poem, both can be true.” She smiled, though it faded a little around the edges before it fully landed.
“I keep thinking about Zhou Hai’s daughter.
Six years old.
Asking every day.” “I know.” “Ten days, Elder Situ said.
We’re on day six now.” “I know that too.” She didn’t say anything else about it, just kept her fingers over his pulse a while longer than the lesson strictly required, and he let her, understanding without needing it explained that some kinds of company didn’t need a reason attached to them.
The rider came in just past dusk on the seventh day, and Tianyun heard the commotion before he understood what it was — shouting near the gate, feet running, a horse’s ragged, exhausted breathing carrying across the courtyard in a way that didn’t sound right at all.
He got there in time to see the rider half-fall from the saddle, caught by two junior disciples before he hit the ground, robes torn, one arm wrapped in a bandage gone dark and stiff with old blood.
“Cloudmist,” the man managed, voice cracked and thin.
“I need — Elder Bao.
Now.
Please.” Elder Bao was already crossing the courtyard, Chen Hao and Feng Li right behind him, and Tianyun felt something cold settle low in his stomach before anyone had said a single word he could actually understand.
“I know you,” the rider said, when his eyes found Tianyun through the gathering crowd, and that alone was enough to make the cold in his stomach turn to ice.
“You’re the Li boy.
From Qinghe Village.” Every other sound in the courtyard seemed to fall away at once.
“What happened,” Tianyun said, though some part of him already knew he didn’t want the answer, already knew from the particular way the rider’s face folded when he said Qinghe Village that whatever came next was going to be the kind of thing that changed everything after it.
“Crimson robes,” the rider said, gasping the words out between breaths, blood loss and exhaustion pulling at every syllable.
“Two nights ago.
They came at night, no warning, straight for the village–” “My family,” Tianyun said, and his voice didn’t sound like his own voice anymore, thin and far away, like it belonged to someone standing much farther from this conversation than he was.
“Is my family–” The rider’s face did something Tianyun would remember for a long time after, a flinch of pure, helpless apology, the look of a man forced to hand over news he’d give almost anything not to be carrying.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I got out early, sent to find help — I don’t know what happened after I left.
I don’t know if anyone’s–” He didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t need to.
Somewhere behind Tianyun, Lin Yueqing’s hand found his arm, gripping hard, and he heard Chen Hao say something low and urgent to Elder Bao, and Feng Li’s voice cracking through the noise asking when, how many, which direction did they come from — all of it distant, all of it happening somewhere just outside the small, cold, narrowing space that had opened up in Tianyun’s chest and didn’t seem interested in closing again.
The jade shard at his chest went suddenly, violently hot, hot enough that he gasped and pressed a hand flat against his own sternum, and for one dizzying second the whole courtyard tilted sideways around him — not Spirit Vision, not Time Perception, something else entirely, something that hurt in a way the first three fragments never had, a raw, tearing pressure building behind his ribs like a held breath about to break something on its way out.
“Tianyun–” Lin Yueqing’s voice, sharp with alarm, close now, her hands on his shoulders trying to hold him steady.
He barely heard her.
Because underneath the pain, underneath the cold fear sitting in his stomach like a stone, something ancient and patient had finally, fully woken up — and it didn’t feel like the calm, careful awakening of the fragments before it.
It felt like something enormous turning over in its sleep after a very long time being still, and opening its eyes, and finding, for the first time in longer than Tianyun could possibly imagine, a reason to be angry.
The last thing he heard clearly, before the world folded in on itself and went dark at the edges, was Elder Bao’s voice, urgent and afraid in a way he’d never once heard from the old man before.
“Get Yueqing to him — now — something’s happening, something’s–” And then nothing at all.
To be continue….