“Three seconds and change.”
The Merchant’s voice came from the depths of Yuan’s consciousness, carrying the tone of a man recording a loss in his ledger.
Even a dead man would have avoided your strike at that speed.
“Run the calculation again.”
I did it twice.
The time did not decrease by a hundredth of a second.
Yuan lay on the floor of his hut, his back pressed against the worn mat, a slow drop of blood trailing from his nostril toward his upper lip.
The single candle on the wooden shelf was nearing its end.
He had slept only two broken hours in the past forty-eight, and the muscles in his chest tightened from exhaustion.
Even so, he raised his forearm and repeated the movement.
What the alley encounter with He Long had proven was crude and costly.
The problem was not the suppressed strength of the Soldier.
The Soldier possessed far more combat ability than Yuan needed.
The problem was Yuan himself: the time required to choose a voice, open the inner lock without allowing the other spirits to escape, and then regulate the flow of that will through his body with enough precision to keep it from burning his tissues.
Three seconds against a Soul Core cultivator were three complete opportunities to die.
Yuan had survived that night only because He Long had chosen negotiation over killing him, not because Yuan had been capable of stopping him.
And next time, his opponent might have no desire to talk.
So he began training.
Every night, after the lights of the outer district had gone out completely, Yuan sank his consciousness toward that inner door.
He opened it.
He closed it.
He opened it again.
A hundred times in succession, then another hundred.
He never forced it open.
Forcing it meant losing control and allowing his entire consciousness to be swallowed.
Instead, he was carving a mechanical passage into his nervous system.
He called it, in his mind, the practiced pathways.
It was like repeating the same physical movement thousands of times.
At first, the body stumbled and hesitated.
Then the nerves became familiar with the route, and after enough repetition, the limbs began to move by instinct, stripped of conscious thought.
Pain accompanied every contraction, but it had become a familiar pain, like the hardened skin of a blacksmith after years of friction.
The pain never disappeared, but it stopped interfering with movement.
He began with the Soldier for his effectiveness in close combat, then followed with the Craftsman for precise measurements of distance and angles, and finally the Merchant for reading changes in people’s expressions and seizing weaknesses in conversation.
“Again.”
You speak as though it were my body being torn apart.
“You are only counting the time.”
And calculating failure hurts too.
During the day, work waited for him above ground.
Two weeks after his confrontation with Gao Qi, Lin Shui summoned him to a back room in a cheap teahouse at the edge of the market.
She sat facing the door and placed a wooden board in front of her, its surface covered with a network of charcoal lines.
“I am no longer satisfied with taxes alone.” She looked directly into his eyes.
“I want eyes in every corner.
Who enters the district, who leaves it, who buys unusual quantities of supplies, and who asks questions that go beyond his profession.”
“A parallel intelligence network.”
“More precise than that.
I don’t need empty rumors.
I need confirmed movement.”
Yuan understood what it meant.
Her reliance on him was growing faster than she herself had planned, and this was exactly where he had wanted to establish his position.
He built the new network around a system of double verification.
Every piece of information gathered by the alley eyes passed through two separate stages.
One observer recorded the event, while another source who knew nothing about the first confirmed the details before the information reached him.
The servant girl complained about how burdensome the system was.
Yuan simply told her that false information used to make a decision today would become a noose around their neck tomorrow.
At the same time, He Long was watching him.
During the first two weeks, He Long observed from a distance: from rooftops, around corners, and behind cargo carts.
Once he became certain that Yuan was not planning to flee the city, he reduced the distance between them.
On a cold night, He Long landed on the roof of the neighboring warehouse and said briefly, “The He Family will be moving its northern supply warehouses this month.
Don’t ask about the details yet.
I’ll give them to you once the plan is complete.”
It was the first piece of information he had offered.
The following week, he gave Yuan new smelting metal prices, followed by the name of an official guard who accepted bribes from merchants belonging to both families.
In return, and without Lin Shui’s knowledge, Yuan leaked He Long information about the Ming Family’s commercial movements: grain shipment schedules and points of internal disagreement among branch officials.
The information gave He Long an advantage within his own family without damaging Yuan’s own network.
A double maneuver on a thread stretched thin.
You’re working for three sides, the Merchant said one night.
And collecting your payment from only one.
“I work for only one side: myself.”
Yet you make each side believe you are its loyal servant.
“That is the essence of the job.”
As for Ming Hao, he remained completely outside this circle.
He received praise from his family’s elders for the stability of the district and spent long moments in front of the mirror adjusting the dragon pin on his chest while boasting about his innate talent for leadership.
He even gave Yuan an old robe as a “reward for a loyal servant.”
Yuan took it and put it on without a word.
Then, on a dark night, the hut’s candle burned down completely, and something happened that he had not calculated.
Yuan was repeating the rapid summoning motion: opening the door to the Soldier, driving the contraction into his muscles, then closing it immediately.
But he rushed the movement in an attempt to reduce the time to less than a second, and a mistake occurred in the internal coordination.
He opened the Craftsman’s passage before the Soldier’s passage had been fully secured.
Two voices flooded into the same consciousness.
Yuan’s body froze in place.
He remembered the warnings in the ancient records.
When spirits overlapped, perception would tear apart, followed by inevitable madness.
Yuan waited for the internal conflict to erupt, for his nervous system to be torn between the Soldier’s violent urge to attack and the Craftsman’s calculations.
But what happened defied the rule.
The Soldier’s crude muscular speed, that reckless burst that lacked restraint, was immediately controlled by the Craftsman’s cold precision and strict calculations of movement.
They did not collide.
The raw strength provided the momentum, while the calculating awareness determined the angle of movement and the point of leverage down to the millimeter.
Yuan raised his right fist in the darkness and realized that, in that moment, he could strike a specific nerve in the body of a moving opponent at twice the usual speed without deviating even once.
He closed both doors together after five seconds.
He collapsed back onto the mat, gasping for breath, the taste of iron filling his throat from the bleeding gums.
Yet his expression carried a sharp, unwavering calm.
“No record ever mentioned that fusion was possible.”
“Because everyone who attempted it lost their mind immediately,” the Merchant said in a cautious voice, stripped of its usual mockery.
“Or died before they could record what they had discovered.”
“Or both.”
Exactly.
Yuan began arranging the new equation.
Instead of summoning a single ability at a time, he could form a calculated combination for each situation, one that joined combat speed with precision of execution.
But the price was as clear as the edge of a blade.
Every fusion between two spirits doubled the pressure on the walls of his consciousness, and one step too far would plunge him into a complete loss of identity.
Yuan suddenly turned toward the inner wall deep within his soul.
An abrupt silence descended.
That sealed chamber at the bottom of the sea of souls, where the damaged and disturbed voices had been imprisoned, scratching at the walls and groaning throughout the nights like restrained beasts, suddenly fell silent.
The scratching stopped.
The groaning died at the same instant.
As though everything within that darkness had raised its head together, watching what had happened in absolute silence.