Fang Yuan sat cross-legged in the secret cave, facing the dried remains of the Flower Wine Monk. The silence of the stone settled around him as he closed his eyes and turned his attention inward.

  In the metaphysical space of his Aperture, his Primeval Sea lay still, a calm expanse of blue-green water occupying forty-four percent of the sphere. The extra twenty percent he'd forcibly extracted during the ceremony had evaporated shortly afterward, as he'd known it would, leaving only what his body actually held. Grade C. His biological reality, unchanged.

  But above that sea, casting its shadow over everything beneath it, stood something that had no business existing in a fifteen-year-old's Aperture.

  A cicada.

  Where the Moonlight Gu resembled a crescent of pale blue crystal, this creature looked like the work of a craftsman who had carved time itself from palm wood and breathed something into it that hadn't entirely died. Its body ran in brownish-yellow hues marked by circular streaks, the growth rings of something ancient, something that had been accumulating years long before Fang Yuan was born in this life or any other. On its back, two large translucent wings overlapped like pressed leaves, their veining still intricate, still perfect in structure.

  The Spring-Autumn Cicada. A Rank 8 Gu, an Immortal Gu. His Vital Gu. The treasure he'd refined at a cost he didn't permit himself to calculate, the instrument that had carried him across the river of time and deposited him here, in this body, at this beginning.

  An aura of death clung to it. Its body had the rigidity of dead wood. Its wings, which should've carried the green urgency of spring, were yellow and dry, their edges curling and beginning to crumble, as though autumn had already arrived and refused to leave. It was, by every measure, a Gu in terminal decline.

  This was, in its way, fortunate.

  Under ordinary circumstances, a Gu Master could only make use of Gu at their own rank, the principle wasn't merely practical but biological. A child who lifts a sword too heavy for them doesn't simply fail to swing it, they injure themselves in the attempt. A mortal Master who possessed an Immortal Gu at full strength wouldn't simply struggle to contain it. The resulting instability would draw calamities capable of leveling mountains. Had the Cicada been anything close to what it once was, Fang Yuan's Rank 1 Aperture would've collapsed the moment the refinement was complete.

  He had two years. That was what experience told him, two years before it recovered enough of its strength to become dangerous to the vessel housing it. Two years was sufficient. He'd worked with less.

  Beneath the Cicada's shadow, the Liquor Worm drifted on the surface of the sea, quietly performing its function. It processed the green copper essence with steady patience, densifying and darkening it until it carried the quality of the intermediate stage of Rank 1, well ahead of where a student one week out of the awakening ceremony had any right to be. Beside it, the Moonlight Gu rested in readiness, coiled and waiting, prepared to project its jade blade at the first call.

  Both were already refined.

  For the other teenagers in the clan, these first days had been a grinding ordeal. Controlling Primeval essence without wasting it was one problem, breaking the wild autonomous will of a newly acquired Gu was another entirely, and the two problems compounded each other in exhausting ways. Even Fang Zheng, with his Grade A talent and all the resources at his disposal, would need the better part of a week to complete what Fang Yuan had accomplished almost without effort.

  The method was simple, if not available to everyone. He'd allowed the Spring-Autumn Cicada's aura to surface for a single moment, not its power, only its presence, the ambient weight of what it was. The Liquor Worm and the Moonlight Gu had encountered that presence and done what any lesser creature does when something ancient and incomprehensible looks in its direction. Their independent wills had collapsed without resistance, folding into submission the way a candle flame bends in the wind of something much larger passing nearby.

  What others would spend days forcing, he'd achieved in the span of a breath.

  For a Gu Master, a refined Gu wasn't simply a domesticated tool. The bond that formed through refinement went deeper than ownership, it was a spiritual fusion, an erasure of the boundary between master and insect that left the Gu as continuous with the Master's body as the fingers of his own hand. To command the Liquor Worm to act or be still required no more conscious effort than deciding to close a fist. The creature's will was his will. There was no seam between them.

  While Fang Zheng sat in a well-lit room wrestling with his essence, Fang Yuan stood at the bottom of the crevice with his back to the sealed wall, turning over in his hands the crushed remains of the Photo-Audio Gu. The recording it had held was gone now, destroyed with the shell, but the memory of it lived in him as clearly as if the wall were still projecting.

  He'd observed this projection twice, once in his past life, and once in this one. But in his previous existence, the message hadn't ended where it usually did. It had continued.

  The image of the devastated mountain summit had flickered and been replaced by something different: a bald Gu Master, grievously wounded, propped against a cave wall. Cuts covered his chest and limbs in a pattern that suggested a prolonged and losing battle, but none of them bled, the body had been drained past the point where bleeding was possible. His face, even in this state, held the particular quality of a mind that hadn't stopped moving.

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  — I am the Flower Wine Monk.

  He had laughed. Not the laughter of despair, but something almost satisfied, the laugh of a man who has set something in motion that he won't live to see land.

  — You, the person from the future, whoever you are. The fact that you endured this recording and allowed it to play for more than three months tells me that you hold no goodwill toward the Gu Yue clan. Good. Then you will be my successor. My entire inheritance is yours. There is only one condition: you will destroy the Gu Yue clan for me. Every last one of them.

  The Flower Wine Monk had believed himself clever. He'd hidden his legacy and attached to it a condition he thought would bind whoever found it, a chain of vengeance passed from a dead hand to a living one. He hadn't considered the possibility that the person who eventually came to stand in this cave would be someone for whom three months of patience was nothing, for whom the destruction of a clan was neither a moral question nor an emotional one but a logistical problem to be addressed at the appropriate time.

  For Fang Yuan, the testament was a price tag. He'd pay it if needed, not out of hatred, not out of the consuming bitterness that had hollowed out the Monk's final years, but because it was the condition attached to something he needed. He would sign the contract in other people's blood, as he had signed many contracts before, and feel nothing particular about it either way.

  He put the remains of the Gu aside and turned his attention to the wall.

  He extended his fingers, letting the Moonlight Gu's sharpness coat them like a second skin, and began making cuts in the stone at carefully calculated positions. The Gu's primary ability was to project a jade blade at distances up to ten meters, but a Master with sufficient experience learned to modulate that force, to compress it into something precise enough for work that required a different kind of edge. He had that experience. He used it.

  Outside, the sky came apart.

  The storm hit Qing Mao Mountain with the particular indiscriminate violence of mountain weather, torrential rain that turned the paths to mud within minutes, thunder that struck the rock faces and sent its echo rolling through the crevice and into the cave beyond. Fang Yuan paused for a moment, listening to the chaos outside with something in his expression that was too small and too controlled to be called a smile but functioned like one.

  For anyone else, the storm was an obstacle, a reason to abandon the work and return to shelter. For him, it was a curtain. The sound of the rain would swallow anything that came from inside the mountain, and the storm would keep people away from the slopes. He turned back to the wall.

  His spiritual sea had dropped to four percent. He noted this and didn't stop. He took the bamboo spike from his belt, set it into the nearest notch he had cut, and began driving it deeper with a stone, repeating the process from notch to notch with methodical patience, using each point of weakness to compromise the rock's structural integrity from the inside out.

  In my previous life I worked in silence and fear, flinching at every sound. Tonight, the mountain itself provides the cover.

  Sometime in the deep of the night, between one roll of thunder and the next, he struck a notch at an angle slightly different from the ones before it. The sound that followed wasn't thunder, it was lower, more final, a dull crack that traveled through the stone rather than the air. A section of wall gave way, collapsing inward, and beyond it a cavity revealed itself, narrow, descending, cut into the earth at a downward angle.

  The air that came out of it was old. It carried the smell of centuries of sealed darkness, of moisture that had never moved, of dust that had been accumulating in the absence of any reason to settle differently. Fang Yuan stepped back and let it breathe out.

  His lungs were burning. His breathing had reduced itself to something hoarse and shallow without his having noticed when it happened. His fingers, still wrapped around the bamboo spike, were trembling, a fine involuntary tremor that he observed with the clinical detachment of someone monitoring a system they didn't particularly identify with.

  It wasn't fear. It was simpler than that: the body he inhabited was fifteen years old, unrefined, still soft in the ways that young bodies are soft. Every muscle in his arms had been pushed past what they were built to sustain, and they were reporting this fact in the only language they had. The pain behind his temples beat steadily in time with his pulse, patient and insistent.

  His eyes, looking into the darkness of the newly opened passage, remained entirely still.

  He'd endured the refinement of demonic Gu, processes that most Masters didn't survive in any recognizable form. He'd fought his way through centuries of a world that was trying, with considerable resources and ingenuity, to kill him. The protest of a fifteen-year-old body that had been worked too hard was background noise.

  He put his tools away. Going further now would be tactically unsound, his reflexes were dulled, and the stale air rising from the passage could cause him to lose consciousness inside. He wasn't a desperate man gambling with his life on instinct. He was a patient one with a plan that extended years beyond this night.

  He sat at the entrance to the crevice and let the time pass. Sleep didn't come and he didn't pursue it. He meditated instead, guiding the Liquor Worm through slow deliberate cycles, allowing the process of recovery to compound while he waited for the air in the passage to renew itself and the trembling in his muscles to stop.

  When he finally emerged from the crevice, the storm had settled into a light rain. The sun was already high, approaching noon, the shadows short and direct on the wet stone. He found a stream fed by the overnight rain and used it to wash the red dust from his clothes, his shoes, his skin, the fine sediment of three centuries of sealed stone that had coated everything when the wall came down.

  He returned to the mansion at noon, moving through the heavy looks of his family, the reproach, the contempt, the studied disapproval of people performing concern they didn't feel, without pausing or responding. He went to his room, allowed himself the hours of rest his essence required, and let his Primeval sea stabilize.

  Then, from the other side of his wooden door, a familiar voice.

  — Young Master Fang Yuan. It's me. I've brought food and wine, something warm. A young master shouldn't be out in the cold like this, shutting himself away.

  Fang Yuan had been expecting this. His uncle's plan was moving ahead of schedule, not by much.

  A glint of something passed through his eyes and was gone.

  — I'm a little hungry, he said, his voice as neutral as a closed door. You're just in time. Come in.