The wind came before the light.
It hissed through the pine needles with a restless hunger, drawing long, whispering breaths between branches that bent but did not break. It pushed through Green Pine Village like an unseen tide, curling into eaves and alleys, stirring dust from shrines long unvisited. There was no scent of rain on it—only dryness, as if it had scraped across stone for a thousand li before finding them.
Li Yao woke with the wind in his ears.
He did not rise quickly, nor groan as stiff limbs begged for delay. He simply sat up in silence, exhaled once, and felt the still-warm ache of yesterday settle over him like a second skin.
There was no dream left to cling to. Just breath. Bones. The slow, insistent churn of his body reshaping itself.
He dressed without ceremony, bound his hair with a strip of bark-cloth, and ate cold rice with pickled greens in two quick bites. The spirit core remained hidden under the floor—tucked between jars of dried roots and beastbone ash—but his mind did not linger on it. Not yet.
There were more urgent things to polish than treasure.
He left the hut with the sun still far from waking, walked the familiar dirt path to the woods beyond the ridge, and stopped where the soil gave way to pine needles and silence.
Here, in the half-wild edges of the forest, he began.
The villagers would not come this way. Too many old stories lived here—stories of blood-drenched foxes and mourning spirits. But Li Yao found no ghosts, only space.
He stepped onto the flattened circle of earth he had cleared with his own hands, and for a long moment, simply stood.
Beneath him, the stones waited.
Flat, cracked, half-buried in loam and root, the old earth here was harder than in the training fields. He had chosen it for that reason. Where others softened their stance for ease and safety, he had decided to train where the ground refused to yield.
His method was named for that.
The Stone Root Method.
It was not elegant. Not passed down in sect halls or written in jade slips by long-dead immortals. It came from watching how mountain cats tensed before pouncing. From feeling where his weight shifted on stone. From testing, bleeding, testing again.
Rootless cultivators could not afford illusions.
They had to build their foundation with cracked hands and patient scars.
He widened his stance, breathed deep into the belly, and let the weight settle into his legs. From there, the motion began: slow, coiled pivots that dragged his qi from its nest at the base of his spine and stretched it thin through muscle and tendon. There was no elegant release, no flashing palm-strikes or mist-wrapped kicks. Just repetition. Pressure. Breath.
Balance on hard ground.
Muscle against resistance.
Qi drawn not from the heavens, but from the marrow.
He turned again, twisting at the hips until the tension in his spine grew sharp. Then exhaled. Again. Again.
As the light began to touch the upper boughs, sweat beaded on his brow and soaked into the dirt at his feet. His breath deepened. He no longer counted the movements. They flowed through him now—stone grounding flesh, flesh guiding qi.
And then, a pause.
Something shifted in the air.
Not just wind.
The stillness changed.
Li Yao's eyes snapped open just before the growl came—a low, ragged thing, half-growl, half-wheeze, echoing from the underbrush with the sluggish menace of a drunk knife-fighter.
He turned and dropped low.
The creature that pushed through the scrub wasn't large, but it reeked of wrongness. A boar—broad, tusked, coated in mottled patches of dark fur—but its gait limped, dragging one hoof as if it were half-lame. Its eyes were milky and pale, ringed with faint black veins that pulsed faintly with something unnatural.
It shouldn't have been here.
Beasts this close to the village? So soon after the lynx?
He narrowed his stance, breath held at the top of the chest. The stone beneath his foot gave him just enough leverage to shift, but not enough to run.
The boar saw him.
And charged.
There was no shriek. No trumpet. Just a sudden thunder of hooves and breath as the beast flung itself forward in a suicidal burst of speed.
Li Yao moved sideways, planted one heel, and pivoted hard. The creature grazed past him, tearing bark from a nearby tree with one tusk, and skidded through the dirt, wheezing.
He snatched a branch from the ground—thick, half-rotten, but solid enough—and dashed toward it. The first blow struck behind the jaw. The second at the spine. It shrieked, spun, and nearly caught him with a back-kick, but he dropped low and jammed the branch under its front leg.
The boar stumbled.
Li Yao vaulted over it, grabbed another stone, and brought it down—once, twice, three times—until the beast fell still.
Breath came back in ragged pulls.
He crouched beside the corpse.
Blood pooled beneath it, but not cleanly—it was thick, almost black in places, with a faint shimmer that reminded him of spoiled wine left in the sun. He pressed a hand to the beast's chest and felt something there—not a core, not quite, but a swollen node of qi-infused tissue, no larger than a peach pit.
He cut it free and held it to the light.
It pulsed faintly. Wrongly.
This was not natural.
Something had awakened it—or corrupted it. A trace of cultivation force, seeded where no beast should have held it.
And again, too close to the village.
His stomach tightened.
If these creatures were being pushed from deeper forest territory, that was troubling. But if they were being driven, or infected—
Then something worse was already moving.
He looked out over the trees.
They were beautiful. Still. Aloof.
But no longer quiet.
And not safe.
He stood, tucked the pulsing node into a jar wrapped in dried cloth, and turned back toward the village.
If more were coming, he had no time to waste.
His body had strengthened. His breath deepened. But there were realms yet untouched. Methods unwritten. Teachers he had never met.
And weapons.
He needed a blade. Not a stick, not a stone. Something forged to hold against fang and claw.
The Stone Root Method had brought him this far.
It would not be enough for what came next.