The sun had barely breached the eastern ridgeline when the Zhenlong estate stirred to life. Courtyard gates opened to let in the cool breath of morning, and the carriage stood waiting at the main entrance—its lacquered panels painted with cranes in flight, the crest of Ruolan's maiden household etched along its sides in silver.
Haotian stepped out from the inner hall, his travel robes crisp, a faint trace of sandalwood clinging to the fresh weave. Lianhua kept pace at his side, her hair tied up in a simple knot, eyes scanning the courtyard as though mapping every detail. Ruolan stood near the carriage, speaking in low tones with Wuhen and Qirou. The presence of both wives had lent the farewell a weight of unspoken formality—Qirou's polite distance contrasting with the quiet pride in Ruolan's gaze.
A pair of household guards secured travel chests to the rear. Overhead, a pale mist still clung to the roofs, refracting the sunlight into soft halos. It should have felt like any other departure.
It didn't.
From his vantage at the carriage step, Haotian caught the faintest ripple of sound beyond the outer gates—a rhythm in the air not made by city life. It was gone as soon as it brushed his awareness, leaving only the creak of leather straps and the whicker of the carriage horses.
Wuhen placed a steady hand on Ruolan's shoulder. "Travel light, but keep your senses sharp," he said, his voice even but his eyes just a shade too still.
Qirou inclined her head. "The roads have been restless. You'll have guards, but—don't stray from them."
Ruolan offered Haotian her hand, and he stepped up into the carriage beside her. Lianhua took the seat opposite, her gaze flicking once more to the gates before settling into a calm mask.
The driver snapped the reins.
As the carriage rolled forward, the city's protective walls loomed closer. From within, Tianluan's streets looked peaceful—merchants opening shutters, children chasing each other along the walkways—but Haotian noticed how the guards at the main gate tightened their grips on their spears as the carriage approached. One exchanged a look with another, something almost imperceptible passing between them.
The wheels rattled over the threshold stones.
Beyond the gates, the road stretched eastward, flanked by tall cypress and open fields glistening with dew. The horizon lay soft and pale in the distance. Somewhere out there waited his grandparents. Somewhere out there, too, lingered whatever faint shadow had brushed against him moments ago.
He leaned back, letting the rhythm of the wheels settle into his thoughts, unaware that with each turn they drew closer not only to family—but to the first threads of a trial meant for him alone.
The cypress trees thinned as the carriage rattled further from Tianluan, giving way to open stretches of wind-swept plain. The air was crisp, but Haotian kept glancing toward the far ridgelines, a faint prickling at the back of his neck refusing to fade.
The guards rode in a staggered formation—two ahead, two behind, one to each flank. Hooves struck the earth in a steady rhythm, the sound folding into the creak of leather harnesses and the muted jingle of fittings. It should have been comforting. It wasn't.
Somewhere behind them, beneath the natural hum of the road, another sound ghosted in and out—a soft thump, as if a single hoof struck out of time. Too distant to be certain, yet too precise to be chance.
Lianhua's gaze shifted to the rear without turning her head. Haotian caught the movement and saw her left hand tighten around the edge of the seat, the faintest narrowing of her eyes. She had heard it too.
A low whistle from one of the rear guards cut through the air. The lead rider looked back. His face didn't change, but his posture grew taut.
Ruolan, seated beside Haotian, leaned forward slightly. "Is something wrong?"
The lead guard forced a thin smile. "No, my lady. Just… making sure the road stays clear."
But as the carriage rolled on, the faint hoofbeat returned—closer now, layered over with the soft swish of something brushing through tall grass. It came and went, like a predator pacing the edge of sight.
By the time the road dipped into a shallow ravine, even Haotian could sense it clearly: they were not alone on this road. And whatever followed was keeping perfect pace.
The sound came again—this time sharper, no longer masked by distance.
A low whumf of displaced air passed above the carriage, and before the lead guard could shout, a shadow broke from the left ridge—rider and horse clad in dark lacquered armor, descending the slope at a reckless angle. The rider's blade caught a flash of sunlight, sending a white line of glare into Haotian's eyes.
"Intercept!" the lead guard barked, heels digging into his mount. The front two riders spurred forward, spears lowering in unison.
But before they could clash, another shadow emerged from the ravine's right lip—this one on foot, moving impossibly fast over loose stone, twin short sabers in hand.
The carriage jolted as the driver swerved, the wheel catching on an exposed root. Haotian was thrown slightly sideways, but Ruolan's hand pressed him back into his seat. Her gaze was calm, but her grip was iron.
Lianhua's expression had already sharpened; she slid the carriage door aside and stepped onto the running board, her right hand curling into a poised guard stance. Her eyes locked on the oncoming assassin, measuring the distance to impact.
The first rider reached the front guard line and swung in a low arc, the steel ringing out—clang!—as spear met blade. Sparks scattered across the trampled dirt.
Then the assassin on foot lunged for the carriage.
Haotian's hand twitched toward the seat beside him, where his travel satchel rested. Inside, nestled between folded robes and medicinal pouches, was a sealed porcelain vial—the result of his tribulation-forged alchemy. He had not planned to test it yet.
But the moment was no longer offering him that choice.
The moment the assassin's foot struck the earth within reach of the carriage, Haotian was already moving. His hand dove into the satchel, fingers closing around the porcelain vial. The faint heat inside pulsed against his palm—unstable, potent, alive with the pressure of his own tribulation tempering.
He vaulted from the running board, boots striking the dirt with a sharp thud. Phantom Steps carried him forward in a blur, his form breaking into a shimmer of afterimages. The assassin's eyes darted, trying to track him—too slow. Haotian's heel pivoted, his body twisting past a slash meant for his ribs.
The cork of the vial snapped free. A sharp scent of scorched ozone and bitter herbs rushed into the air. Haotian crushed the vial in his hand, the volatile mix spilling between his fingers—then channeled lightning into it.
The reaction was immediate. CRACK—WHUUM! A shockwave of electric force surged outward, arcs dancing across the assassin's blades and locking his muscles for a half-second—just enough.
Haotian stepped inside the assassin's guard. Silent Steps muffled the strike until it landed, his palm slamming into the chest plate. Lightning-infused force burst through the assassin's body, the man collapsing with a strangled gasp.
Another rider wheeled in, sword raised, but Haotian was already on him. Phantom Steps made him a ghost; he slipped past the horse's flank, seized the rider's wrist, and sent another lightning shock straight into the man's arm. The weapon clattered to the ground.
Behind him, Lianhua's movements were precise and deadly, cutting down another attacker with a flash of her blade. The front guards were rallying, but Haotian was already moving to intercept a third threat—two more shadows coming fast down the slope.
He had no time to think. The tribulation-forged alchemy had worked. Now, it was simply a matter of how far he was willing to push it before it burned out of his control.
The ravine amplified every sound: the rattle of the carriage, the grunt of a guard yanking a rein, the thin, startled gasp from a horse that had seen the wrong kind of shadow. Dust hung like breath in a cold morning, brushed by the first fingers of a wind that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago.
The ambush broke—hard and fast—and Haotian met it on the move.
He'd already smashed the porcelain seal in his palm, lightning-rich tincture mixing with a thread of his qi to become a living storm in his veins. The first assassin stiffened under the shock and folded; the second lost his blade to a numbing jolt that turned fingers into wood. Haotian let the momentum carry him through—Phantom Steps blurring his outline into three echoes, Silent Steps smothering the sound of his next footfall until even the dust he kicked seemed to hush itself.
Then the fight changed.
Not in noise or numbers, but in the enemies' eyes.
The rider he disarmed didn't scramble for the fallen sword. He rolled, slammed his palm against the ground, and barked a sharp command. On the ridge, a figure in ash-grey robes answered with a mirror shout. Three more shadows surfaced from scrub and rock like knife points glinting out of burlap. A standard rose—a narrow pennant marked with a lattice of black ink sigils—and the man beneath it turned his head to fix Haotian with a long, measuring stare.
"Blue mantle," he rasped, voice roughened by too much dust and too little sleep. "The boy is the threat. Not the mother, not the maid."
Haotian felt that stare like a hook trying to set in his spine. The leader's next words were clean, practiced, the kind you use when you've drilled a plan deep enough to do sleeping:
"Ground the thunder. Blind the step. Bind the boy."
Two robed men pivoted instantly, slamming short iron stakes into the dirt with flat-headed hammers. Lines of chain sang as they unfurled between them, each link etched in tight, mean characters that bled a dull, earth-colored light. A third snapped open a folding fan that wasn't a fan at all but a cage of thin copper rods; he flicked it once and the air turned heavy, the bright crackle along Haotian's forearms dimming by a shade.
Suppressors. Grounding tech. He knew the theory. He hadn't expected a roadside ambush to bring a workshop's worth of counters.
"Down!" a guard shouted, shearing a rider from his saddle with a spear butt to the throat. Lianhua's blade flashed once—clean, economical, a curve of silver that didn't quite catch the light—and another attacker stumbled back clutching a forearm that would never hold straight again.
Ruolan didn't scream. She didn't move, either. She watched Haotian and the world around him with the exact attention of someone who had learned long ago that chaos punished distraction first.
The leader's palm cut through the air. The copper-fan bearer brought the ribs together and snapped them toward Haotian. The rods spat a mesh of thread-fine arcs—lightning's negative, a hungry net that drank charge instead of giving it. Haotian twisted, the mesh grazing his shoulder. Where it touched, the storm in his blood hissed and guttered; his right hand cramped, skin prickling with phantom needles.
Adapt. He stamped, pulled earth-aligned qi through the sole of his left foot to bleed the excess charge, and let the pain sharpen his focus. Three heartbeats to assess, two to move, one to break.
The pennant turned again. "Now the wind."
On the ridge, a bowstring thrummed. The arrow wasn't for flesh. It detonated ten spans above Haotian's head with a brittle pop, unfolding a whirling disk of paper and lacquer that spun faster, faster—dragging the ravine's air into a hungry spiral. Wind took the dust, the breath, the sound. It tugged at Phantom Steps like a child snatching at a sleeve.
He went low, weight on the outside edge of his foot, feeling the pull in his ribs and the back of his jaw. Wind and lightning. He'd been failing that merge all morning in the safety of the courtyard. The ravine offered no safety. It offered the same question with knives for consequences.
"Right flank!" Lianhua called, voice cutting cleanly under the wind without shouting. Haotian saw what she saw: two more footmen sprinting low, sabers up to catch his thighs if he vaulted and his ribs if he didn't.
He didn't vault.
He vanished.
Phantom Steps is not speed; it is disappearance inside a rhythm the eye cannot hold. He let the wind pull, leaned into it a fraction late—late enough to look wrong, late enough to look clumsy—and then he was simply elsewhere, a half body length inside the nearer footman's guard. The man's eyes widened, the sabers crossed to parry a strike that didn't come. Haotian's hand touched the inside of his wrist—just two fingers, a weight softer than courtesy—and a pinprick jolt went in, under the skin, riding the river of the man's own qi.
The saber went numb. The elbow went hollow. The fighter folded around an absence his body didn't understand, and Lianhua's blade found the gap that silence and lightning had bought.
The second footman didn't slow. He did the opposite. He abandoned the saber entirely, flung it at Haotian to draw the eye and went for a grapple, hands spread to close on Haotian's throat and hip for the kind of throw that breaks both spirit and bone.
Haotian let him touch.
Fingers on collarbone, palm on belt. The man committed. Haotian committed harder. He slammed his right heel into the dirt, let earth and fire answer the stomp, and tore the ground a thumb's breadth upward in a wave that traveled under the footman's stance and stole it. The man's grip strengthened reflexively—the way a drowning man clings to something he thinks is a rock—and Haotian twisted into him, shoulder under sternum, hip turning, back rounding, the old, ruthless geometry of a throw so pure it had no name in the flashy lexicon of sect forms.
The man left the earth and found it again on the back of his head.
"Hold the nets!" the leader barked. The copper-fan wielder snapped the rods wider; the grounding chain teams drove their stakes deeper. The mesh and the earthlines began to close, knitting a rectangle around Haotian and Lianhua with the carriage at one long edge like a pinned moth.
The guard captain saw the trap, too. "Break left!" he roared, spurring his mount toward the nearest stake man. An archer tugged a second cord; a knobbed weight whipped around the horse's ankles. Horse and rider went down in a tangle of hooves and leather.
Haotian's pulse hitched. Pin the thunder. Cut the step. Bind the boy. The plan wasn't about killing. Not first. It was about taking.
A rider with a half visor that turned his face into a tin sneer leveled a short spear and lunged for Haotian's back. Lianhua's eyes went wide. "Behind!"
Haotian didn't turn. He slid.
Silent Steps kissed the ground and made no sound to warn the spear point that its target had become an angle it couldn't predict. The thrust kissed empty air. Haotian's left hand caught the shaft behind the point; his right hand folded over left, lightning kissing wood. The spear screamed—wood shouldn't scream, but there is a pitch that static finds in grain—and snapped.
He drove the iron tip back along the line it had come. It found the visor and the soft hinge the tin sneer didn't bother to cover.
The leader's head jerked toward the carriage. "The mother! Draw the boy!"
So that was the lever. They'd tested the guards. They'd tested Lianhua. Now they tugged on blood.
Two men broke away from the line, ran low behind the rock teeth that lined the road, and came up on the carriage like sharks breaching—ropes in hand, hooks tipped with barbs meant for wood and the flesh behind it. Ruolan stood inside the door frame, one hand braced on the roof beam to steady herself as the driver tried to wheel the team. She did not reach for a weapon. She did not need to. The look she sent those men was the kind of cold math that makes even the brave introduce hesitation to their legs.
They threw anyway.
Haotian moved.
Phantom Steps failed in wind once already today. He did not try to outmuscle the weather this time. He stood into it, inhaled its pull, and then—very gently—bent his lightning into its rim, not its spine. He didn't try to marry them. He let them court.
Wind is path. Lightning is traveler. When the path curves, the traveler either skids or learns a new step.
His outline blurred with the spiral instead of against it. The wind stole a fraction of the charge he threw forward and laced it through the curve, and suddenly his step traveled farther than it should, faster than it could, without warping. The world slid past in a single, slanted line. He arrived at the carriage door between the hooks and his mother's face, both hands raised.
He didn't block.
He caught.
Hooks struck his palms and sank a finger's width. The barbs bit. His hands bled. He smiled—small, feral, pleased with some private proof—and gave the chains a taste of the storm in him.
Lightning raced the links, found the men holding the other ends, and reminded them that metal is a road and roads lead somewhere.
They spasmed and let go. The hooks fell. Haotian bled on the carriage threshold and bowed, half joking, half not. "Excuse me, Mother."
Ruolan's mouth quirked. "If you're quite finished bleeding on your sleeves, you might go remove the standard that is making this worse."
"Working on it," he said, and dropped.
The leader saw him coming and did something smart. He didn't fight. He hid. Not his body—his intent. He let his killing will go slack, like a blade put into a scabbard too soft to hold its shape, and stepped behind the grounded chain grid so that when Haotian's senses swept for threat, they found ten points of false urgency and a blank at the center.
It almost worked.
Lianhua cut the nearest chain with a feint-stab that turned into a hook and pry, burying her foot against a stake and hauling until the iron screeched a protest. A grounding glow sputtered. The copper mesh's pull weakened a hair. The fan wielder hissed, snapped his rods to redouble the field, and looked just a breath the wrong way—toward the woman who'd caused the problem, not the boy he meant to catch.
Haotian took the breath and turned it into a break.
He slammed his right foot down, called earth up and fire down, and let the ground answer his weight with a surge. Stone domed under the stake nearest him—half an inch, then an inch—because ground, like people, is more reasonable when you treat it as something that can be asked. The stake leaned. The chain sang. The grid bulged.
The copper-fan's mesh snagged on the new angle. In that fraction of a second, where energy had to recalculate a route and re-knit a net, there was a gap big enough for a ghost to pass.
Haotian passed.
He broke into the line with a right-left that wasn't fists at all but two fingertips and a thumb, each strike pecking a character out of the robed man's chest: crack—crack—crack like beads on the floor. The man didn't fall. He stopped, breath held by a body that couldn't remember how to exhale. Haotian ripped the fan free, snapped it shut, and flung it aside.
The pennant bearer finally moved. He went for Haotian's throat with a knife that had the ugly geometry of tools designed to talk to bone. Haotian met the wrist, stepped through it, came around the arm, and let a thread of lightning ride his grip back into the man's elbow. Joint locked. Knife fell. Haotian stamped the blade point-down into the dirt, left it standing like a marker stone, and raised his eyes to the standard.
The cloth wasn't cloth. Up close, he could see that the "fabric" was layered paper lacquered into flexibility, each layer inked with the same hungry characters as the chains. The pole hummed with caught air. The sigils drank the world.
He could tear it. Fire would do. But he had already given the enemy too much of his read. He wanted the thing off, not destroyed. He wanted to know who had paid for a roadside geometry this good.
"Haotian!" Lianhua's voice came like a plucked string: warning, not panic. He half-turned. A rider sprinted his mount along the ravine wall and leapt it—leapt the wall—horse and man in a parabolic determination that spoke of training no roadside rabble ever received. The rider's spear came down in a perfect angled dive for Haotian's spine.
He didn't dodge.
He breathed—once—and everything he had been failing in the courtyard hours ago, everything he had half-learned by accident at the carriage door, everything the wind had tried to teach him by punishing him—clicked.
Wind makes path. Lightning takes shape.
He sent a thin rim of wind out from his back—no more than a handspan—and let lightning ride it as a skin. When the spear point met that skin, it met resistance like a blade meeting stretched rawhide: not hard enough to chip, not soft enough to pierce, wrong enough to redirect. The spear skipped, slid along the curve, and plunged into the dirt a stride to his left.
Haotian caught the haft, pivoted, and threw rider and spear together with a twist that turned the man's own momentum into betrayal. The horse screamed. The rider hit stone shoulder-first, lost the feeling in his right arm, and rolled.
The leader abandoned calm. "Bind him!"
The chain teams let go of their stakes. The two closest pulled lengths of cord from hip spools—thin, dull cords twined with the same script—and hurled them. They didn't throw for hands. They threw for legs. If Phantom Steps had no stable stance, it couldn't vanish. If Silent Steps had a bell tied to its ankle, it couldn't quiet.
Haotian tried to step, found his left calf hugged by a cord with a mind like a patient snake, and made a choice people who liked living would not have made: he sent lightning down into the thing touching him, even though the script on it promised to drink. The cord drank—and choked. The characters gorged to brightness, then blew out, heat turning dull twine to ash. He used the breath that cost him to cut the second cord with a forearm blade of ice that bloomed and broke before anyone could name it.
"Captain!" a guard shouted. "Back line!" Three more riders had crested the ridge. One carried a tube—lacquered, heavy, the kind that makes siege engineers grin and everyone else run. He lifted it to his shoulder.
Haotian didn't know the device, but he knew the stance. He knew what it meant when a man planted his feet that way and didn't flinch at the thought of recoil.
He didn't think. He moved, Phantom Steps bending around the wind's rim and throwing him too far, too fast, so that to the man with the tube it looked like a flaw, an overstep, the eager stumble of a boy who hadn't learned distance.
The man fired.
It wasn't fire. It was a net—weights at the corners, a belly of layered papers and metal thread meant to fall like fate. It unfolded midair with a sound like a hawk slapping water.
Haotian raised both hands and welcomed it.
He let it fall. He let it touch. He felt it drink. Then he did to it what he had done to the ankle cord, and more: he gave it the wrong kind of lightning, the kind that rides the surface without penetrating, that turns edges into mirrors for current. The net curled on itself, shocked by its own appetite, and clapped closed a sword's breadth from his fingertips.
He took one step back, bowed to the man on the ridge—a gesture not of mockery but of acknowledgment—and looked, finally, at the standard again.
The ravine was a clatter of small battles now: a guard pinwheeling a spear to keep a man with a hooked sword from getting close enough to make that hook meaningful; Lianhua sliding behind a chain bearer and tapping his spine with the pommel just hard enough to turn muscle off; a horse stumbling and being righted by a rider with hands that didn't panic easily. Ruolan remained at the carriage door. Twice she had said a guard's name—only a name—and each time the man had straightened, breath finding purpose again.
Meiyun was not there in flesh, but a sliver of polished jade at Haotian's belt warmed the way it did when a certain Ancestor's attention brushed it. She had given it to him wordlessly the day he left. Now the jade made a quiet note in his mind: Learn. It was not pressure. It was invitation.
He put his hands on the standard.
He didn't tear.
He wrote.
Two fingers, two strokes, a third never finishing—an almost-character that suggested a different ending without completing it. He laid the suggestion next to the hungry script on the pole. The scripts met like dogs one of which had decided, mid-snarl, to yawn instead. The pole's glow hiccuped. The pennant hissed and sagged. Wind lost its anchor. The ravine exhaled.
The leader swore—a perfect, heartfelt, untrained oath that fit no sect's rule book—and went for Ruolan.
He was fast. He was good. He moved the way survivors move: nothing wasted, nothing offered for free, everything ugly and effective. He carried no long blade now, just a short, mean punch dagger that asked small questions and demanded large answers. He came under a guard's spear without looking at it and planted a heel on the man's instep hard enough to hear cartilage give up. He put his shoulder into the gap where Lianhua could not be fast enough and where the driver was entangled with reins and panic. If he got a hand on Ruolan—
Haotian did not think about what if.
He put his right foot forward, his left foot back, and brought his fist down.
Fist of Ruin is a conversation with the ground that ends with the ground agreeing to say something loud. He drove the punch into the earth at the exact spot where the leader's next step would land. Stone cracked, not outward but upward in a thin, mean ridge. The leader's foot hit it, found a floor one finger higher than truth, and sent the rest of him into a stumble the body's pride could not correct before the body's balance made the bill come due.
Haotian didn't waste the fall. He slid across the broken tile, one knee tracking a curve, one hand finding the leader's wrist. The punch dagger kissed his palm. He let it. Blood remembered blood. He closed his fingers around the blade's handle and around the man's pulse and sent one sudden, precise pulse of storm straight into the nerve cluster that keeps a hand from lying to a man about what it's holding.
The leader's fingers opened. The blade stayed with Haotian.
Silence found a handshake with the moment. The only sound was Lianhua's breath coming in two measured strings and the far, sick hum of a net finishing its own electrocution ten strides away.
"Yield," Haotian said, quiet enough that only the leader and the dust heard him first.
The leader looked up, eyes clear, mouth bitter. "You're thirteen," he said, as if that made any part of the last minute less real. Then—too honest to stop himself—"and I don't get paid enough for this."
"Then stop," Haotian said.
Three things happened at once.
A whistle split the air—a rising, spiraled note. A rider on the far ridge shoved a flare into the sky. And a new sound rolled over the ravine: wheels, not of a carriage but of a cart heavy enough to leave grooves in the hard road.
Reinforcements. Or contingencies. The leader's mouth didn't move, but his eyes did. They looked not at Ruolan, not at Haotian, but beyond both—toward the bend in the road where dust fountained around something turning into view.
Lianhua stepped to Ruolan's side. The driver got the team under control by the transient magic of repetition and sweat. Two guards hauled their captain up, his face white around the edges but set. The men who could run did not run. They re-formed.
"Haotian," Ruolan said, low. He turned. Her gaze flicked to his hands. He realized he still held the punch dagger and put it down on the stone, not tossed, not dropped: placed.
The cart came around the bend.
It wasn't a cart. It had wheels and a bed, yes, but what rode the bed was no cargo. It was a box, iron-bound and rune-latched, and the thing inside it breathed. The slats on one side were not a door. They were a grate. And behind the grate, something watched the world with eyes the color of old ash—and hatred.
The leader's mouth twisted. "We were told to take you clean. We were given… insurance in case clean didn't happen."
"Who told you?" Haotian asked.
The man didn't answer; he didn't need to. The flare already had.
The box's latches lifted like the slow opening of a wise man's hand.
Haotian inhaled and tasted fur and iron and blood.
"Back," the guard captain said, voice a rasp. "Back, back! Form on the carriage!"
Lianhua's knuckles went white on her sword hilt for a breath, then loosened as she shook tension into readiness. Ruolan moved to the step, her hand light on the roof beam again, the calm center for a storm that had learned his name moments ago and now wanted to see if the name could hold.
The leader took one step back. A guest who knows when to leave.
"Boy," he said softly, fatigued admiration in it, "if you live through this, leave the road for a while."
"Why?" Haotian asked, quiet.
"Because someone who can afford that," he nodded at the opening box, "can afford worse."
The grate lifted.
Wind returned, not summoned by paper or shouted by sigil, but dragged by the beating of something's lungs. Haotian felt the net of his own formation work at home, miles away in Tianluan, as if the estate itself turned its head to listen through him. Lightning pricked at his fingers, eager, afraid, eager again.
He glanced at Lianhua. She nodded. He looked at Ruolan. She nodded, too.
He rolled his shoulders once, and the world rolled with him.
"Then let's find out," he said.
The thing in the box stepped into air and made it mean something it hadn't meant a moment before. The chains at its ankles sang a flat, ugly note. Its eyes were wrong in the way eyes get when men remake beasts to fit needs no beast ever agreed to. It did not roar. It looked.
Haotian's feet found the ground. Silent Steps. Phantom Steps. Lightning skinned in wind. The lesson he'd bought with pain and breath and a snared ankle wrote itself along his bones. He didn't need to merge the elements. He needed to teach them how to take turns.
The turning point of a battle is not always the biggest strike. Sometimes it is the smallest change in a heartbeat.
This was that change.
He went forward to meet the next thing the road would teach him, and behind him, the family he'd chosen and the family who had chosen him gathered themselves to make sure the lesson, whatever it was, didn't write its conclusion without their ink.