The first rule Master Yan gave him was this:
"The sword does not forgive posture."
The second was more blunt:
"Complain once, and I'll bury you where I found you."
Wuye learned both rules the hard way.
The first lesson began with snow.
Not metaphoric snow. Real snow — waist-deep, powder-heavy, and cold enough to make your bones chatter. The northern wind lashed through the mountain hollow like a whip, and Master Yan, ever the sadist in disguise, had made Wuye strip down to bare chest and linen trousers.
"Draw the sword," the old man said.
Wuye's fingers, already blue, curled around the practice blade — a wooden branch barely carved into shape. "What sword?"
"The one in your mind," Yan snapped. "The real one would kill you."
He did as told and promptly fell.
Not once.
Twenty-three times.
By the fifth fall, his knee split open. By the tenth, his hip struck frozen rock. By the twentieth, his vision had begun to tunnel, and black spots crawled across his sight like ants devouring his thoughts.
Yan offered no sympathy.
"You stand like a peasant begging for millet. Again."
"I am a peasant," Wuye growled. "Just upgraded from corpse."
Yan rapped him on the head with the butt of his walking stick. "You're a prince. Act like it or better yet — a blade. A blade does not wobble."
Wuye spat blood into the snow. "A blade also doesn't have kneecaps."
"Then cut off your knees and meditate. I'll wait."
There was no warmth in the lesson.
Only discipline, pain and repetition. But in that agony, something slowly stirred in him. Not power or revelation.
Just defiance.
If this was how Master Yan had once shaped disciples, no wonder his sect had collapsed. By nightfall, Wuye collapsed in the cave mouth, his breath steaming from split lips. His fingers wouldn't uncurl from the sword-branch. His thighs trembled. His back screamed.
Yan passed him a cup of boiled snow-water mixed with dried fungus. It tasted like moss and regret.
"Again tomorrow," the old man said. "Unless you die. Then I'll train the next idiot who falls out of the sky."
Wuye didn't answer.
He couldn't but he remembered the movement — the first form. Void Severance, Stance One: Still Blade in Chaos Wind. Not poetic. Just cruel and beautiful.
The days blurred after that.
Training in the morning.
Falling in the afternoon.
Vomiting blood before sunset.
By the fourth day, Wuye's balance began to change. He stopped relying. Began using momentum. His feet found steadier lines in the ice. His arms, though too thin to lift a real sword, moved with instinct rather than raw force.
"Good," Yan muttered once. "Now forget everything. That was wrong."
Wuye nearly stabbed him with the branch.
On the sixth night, he asked a question he'd been swallowing for days.
"Why are you teaching me?"
Yan didn't look up from the fire. He was carving a small wooden figure — a fox, maybe. Its ears were chipped.
"You're dying," Wuye said.
Yan's hands paused. "And?"
"And I'm not worth your time."
The silence stretched. Then — quietly, but without warmth — Yan said, "That's true."
Wuye blinked. "Then why—?"
"Because I was waiting for someone more broken than I am. Someone who'd treat this cave like a grave, and still want to learn how to kill."
Wuye stared into the fire. "You think I want to kill?"
"No," Yan said. "I think you need to."
That silenced them both.
The next morning, Wuye woke with blood in his mouth and a new lesson burning in his skull. The mind cultivates before the blade.
It wasn't a phrase. It was an experience.
A hallucination, maybe or a vision or just the memory of Earth bleeding through the cracks. He'd seen himself — older, dying again, this time with a sword in his hand and no empire to blame.
And he'd whispered, "Don't waste the second chance."
He sat up and found Yan already waiting outside, sword drawn.
A real one.
"Today," the old man said, "you stop being a corpse."
Wuye didn't understand then Yan struck.
A blur. A whisper of metal. A lash of force that didn't come from muscle — but from intent.
Wuye barely dodged.
His chest split open in a shallow gash.
"Lesson begins," Yan said and it did.
They sparred until Wuye couldn't feel his legs.
The blade never touched him again but the intent did.
Yan's strikes were more like questions than attacks. Each one asked: Can you see me? Can you feel the moment before I move? Can you sever the thought, not the body?
By the end of the session, Wuye was bleeding from four places, dizzy from exertion, and trembling with something dangerously close to awe.
Yan dropped the sword beside him. "Void Severance is not a form. It's a refusal."
"Of what?" Wuye gasped.
"Fate, lineage and the script written for you."
Wuye swallowed.
"I want that," he said.
Yan nodded once and raised his sword. "Then survive long enough to steal it."
That night, Wuye sat alone in the mouth of the cave, the old sword beside him.
Snow fell again.
Soft and silent but for the first time, it didn't feel like a burial shroud. It felt like silence waiting to be broken.
He drew the branch. Took the first stance and whispered, "Still Blade in Chaos Wind."
The snow didn't answer but the wind shifted. Just a breath — enough to bend the smoke from the cave's fire sideways. Enough to catch the edge of the branch in his grip and make it shiver.
Wuye held his ground.
The cold clawed at him. His knees trembled. His breath rasped from half-mended lungs but the stance held. Barefoot in the snow, spine straight, arms extended — he became stillness not from serenity, but from sheer refusal.
He stood there for what felt like hours or maybe minutes. Time stretched strangely in that place, between the mountains and death.
His thoughts wandered.
To his mother's hands, once worn from washing dishes. To his own, now scarred and calloused. To a hospital bed where machines had beeped at his every heartbeat, as if waiting for silence. He'd come from a world where people died slowly and quietly, apologizing for every breath they took.
Not this time.
This time, he would live like a blade — quiet, sharp, and never sorry. Behind him, he heard the scrape of slippers on stone. Yan was watching.
The old man didn't speak.
Didn't need to.
Wuye held the stance a moment longer, then let the sword lower. Not collapse — lower, deliberately. His arms shook and back screamed but he turned and met Yan's gaze with something close to calm.
Yan nodded once.
Then, with his usual subtle cruelty, he said: "That took you long enough."
Wuye smiled, teeth bloodied. "Wanted to make sure the snow was afraid first."
A faint smirk tugged at the old master's lips. He walked back inside.
Wuye lingered a moment.
Looked out at the mountain ravine. The burial ditch that had spat him out was somewhere beyond those trees — a scar on the land. A place where his life had started over in blood and silence.
He didn't thank it but he remembered it. Then he stepped into the cave, dragging the branch-sword behind him, and let the darkness close around his shoulders like a cloak.
Tomorrow, he'd bleed again. But tonight, he'd survived the first form.
And that, in this world, meant everything.