The caravan left the town at dawn, wheels rolling over frozen ruts that cracked beneath their weight. Frost glittered on rooftops, turning the village into a pale mirage in the morning light. Behind them, bounty posters still clung to every post and wall, fluttering in the wind like silent banners of pursuit.
Liang Zhen walked at the head with his staff, boots crunching on the hard earth. The ember within him was quiet, but not dormant. It pulsed steady, every beat reminding him of the vision: pillars, flames, runes—something waiting to be built.
The merchants whispered less now. Some still eyed him with unease, but others offered cautious nods. A guard who had once muttered about curses now walked near him deliberately, as though sharing his shadow meant safety. Respect and fear tangled together, and neither quite won.
Dalan marched close, muttering about roads and traps. "The bounty's grown like rot," he said under his breath. "Every bend of the road smells of knives. We'll have trouble in the pass."
The caravan master rode ahead, face pinched with worry. "Knives I can count," he murmured, "but whispers I cannot. Too many ears heard too many tales in that town. By now, word of you will reach guild halls a hundred miles from here."
Zhen listened, saying little. His hand brushed the shard wrapped in cloth at his belt. It hummed faintly, as if agreeing with Dalan's grim prediction.
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The pass came by noon, a narrow cut through gray stone cliffs that rose like jagged teeth on either side. Old pine roots clawed at the rocks, and snow lingered in shadows untouched by sun. Wagon wheels groaned as they rolled over uneven stone. Every sound echoed—hoofbeats, creaks, coughs—louder than they should.
It was a place where a handful of men could block an army, where one archer could bleed a hundred merchants dry.
The guards tightened formation. Dalan's hand never left his blade.
Zhen's eyes scanned the cliffs. The ember pulsed, and his vision sharpened. He saw faint scuff marks on the rocks—places where boots had ground into stone recently. Broken twigs where someone had crouched for hours. The smell of cold iron where blades had been oiled.
He stopped walking.
"They're here," he said quietly.
The guards froze. The caravan master paled. "How many?"
Zhen tilted his head, listening to the ember's rhythm. "Enough to think silver weighs more than their lives."
And as if summoned by his words, a voice rang out from the cliffs.
"Leave the ember boy, and the rest of you pass free!"
Figures emerged from the rocks—mercenaries in patched armor, bows drawn, swords flashing in the pale light. Dozens of them, their faces masked with cloth. Their leader, tall and broad with a scar like a lightning bolt down his neck, pointed his blade at Zhen.
"Your fire ends here, boy," he snarled.
The mercenaries' cry rolled down the pass like a boulder. Arrows answered, thwacking into wood and flesh with dull sounds. The caravan's guards scrambled, shields clattering, trying to form a line beneath the jagged cliffs. Dalan drew his sword with a curse, eyes burning like coals. Men shouted; reins snapped; an ox bolted and tripped, sending a wheel crashing into a heap of goods.
Zhen moved as if stepping into a current he already knew. He planted his staff and let the ember in his chest extend a finger of warmth into the world, mapping the fall of arrows and the rhythm of feet. The passage narrowed the battlefield, but it gave him clarity; each sound was distinct, each footfall a marker on the road. He inhaled, held, and exhaled—breath a metronome that made the world fall into cadence.
A volley of arrows screamed down from the cliffs. The guards raised shields, leather groaning as dozens of shafts struck. One arrow pierced a guard's shoulder; he went down in a spray of red, but the line held, ragged and fierce. Zhen felt the ember prick in his chest like a living sensor. He spun his staff in a wide arc, the wood slicing air. The motion traced a shallow dome; where it passed, arrow shafts shivered and bent, diverted by a thin, almost invisible field of warmth and pressure. Sparks danced along the staff and leaped outward, startling the horses and the men but keeping the worst of the hail from hitting human flesh.
The attackers adapted. From a hidden ledge a marksman loosed a heavy, barbed bolt that arced with terrible intent. Zhen watched its parabolic hunger and stepped into its fall. He planted the staff into the ground, eyes closed for a breath as if listening to a song only he could hear. Then he twisted, a motion that turned the bolt's trajectory; it struck the damp earth behind the line, burying itself in mud rather than bone. The guards stared, muttering words that sounded like prayer and oath all at once.
But force met force. A mercenary leapt down, sword flashing in the dim light, landing between two wagons. He moved with practiced brutality, swinging a blade that sought necks and leather. Dalan intercepted, steel clashing as old muscle met ambition. The two fought a brutal rhythm—parry, strike, counter—that chewed at the night like teeth on bone. Dalan's blade sang; he bled but he did not fall. Beside him, a younger guard went down, felled by a thrown dagger that slipped past his shoulder. The caravan's cohesion buckled and corrected, a living organism limping but not collapsing.
Zhen found himself facing three attackers at once. They came with the greed of men who saw silver beyond the scent of blood. One lunged low for the legs; another tried to flank; a third aimed for his torso. He did not think—he listened. The ember's heartbeat synced with his breath, and his hands moved almost of their own accord. He angled the staff's tip, redirecting weight and momentum. The first attacker's thrust was diverted into a cart's spoke; the second's foot caught in a rope and he tumbled; the third's sword struck the staff and whirred free, leaving him unbalanced. Zhen's footwork was a quiet geometry—small steps, angles, leverage—turning crude momentum into useless arcs.
At one point, a slain mercenary's blade slid toward a child cowering behind a crate. Zhen's hand closed over air and the staff whipped out in a blur, catching the blade mid-slide and flinging it away. The child's sobs stuttered into gasps. Around them, men shouted and cursed and prayed. The battle was tight and ugly and immediate; it was not the grand clash of sects taught in secluded halls, but the raw, necessary violence of survival.
Dalan, blood streaking his face, found a moment to grin through the pain. "You move like a river," he panted. "Not like a storm. A river wears down stone."
The tide turned. The attackers, startled by the caravan's stubborn resistance and the odd genius of one boy with a staff, began to falter. Their formations unspooled; their ranks, dependent on surprise, buckled when surprise failed. Men who had come for coin now came up against faces set with resolve. The leader, scar slicing his neck, saw the shift and cursed, ordering a retreat as his men dragged the wounded. They slipped back up the cliffs in ragged lines, melting into cracks and shadow until the pass swallowed them like a mouth.
When silence finally fell, it was thick and humming with the aftershock. The wounded were attended; a makeshift litter carried the dead. Merchants counted losses—cloth ruined, trinkets lost—and added them to a ledger of small tragedies. The caravan master swore under his breath, but his eyes softened when he saw the guards tending their own. Respect had been paid in steel and mud.
They made camp in the pass, uneasy and watchful. Zhen sat with his staff across his knees, breathing slow. The ember's glow was faint now, a patient coal beneath ash. His hands trembled not from exhaustion but from a widening sense of what lay ahead. The battle had shown him more than the mercenaries' cruelty: it had shown him the pattern of greed, the way silver turned men into knives, and how those knives sought not just bodies but systems—routes, ledgers, markets—as much as flesh.
He took out the shard and touched it to his forehead, letting the warmth draw maps in his mind. The hall's pillars stood clearer than ever, etched with runes that hummed like distant bells. He saw workshops—smiths, apothecaries, weavers—humming around a courtyard. Each craft fed another; each coin turned into protection if honed. The vision was not just flame and pillar now; it was industry woven into cultivation. If he could not defeat every hunter alone, he could build a place where hunters met more than a boy with a stick—they met a community, a net, a forger's bell and a healer's tincture and a muster of trained hands.
Dalan watched him and nodded slowly. "You wanna build an army of smiths and bakers, eh?"
"Not an army," Zhen said. "A home. A hall. A craft that keeps embers alive."
The old guard chuckled, but the laugh had no mock in it. "Then let's see you start a spark."
At dawn they continued through the pass, each man limping a little more at ease because the road had been survived. Word would go ahead, as it always did—exaggerations, tunes, whispers. The bounty's reach would lengthen, and with it new predators would come. But Zhen felt the shape of his resolve sharpen like a blade in his hands. He would not only stand. He would build.
Dawn after the pass came with a brittle light that painted frost on wagon tongues. Men moved slowly, hands raw from hauling, faces set in lines that did not yet show relief. The caravan bore its scars like tattoos—streaked blood on leather, mended cloth, a quiet now that hummed with unspoken thanks and thin grief.
For a time the road unwound in peace. Pines thinned, the cliffs fell back, and a wide valley opened with fields ploughed into neat ranks. Farmers leaned on hoes and watched the caravan pass, their faces neutral but their eyes quick. News travels like wind; a dozen lips had already shaped the tale of the pass into a dozen songs, and with each telling the ember boy's name grew teeth. Some sang of heroics, others of omens. Zhen heard snippets—fragments of verses and childish chants—and smiled without humor. A child in the crowd pretended to wield a staff, beating the air in mimicry. Zhen bowed, and the child beamed; for a moment the road held its innocence again.
But the respite was short. At the next crossroads, a rider waited—a courier, coat whipped by wind, breath steaming. He carried a folded notice sealed with a guild mark. The caravan master took it with a hand that trembled slightly and broke the wax. His eyes skimmed, then darkened. He passed the paper to Dalan, who read in silence, jaw tightening.
"The bounty's been increased," Dalan said finally. "Now six hundred for his capture. Guilds and a provincial guild have put money. They're organizing hunters up and down the route."
A low murmur rose—then fear. Merchants who once swapped jokes now counted coin and measured exits. The caravan master rubbed his temples. "We cannot keep moving like this forever."
Zhen folded the shard into cloth and held it at his chest. The ember tapped a steady rhythm against his ribs. He felt the change deepening—not only in his visions but in the world's response. The hall in his mind acquired detail: a courtyard where apprentices learned to temper metal and knead dough, glassy vials of tinctures drying in the sun, banners with simple runes that marked stations—forge, clinic, study. He could see people moving through a rhythm that was not war but work, and the hum in his chest matched it like a metronome. If bounty followed him because of fear, then he would turn that fear into structure. Build a place where embers learned to be steady and useful.
That evening the caravan entered a small township clustered at the base of a low ridge. Smoke curled from chimneys and the market's lanterns swung in their brackets. Zhen walked through the town more to feel its bones than to shop. He watched a smith at his anvil, his hammer ringing in measured beats. He watched a healer mixing herbs with precise hands. In the tavern, a young woman sang with a voice that caught in the rafters. Each person moved with a practiced trade—an unspoken cultivation that fed life rather than fought patrons. The vision in his head hummed like a promised song.
When he paused, the smith looked up. There was a place in the man's eyes Zhen recognized—not hunger, but a pragmatic curiosity. The smith wiped his hands on his apron and ambled over. "You've been in the pass?" he asked gruffly, nodding at the healed bandages on Zhen's forearm. "Hate those folk. Cowards with coin."
Zhen smiled faintly. "They hunt with paper and silver."
The smith grunted and offered a hand. "Name's Rong. If you ever want a blade that remembers how to bend and not break, find my forge."
Rong's handshake was solid and honest. It struck Zhen like the hand of a man who built things rather than tore them down. For the first time the boy felt the stirrings of recruitment—a person who could become a pillar in his future hall. He wondered how many more like Rong lived along these lanes: craftsmen whose work could bolster a fledgling sect not through dogma but through commerce and craft.
That night Zhen sat with Dalan beneath the tavern eaves while the caravan's men laughed quietly inside. "You see it too?" Dalan asked, voice low.
"I do," Zhen said. "Not a sect, not yet. A craft and shelter. A place to temper people as the smith tempers steel. If we can make tools and teach trades—if we can give people a living that stands beside cultivation—then our strength won't be just blades and banners."
Dalan snorted softly. "Sounds like you want to start a city."
"A hall," Zhen corrected. "A hall becomes a city if it endures."
The old guard looked at him long, and in his eyes there was a light that had seen many things: fear, hope, a stubborn love for the road. "You'll need coin," Dalan said. "And protections. And men who will not sell you for silver."
"And craftsmen," Zhen replied. "And healers. And ways to turn coin into shelter. I'll need people who can make more than weapons—people who can make lives."
They sat in silence long enough for the stars to wheel. In the distance a dog barked and then fell silent. The world felt both too big and small at once: predator and possibility. Zhen folded the shard against his chest and whispered, "Build the first stone."
As the caravan slept, small threads of the plan began to take shape in his mind—who to approach, what trades to need first, where a hall could be hidden yet open to those who sought it. He would not rush. Rushing invites mistakes. He would call people when ready, not when hunted; he would temper the hall like blade and forge. For now, the road demanded vigilance. For later, it would demand patience and craft.
At dawn they would move again. But somewhere in Zhen's mind, a place had been set aside for the first pillar.
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