When the sun came up like a cracked yolk over the Basin, Rat was already ankle-deep in cold mud, poking a stick into reeds to fish out other people's trash.
The city's edge was a quilt of everything the Era of Mortals couldn't quite digest. Beyond the last huts and half-walls, the land slouched into damp ground where the Jade River frayed into smaller veins. Reeds hissed. Frogs croaked in a language that probably translated to "you are not welcome." The air smelled like old fish, wet iron, and the kind of silence that waited for mistakes.
Rat made plenty of those.
He jabbed, hooked a strip of bent tin, and dragged it to the bank. Scrap iron and tins meant knives or nails for the smiths, meant a few coppers if the smith was honest, which he never was. Still, copper was copper. A certain copper coin in Rat's pouch pressed its circle into his thigh like a small sun.
The girl's coin.
He should have sold it already and eaten until memory blurred. Instead he kept it like a charm. Stupid. Or destiny. Hard to tell those apart in the Basin.
From here, he could see the Basin's sprawl reorient itself with distance. To the south, the Golden Plains rolled away in shimmering waves of oat and barley, broken by pillar-stones and dry creek cuts where the Rooted Stone Sect practiced endurance that could outlast seasons. To the north, the Cloud-Piercing Mountains stabbed the sky, their far ridgelines the study of endlessness itself; the Open Sky Sect carved terraces there, learning how to ride wind and horizon. Off to the west, where the soil blackened and the ground remembered funerals, lantern stubs poked up like rotten teeth; the Dark Lantern Sect's Grave Lantern Fields brewed Yin Qi nobody sane wanted to breathe.
The Basin looked like choices pretending to be geography.
Rat bent to pry another shard of tin from the sucking mud. The woven book hovered at the edge of his vision, faint as a reflection. It had been quiet since the coin, its threads slumbering. He preferred it that way. Fewer choices meant fewer ways to die.
The mud farted as the shard came loose. Rat grinned despite himself. "Two nails and a half," he announced to nobody. "Smithy will cheat me out of the half."
A dragonfly skimmed past, casting a needle-thin shadow. The reeds swayed, patient. The river's smaller vein muttered as if it had a bad opinion about him.
The Codex shivered.
Threads sketched themselves midair, a page pulling free of the invisible loom. The hair lifted on Rat's arms.
[Fate entangles. Choose.]
[Path One: Run toward town. Scream. Die.]
[Path Two: Freeze. Lower your eyes. Bleed. Live.]
Rat's mouth went dry. The stick slid from his hand and landed with a soft gulp.
He didn't ask "what now." He knew. The reeds quieted the way a room quiets when a stranger walks in. The dragonfly zipped away, suicidal honesty gone from the air. There was a new weight to the silence, heavy as teeth.
Rat turned his head very, very slowly.
The beast was there where the reeds opened to a small pool. It stood with its forepaws sunk in the muck, water bending around its ankles. Smaller than the dog-shaped monster from the alley, but longer through the ribs, hip bones like shovel blades pressing at its hide. Its fur was a wet black-brown that made it difficult to see where shadow ended. Most wrong were its eyes: a young thing's brightness sunk into something older than the Basin's walls. Its jaws unfurled with a whisper, showing a crescent of thorn-white teeth.
Juvenile. He knew it without knowing how. Not full-grown. Lord-tier, the word bubbled up, snagged from some overheard argument between traders and a hunter. Lord-tier meant a Beast that could end Foundation disciples if they were stupid, or mortals if they were breathing.
Rat was definitely breathing.
He did not run. The Codex's page didn't lie, and his legs chose survival over dignity. He fixed his eyes on the mud by his feet. His heart hammered in his ears like a scampering thing that knew its own name.
The Beast's nostrils flared. It snuffed the air toward him. Its weight sloshed the pool. Rat could hear the slide of water up its legs and the wet kiss of skin leaving mud.
Inhale, he ordered himself. The beggar's breath, not the rat's. Horizon in, horizon out. Slow.
He inhaled. Pain flared along his ribs but it did not take his breath prisoner. He exhaled, and for the first time since waking he felt the faint coal in his belly glow warm, a thumb's-width ember.
The Beast came on, step by slow step, curious death. Rat felt the pull of its attention like a hook in his chest. Fate threads tightened, singing tight little notes in his skull. He kept his eyes low, posture small, body language saying what everyone in the Basin said to power: not today, please.
The Beast decided. It moved.
Fast.
Rat slipped.
His heel found nothing and then everything. His foot shot forward, his balance ran away without leaving forwarding details, and he went with a strangled noise backward into the reeds. The green knives slapped his face. He tasted river mud. He also tasted fear, which was sour and familiar.
His hands scrabbled for anything. One found the reed-root, slick and stubborn. The other found a different stubbornness. Fur. Warm. Alive.
The Beast lunged to clamp his shoulder and misjudged the slip. Rat's fingers sank into fur at the edge of its jaw. His body reacted on a logic older than the Era of Mortals and definitely older than sect etiquette.
He bit.
Rat's teeth closed on a mouthful of wet fur and skin, just above the Beast's lip. His jaw clamped like a rusty trap and refused basic negotiation. The taste was salt and copper and the dirt of the riverbank. The Beast jerked in shock. Rat held on because he had no idea what else to do besides die.
Somewhere between his clenched jaw and his panicked brain, a thread snapped and retied itself wrong-way around. The Codex's invisible loom twanged like a plucked gut string.
The Beast made a noise not in any of Rat's languages. Not pain. Not anger. More like offense, as if reality had stepped on its tail. It yanked away with such force that Rat's jaw tore free and he flopped backward into the mud, spit-red and water. The Beast skittered three steps, almost fell, and then gathered itself with angry dignity, ears flat, eyes wide with something that looked suspiciously like fear.
They stared at one another, mud-slick and ridiculous.
"This is a terrible idea," Rat informed the universe through a mouthful of blood and fur.
The Beast seemed to agree. It took one more snuffing breath, nose wrinkling as if struggling to accept the new fact that prey sometimes bites back, and then it turned with a teenager's offended stiffness. The reeds folded around it, parting like nervous servants. In two heartbeats it was nothing but noise, and in two more it was nothing at all.
Rat lay in the mud with the river chill climbing his spine. Then he started laughing.
It came out hysterical and wet and too loud. He tried to stop. He failed. It kept spilling, because how else do you respond to the Basin deciding the proper answer to a Lord-tier juvenile was "bite its face."
He laughed until his ribs protested and then he laughed more softly, until it turned into shivers. He rolled to his side and spit hair and red out of his mouth, then hung over the bank and rinsed with river water that probably contained a lawsuit's worth of invisible biological insults.
When he could breathe without wanting to lie down for the rest of his life, he crouched and let the beggar's tide fill him. Slow. Slow. The ember in his belly answered, surprised but present. Each careful exhale tasted less of panic.
The Codex spun down like a snowflake of light and settled before his eyes.
[Thread inversion registered.]
[Event: Prey Bites Predator]
[Outcome: Hunter retreats]
Rat wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand. "Put that on a wall somewhere," he muttered. "I am going to be the dumbest cultivator in history."
His legs remembered they were legs again. He stood, swaying, and scanned the reeds. Nothing. Still, he set his feet toward town. Stupid people retraced their steps and asked to be eaten on the second try. He was stupid in very specific ways and tried to keep it at that.
The path back to the market skimmed the river's knuckled bank and cut through brush where old prayer flags decayed on branches. Rat kept the horizon in his breath and the coin's circle against his thigh. He wondered if the girl disciple would believe him. He wondered if he believed him.
The Basin felt different, as if the whole place had exhaled. Maybe it was only him. The world had not grown kinder; it had merely become possible in a new and uglier way.
He reached the first huts and their cooking smoke without dying, which he filed under personal bests. Children chased a dog through puddles, shrieking. Women argued price over fish heads with the same artistry poets used on metaphors. A man with a patched hat hawked river clay charms that did nothing but soothe the fear of those who bought them.
Rat passed the fountain where the beggar had breathed tide. The old man was not there. Only a stone in the bowl's place, smooth as if someone had thumbed it for years. Rat touched it and felt nothing but old warmth, like a hand withdrawn moments ago.
The woven book rippled again.
[Codex of Strands of Fate – Status Update]
Vitality: 2
Qi Sense: 2
Comprehension: 2
Fate Entanglement: 6
Realm: Mortal Dust
The numbers settled like dice at the end of a throw. Rat let out a breath he had not realized he was holding, then snorted at himself because that phrase was exactly what he had been doing for two chapters now.
"Fine. I admit it," he told the Codex, the fountain, the absent beggar, the laughing Basin. "Breath matters."
The threads of the Codex loosened and rewove into a different kind of page. The letters this time were thicker, the way words are when they have teeth and history.
[Appendix Unlocked: Beasts of the Basin]
All Beasts are born from Qi and hunger. Their ranks mirror the ladders mortals climb, though Beasts do not ask permission of heavens or sects.
Common:
Creatures touched by Qi but ruled by flesh. They stalk fields and alleys. A mortal with courage and luck may slay one. Many mortals die learning they lacked either.
Lord:
Blood wakes, spirit hardens. A Lord shapes terrain with presence, bends lesser beasts with a glance. Comparable to Foundation Establishment cultivators. Wise mortals flee. Wise Foundation disciples bring friends.
Highborn:
Essence condenses, will grows cruel and clear. Territory becomes extension of the body. Comparable to Golden Core cultivators. Highborn teach mortals the shape of insignificance.
Titan:
Names carved into storms. Steps rewrite paths. Titans exceed the Basin's ceiling; even Nascent Soul cultivators whisper and plan around them. When a Titan turns its head, sects hold their breath.
Note: The Basin's human ladder ends at Nascent Soul. Beasts do not respect human ceilings.
Rat read it twice, then a third time, then touched his jaw and winced. His teeth had left their opinion on a Lord-tier juvenile. The juvenile had left its opinion on his future.
"Great," he said softly, and could not help the grin that crept out anyway. "I bit the Basin back."
He palmed the copper coin. It flashed in the late sun, a tiny horizon circle. Trials. The word rolled in his mind like a dangerous marble.
Somewhere out in the reeds, a young Lord told a story to itself about a bite. Somewhere beyond the roofs, clouds gathered on the mountain's knife-edges and thinned again, as if the sky were practicing how to be wide.
Rat tucked the coin away, set his feet toward the market's racket, and kept his breath steady until the horizon inside him matched the one above the roofs.