Dusthaven's north gate yawned in the gray, and the mountain answered with a breath cold enough to bite. The bell tolled once, iron and final. People gathered like spilled grain, each kernel hoping not to be ground.
Rat tightened his sash and slid into the flow. He was still bruised from the market lesson, scalp tender where hair had been torn away, but the small sun behind his navel held steady. The stray dog shadowed him up to the gate until a guard shooed it with a boot. The animal danced out of reach and watched from behind a cart wheel, ears forward, as if taking attendance.
"Wait for the leftovers," Rat told it. "Or my corpse."
A man in a patched robe laughed once and then went silent. No one wanted to spend jokes before the mountain took its fee.
The disciples of the Open Sky Sect waited under the gate arch. The boy stood like a blue nail that refused to bend. The girl's gaze moved over the crowd, precise and quiet. When her eyes brushed Rat, the Codex hummed faintly behind his ribs, like a plucked string.
"Trail opens," a gray-bearded steward announced. He carried a wooden board with names scratched into it and a bell that did not look big enough to be this heavy in the air. "You will follow the markers. You will not touch a disciple. You will not speak unless spoken to. You will not fall. If you fall, you will not be spoken of."
"Efficient," Rat murmured.
"Waste less time, lose fewer lives," the steward said without looking at him, as if his ears had grown eyes.
They set off.
The path left Dusthaven like a scar. It wound into foothills scabbed with scrub pine and ribboned with frost even though the sun had not earned it. The air thinned in steps, not steadily. At certain turns it felt as though a giant hand had scooped a cupful from the world and forgotten to pour it back. Rat breathed with the horizon. Inhale, pour, rest. Exhale, return, settle. The warmth in his belly moved like a patient wheel.
Two hundred people started the climb. By the first ridge, three sat on rocks with their heads between their knees. One of them, a girl with too-long sleeves, tried to stand and slid back down the gravel to Dusthaven with tears on her face and dust on her chin. No one jeered. The mountain hated loud mouths.
The trail cut across a slope where the pines had been burned long ago. Their black bones stuck from the earth at angles that made the eye ache. Far below, the Jade tributary looked like a dull wire laid across the land. Far above, stone towers shouldered the clouds.
Wind prowled the switchbacks. It tasted of minerals and cold sap and something like old iron. Banners hung from broken posts along the trail, each one a faded blue with the character for sky still visible if you squinted. Rat ran a hand over one post in passing and felt a tingle come off the wood. Not magic. Memory, baked deep and forgotten.
The Codex stirred like a moth caught under glass.
[Ambient Qi density increasing.]
[Secondary effect: air-thinness. Risk: mortal collapse.]
Rat grinned through teeth that wanted to chatter. "I see you. I breathe anyway."
Behind him someone cursed. A man with a farmer's hands and the shoulders of a mule had stopped to grip his chest. A friend tried to haul him onward by the elbow. The man waved him off, face gray. "Go," he said. "Tell my wife I nearly touched the sky, then the sky touched me back."
They went around him because the trail made choices simple. Rat did not look back. The small sun in his belly turned and steadied. Every dozen steps he tasted the air and felt something new in it. A slight sweetness. The breath did not come easy. It came honest.
A broken watchpost sat on the shoulder of a ridge, four old stones and a collapsed roof that had once threatened rain. A disciple in pale blue stood there with a staff across his knees, eyes half-lidded, paying more attention to the wind than to the mortals puffing past. He could have been thirty. He could have been three hundred. As Rat climbed by, the man's nose twitched, as if he had just caught a scent he could not place.
The boy disciple and the girl passed along the line in opposite directions. The boy moved like a rule in a pretty robe. The girl walked closer to the cliff edge, watching the drop as if the mountain were whispering and she did not want to miss a word. When she crossed Rat, she did not pause. She looked like someone reading a signature that had changed since last time.
On the third switchback a wooden ladder bridged a gully carved by spring flood. Halfway across, a large candidate in a nice robe panicked and froze. The ladder sang under him. He tried to crawl. The boards creaked. He tried to stand. The ladder bucked. He shut his eyes and muttered a prayer that belonged to the old dynasties.
Rat put his hand on the ladder at the near end and felt it jump under the man's fear. He crouched and spoke like a bored brother.
"Breathe," Rat said. "There is air. Pretend to drink it slow. Use your hands like feet. If you imagine the river under this thing, I swear I will push you."
The man's mouth twitched. He stared at Rat as if resenting the tone and loving the instruction. He moved. The ladder settled. He made it across and plopped onto stone like a sack of something that had not quite exploded.
"Try not to die before the mountain tries to kill you," Rat said as he crossed.
"You are not a disciple," the man said, breathing hard.
Rat flashed the copper coin at his sash. "Worse. I am a future disappointment."
The man laughed once despite himself. It sounded like fear trying on bravery and discovering the fit was not bad.
They climbed into mist. It soaked hair and rags and hope. It smelled of crushed needles and a faint sweetness, like a thawed-out winter fruit. Rat's breath met resistance and remembered its lesson. He pressed it against the wall and waited. Paths opened. The small sun turned.
They passed a shrine carved into the rock, no bigger than a cupboard, with little offerings lined up: beans, half a pear, a copper nail. Someone had laid a strip of blue cloth across it. The cloth had been mended three times. The character for sky had been stitched by a hand that did not know how to stitch and did it anyway. Rat touched the edge and felt the weight of all the hands that had done the same, asking for favor or forgiveness or both.
At a narrow bend, the wind came down like a scold. It pushed at backs and cheeks and tried to slide the unwary into the pines. Two boys in front of Rat linked arms and leaned into it like drunks refusing to admit this was a hill. One lost his footing and would have gone if the other had not been stupid enough to keep holding on. Their combined stupidity saved them both. The trail did not mind. It had seen worse bargains.
By midday the crowd had thinned to a river of maybe one hundred and twenty. Faces had lost swagger and kept only teeth. Dusthaven lay behind a haze. The Verdant Canopy spread south like a sea that had forgotten how to be water. The mountain no longer looked like a picture. It looked like a person who did not care what you thought of them.
Rat spoke to it under his breath. "You win if I stop. I win if I keep breathing. That is a fair game."
The mountain did not answer. The Codex did, very softly.
[Horizon Breath efficiency increased under altitude load.]
[Candidate adaptation observed.]
"You flatter me," Rat said. "Buy me lunch first."
A final rise cut the sky at a clean angle. The wind sharpened. The stone underfoot lost its stray pebbles and became something polished by attention. The crowd funneled through an arch that had once been carved with names. Most had weathered into soft ghosts. The ones that remained looked like old teeth.
Beyond the arch lay the first platform.
Breath Ledge shoved out from the mountain like a tongue. Below it, a space so wide the eye could not measure lived in white and blue. Clouds grazed the cliff. Wind hurled itself across the stone with a sound like torn silk scaled up to a god.
A line formed because lines keep fear from running. A steward pointed with two fingers. One at a time.
The first boy stepped onto the ledge. He lasted three breaths. The wind noticed him and asked a question he did not have an answer for. He slid. He fell. His scream whipped into nothing. The line flinched in a wave and then pretended not to.
A girl went next, palms together. She breathed in little bites. The wind took the bites away and left her empty. She clawed stone. Stone did not grow hands to return the favor. She vanished into the white.
Rat wiped his mouth with the back of his hand because his body wanted to do something, and that was better than screaming at the air. The boy disciple's voice reached him with the precision of a well-thrown pebble.
"Watch closely, Fate Rat," he said. "Heaven enjoys vermin scurrying before it crushes them."
"If heaven wants a clean floor," Rat called, "it should hire a better broom."
Several candidates made the wrong kind of sound. The boy's smile thinned into a blade. The girl watched Rat from the corner of her eye as if measuring him for a box he might not fit.
"Next," the steward said.
Rat stepped out.
The wind ripped the breath from his mouth and tried to wear his body like a coat. He crouched without shame and slid his inhale down the path he had carved all morning. Horizon in, pour, rest. Horizon out, return, settle.
The gale punched. It pushed fingers down his throat and demanded panic. He took the panic by its collar and set it down beside him like a child in need of a lecture. Air moved. Pain flared. He steadied. It hurt. He steadied anyway.
Silver letters skated across the air in front of his eyes, too quick and too calm.
[Fate entangles. Choose.]
[Path One: Stand firm. Endure. Breath bleeds slower, pain cuts deeper.]
[Path Two: Lean into the gale. Trust gutter lungs to learn filth as lesson. Risk collapse. Risk survival.]
Rat barked a laugh that the wind stole and threw over the edge. "Lean in," he said. "The Basin has been teaching me poison since I could count."
He tilted his weight forward. The gale rammed his chest. He let it. He dragged the air in with it, letting it sand his lungs from the inside. Onion Skin Endurance uncurled like an insult learning to be useful. Horizon Breath kept the rhythm.
He coughed blood that went away in a fine spray. He breathed again. The next pain sat slightly different. He breathed again. The next pain sat where he had room for it.
Something ugly and familiar awoke in his ribs. It was not the river sun. It was the grit from a thousand alley fires and the mold in a hundred damp corners and the acrid smoke of oil burned too often in the same pan. It rose with the air and did not excuse itself. It learned.
The Codex's letters tightened.
[Skill Registered: Gutter Lung Endurance.]
[Lungs trained by rot and smoke adapt under hostile air. Each poisoned breath becomes another brick of survival. Effect minor now. Increases under strain.]
"You finally pay interest," Rat whispered.
A candidate on his left screamed and slid. Another on his right dug fingers into a crack and held as if he could argue with physics. Rat did not look. He kept the line from nose to belly unbroken. He coughed again. The wind tried new tricks. He answered with the old one: stay.
Three breaths. Five. Ten. Time lost the shapes it wear to work. He was breath and pain and refusal and a line of force that did not love or hate him. It simply showed him where to stand.
The gale thinned the way a bully thins when it has spent too much trying to find your flinch. Rat's knees gave for a beat and then remembered they had a job. He stepped back onto rougher stone, still crouched, laughing under the coughs because this was the first true thing he had done since biting a Beast and surviving the joke.
"Fate Rat endures," someone whispered, and the whisper went further than it had a right to.
The boy disciple's face did something small and unpleasant. The girl's mouth almost smiled. It did not.
Rat wiped his mouth and left a smear of red on his wrist. "First ledge done. Anyone got a broom for heaven's floor?"
The steward banged the bell once. The sound hopped off the cliffs and came back nine times smaller and sharper. Above them, a ragged line of stones crossed a broken gully, each step the width of a foot and not always where a foot would want to go. The wind made the stones look like teeth in a mouth that had been punched already and wanted to bite someone responsible.
"Sky Steps," the steward said. "If the knees remember fear, the sky remembers gravity."
The boy disciple walked past Rat close enough for incense and arrogance. "Your lungs surprised me," he said without warmth. "Your feet will not."
"Those belong to fate," Rat said, because he wanted the Codex to hear him and deliver a cheap miracle later.
The girl disciple had not stopped watching. "Breathe between the stones," she said in a tone that could have been advice or a test. "Or do not. The sky is patient."
Rat nodded like a student who had already failed and decided to make that failure a performance piece. He looked back over the ledge. The world was cloud and light and the thin thread of the Jade far below. Dusthaven was a rumor. The old temple was a thought.
He looked up at the steps.
"Fine," he told the wind. "You were expensive. Let us see what your stairs cost."
The Codex drifted down once more, formal and satisfied.
[Codex of Strands of Fate – Status Update]
Vitality: 4
Qi Sense: 3
Comprehension: 3
Fate Entanglement: 10
Realm: Foundation Establishment
New Skill: Gutter Lung Endurance (Minor)
Lungs hardened by filth adapt under hostile air. Grants resistance to wind, smoke, and poison. Improves with strain.
System Note: Altitude field detected. Candidate adaptation favorable.