The fifty Low-Grade Star-Jades in the small leather pouch were the heaviest thing Yang Kai had ever owned.
He sat on the edge of his bed in the pre-dawn gloom, the milky, opaque stones spread out on the rough blanket. Their faint, internal light seemed to mock him, a constellation of his own inadequacy. They felt cold to the touch, like the bones of some long-dead creature.
They were a fortune. They were nothing.
He did the math in his head, his mind slow and deliberate, tracing the numbers in the dust on his floor. One Mid-Grade Star-Jade was worth one hundred Low-Grade. He needed twenty Mid-Grades for Xiong's escort, for a guaranteed path out of this gilded cage and into the Titan's Tooth mountain range.
Two thousand Low-Grades. This pathetic little pile of stones, his entire life's earnings from a night of terror and butchery, was one-fortieth of his goal.
It was an insurmountable mountain, and he was at the very bottom, equipped with nothing but his bare hands.
The thought of spending years scrounging for scraps like the lynx carcass sent a wave of cold despair through him, a chill that had nothing to do with the morning air. He couldn't wait that long. The journals he'd stolen spoke of a life that was a race against time, a constant, desperate struggle for resources before one's own potential withered on the vine. To stand still was to die slowly.
His eyes drifted to the sack hidden under his bed. It held his only other asset: the Meteoric Ironscales.
He had a path. A disgusting, pathetic, but tangible path. He would have to become a craftsman.
He needed beast tallow.
The kitchens were a place of controlled chaos in the late afternoon. Servants bustled, their faces slick with sweat as steam rose from great bubbling pots. The air was thick with the smell of roasting meat, chopped star-root, and the sharp tang of cheap vinegar. Yang Kai slipped in through a side entrance, a ghost in the noise, his borrowed servant's rags making him all but invisible.
No one paid him any mind. He was just the useless son of the Second House, a familiar wraith likely scrounging for leftovers again. Their pity was the perfect cloak.
He moved with a practiced quietness into the larder and found what he was looking for: a large clay pot filled with thick, white, congealed boar grease. It was used for everything—for frying, for greasing cart wheels, for waterproofing boots. No one would notice a small amount missing.
He scooped a double handful into a piece of oilcloth he had brought. The texture was slick and repulsive against his skin, like cold, dead flesh. He wrapped it quickly and slipped away, his heart pounding with the small, pathetic thrill of a successful theft.
That night, he returned to the Withering Springs Bathhouse. The place was his laboratory now, his secret workshop, a tomb for a forgotten past that now served as the cradle for his own desperate future.
He built a tiny, smoky fire in the center of the dusty floor, using dried leaves and splinters of rotten wood. The smoke stung his eyes and coated the back of his throat with soot.
He began the grueling work of crushing the hard, rust-colored Ironscales between two flat stones. It was a repetitive prayer of physical labor that made his shoulders ache and his palms raw. The scales were unnaturally hard, and each one had to be broken down into a coarse, gritty powder. For hours, the only sounds were the scrape and crunch of stone on metal and his own ragged breathing.
The result was a small pile of dark-grey powder that shimmered with a faint, metallic luster in the firelight.
He melted the boar grease in a cracked ceramic pot he'd found. The smell was thick and nauseatingly greasy in the enclosed space. He tipped the powder in, stirring it with a stick. The tallow hissed and spat as the cooler powder was introduced, and the smell intensified, becoming the stench of burnt meat and wet dog.
The result was a lumpy, foul-smelling grey paste. It looked like wet cement.
It was his first creation.
He was staring at his ugly handiwork, a feeling of grim satisfaction warring with a deep, soul-crushing disgust, when he heard it. A commotion from the main courtyard. The sound of many footsteps. The groan of the great wooden gates opening, a sound of finality, of judgment.
He doused his fire instantly, plunging the bathhouse into near total darkness, his heart seizing in his chest.
The Patriarch had returned.
He moved like a phantom through the darkened estate, his pots of ugly grey paste left hidden in the ruins of the bathhouse. He found a perch in the high branches of a gnarled willow tree that overlooked the main courtyard, a position of perfect, unnoticed observation. The branches scratched at his face, and the rough bark dug into his skin, but he ignored it, his focus absolute.
The returning party looked like a defeated army. The Patriarch, Yang Kun, walked at the head, his face a mask of stone, but his shoulders, usually held with the unbending pride of a clan leader, were slumped with a weariness that went bone-deep. His steps were heavy, as if the very ground sought to hold him in place.
Behind him, the disciples were silent, their usual arrogance stripped away, replaced by a grim exhaustion and the hollow-eyed look of men who had witnessed a profound humiliation.
Then he saw her.
His First Aunt, Madam Lan. She looked pale, the serene, almost clinical composure she always wore frayed at the edges like a well-used map. Her jade-green eyes, usually so calm and analytical, were filled with a frantic, anxious energy.
The moment she was through the gates, she didn't wait for her husband or the Patriarch. She broke from the group and practically ran towards the First House's wing, her hips swaying with an urgent, desperate rhythm beneath her travel-stained robes. She was a woman running towards a disaster she had failed to prevent.
The news spread through the servant's grapevine like a poison, a wave of whispers and fearful glances that rippled through the assembled clan members. Yang Kai didn't need to hear the words directly. He could read the story in the shocked faces, the hushed whispers that were quickly stifled, the sudden, fearful glances towards the eastern wall of the estate where the Tie Clan compound lay.
A marriage. A surrender.
He saw his mother, Madam Liu, emerge from the Second House. A servant had clearly just given her the news. Her beautiful face, usually a picture of calculated grace, was a storm cloud of pure, undiluted fury. She swept towards the main hall, her crimson robes a slash of angry color in the gloom, her eyes blazing with a fire that promised conflict. She walked like a woman marching to war.
From his branch, Yang Kai looked down at the grand drama unfolding. A battle for the clan's future, a marriage of humiliation, a matriarch's silent fury. He thought of the ugly, foul-smelling paste hidden in the abandoned bathhouse.
His world was so small.
They fought over the clan's soul. He fought for fifty jades. They maneuvered for power and influence within a house that was already crumbling. He was trying to build a raft.
The distance between their lives and his felt as vast and as cold as the space between the stars.
And in that moment, a profound clarity settled over him. His path was not theirs. He would not save this dying house. He would simply earn enough coin to escape its collapse.
The air in the First House's seclusion chamber was thick with the scent of expensive, wasted elixirs and the quiet despair of failure. Madam Lan knelt beside her son's bed, her serene composure a shattered porcelain mask.
Yang Wei was stable. The Tie Clan's Stillness Anvil had arrested the chaotic energy that had been tearing his newly-formed foundation apart.
He was alive. The thought was a bedrock of relief in a churning sea of fury. She had not lost him.
But the price… her mind replayed the scene in the Tie Clan's fortress. The condescending pity in Patriarch Tie Wuji's eyes as he named his price. The triumphant, reptilian smirk on his daughter's face. Tie Mei.
That viper, with her cold eyes and sharper tongue, would now be coiled in the heart of their house, her son shackled to their most bitter rival in a marriage of shame. She remembered the girl's words, spoken with a false sweetness that dripped with venom, "I shall take good care of my dear husband. I will ensure he never over-exerts himself again." It was a promise and a threat, a declaration that she would hold the leash of the First House's heir.
Her husband had accepted it with a stony, useless pride, too concerned with "face" to see the blade they had just placed at their own throats. The elders had accepted it with grim resignation, old men too tired to fight. They were fools, all of them.
While the clan tears itself apart over this public humiliation, she thought, a cold, sharp anger cutting through her grief, the Governor's real plan continues unchecked.
Her hand instinctively went to her sleeve, where the surveyor's journal was hidden. The secret felt like a shard of ice against her skin, a cold, hard point of clarity in the emotional chaos.
The boy's information… it is the only real dagger we possess. This public catastrophe would consume all the clan's attention, leaving her free to investigate the true, hidden threat. The boy, for all his pathetic weakness and infuriating secrets, had given her a weapon. A chance.
She would not let it go to waste.
In her opulent chambers, Madam Liu's hand tightened around her porcelain teacup until a hairline crack snaked across its surface, a silent testament to her rage. The news had just arrived, delivered by a trembling servant. A marriage. Her nephew—the next Patriarch—betrothed to a Tie.
The Second House's influence, her influence, her own son's faint, distant chance at relevance—all of it was to be slowly strangled by a snake they were welcoming into their own nest.
"My husband stands there and accepts this shame. The Patriarch sacrifices his own son's future to save face for a failed breakthrough. Useless. All of them," she whispered to her reflection, her voice a low, venomous hiss.
Her thoughts, black and sharp, turned to her own son.
"And where is my son in all this?" she muttered, the teacup groaning in her grip. "Hiding in his room, playing with dirt and dust. Pathetic."
But a new, more dangerous thought followed, unbidden. "At least he has nerves. At least he acts. This entire mess started because their precious genius failed, a boy coddled and praised until his own ambition broke him. My son may be a cripple, but he is not the one who has shackled this clan to its enemies."
It was a traitorous thought, disloyal to the clan, but it held a kernel of undeniable truth. Her son, her strange, broken son, was the only one in this house who seemed to be moving with his own hidden purpose, however small and pathetic it might seem.
[Cycle of the Azure Emperor, Year 3473, 6th Moon, 3rd Day]