Mo Xuan returned late to his newly assigned accommodation — not the crowded quarters given to new recruits, but a small, private lodge, quiet and set slightly apart from the main barracks. After collecting the required herbs to begin cultivating, he laid them out along the room's single table: Frostbone Stalk, pale and faintly frost-rimed even indoors; Iceheart Moss, dark and slick to the touch; Snowfiend Ginseng, gnarled into a strange shape. These plants only thrived in extreme climates — some grew in the deepest cold, others survived only in blistering heat — and all of them, according to the scripture, needed to penetrate the skin, seep into the bone, and temper the body from within.
He filled the wash basin. Dropped in the herbs and watched the water bleed a dull, arctic blue as steam curled upwards into the freezing air. For a moment, standing over that basin, he remembered the time when his cosmic soul had been defective. When the elders had looked at him with pity. When everyone had already buried his future in their minds. When he had stumbled upon that strange, old book — the one that had changed everything.
Back then, he had soaked in a medicinal bath just like this, pushing his cosmic soul to awaken through nothing but stubbornness and a refusal to accept the verdict everyone else had already passed on him. He had done it anyway, not knowing the outcome, because the alternative — staying exactly as broken as everyone insisted he was — had felt like the worst death.
Now, he was walking a similar road again.
He stripped to the waist, stepped into the basin, and began the first circulation exactly as the manual instructed.
The pain arrived without warning and without any mercy at all. It felt like his own skeleton had turned against him from the inside, a knifing, splintering agony that started somewhere along his spine and radiated outward through every joint at once, and began rearranging what it found there. His vision whited at the edges. His hands, locked around the basin's rim, went bloodless from the grip alone.
The energy from the medicinal herbs surged into him in slow waves, breaking his bones down and forcing them to regenerate stronger in the same breath. Impurities flowed out from his body, carried on streaks of blood gone dark and sluggish, staining the water a deepening, murky black-blue where it had started clean. The exchange went on for a long while — his body remoulded and strengthened with each passing hour. Time disappeared beneath waves of pain, measured only by the lantern's shadow crawling across the wall.
He was still sitting in the cooling, faintly glowing water — turbid now, thick with everything his body had shed — when the ache finally dulled enough for thought to return. He stood, unsteady. The ache remained, but beneath it his bones felt sturdier, and he crossed to the basin at the room's edge to wash the last of the murk from his skin, curious despite the exhaustion to examine his body.
The knock came before he'd gotten more than halfway there.
A runner stood at his courtyard gate, young, breath ragged from running, face already gone the particular grey.
"The dawn squad," the runner said, not quite meeting his eyes. "The one that left before light. They haven't come back."
Mo Xuan dressed quickly and pulled the door open.
He didn't ask questions. The runner's face had already told him everything worth asking — no squad returned late without cost out here, and a squad that didn't return at all meant something worse.
He followed the boy at a half-run through the yard, past soldiers already stirring out of their bunks, toward the mission hall at the stronghold's heart.
The hall was already half-full by the time he arrived — a long, low room lit by the same shadowless cold-fire lanterns as everywhere else in Northwatch, its walls lined with old campaign maps gone soft and yellow at the edges. Someone he didn't recognise stood at the front, a woman with a voice like a grinding stone, laying out what little was known.
"Dawn squad went out on the northeast trail, standard perimeter sweep. Should've been back four hours ago." She didn't dress it up. "No signal fires. No stragglers. We need five volunteers for a scout-and-recover party. Anyone who isn't fit for it, don't raise your hand out of pride."
Mo Xuan raised his hand before he'd fully decided to.
He wasn't the first. A scarred man near the front had already stepped up, along with two soldiers Mo Xuan recognised vaguely from the barracks, and a fourth who moved with the unhurried confidence.
The officer looked at Mo Xuan a beat longer than the others — weighing whether the new blood who'd only patrolled was worth the risk — before giving a short nod.
"Five," she said. "Move out."
The trail out was easy to follow at first. Boot-prints, deep and evenly spaced, tracking northeast exactly where the dawn squad should have gone. Then, perhaps two hours out, the prints began to change — scattered, overlapping, the spacing gone erratic in the particular way that showed people had stopped walking and started running.
"There," the scarred man said, crouching beside a shallow depression in the snow where the white had gone rust-colored and stiff. "Blood. Not much. Somebody got hurt here and kept moving."
They followed the trail deeper into the frozen plains, past low ridges scoured bare by wind, past the skeletal remains of trees that had been frozen still. The signs of a fight accumulated the further they went — a broken spear-haft half-buried in drift snow, a scrap of fur-lined cloak snagged on frozen brush, a wider smear of frozen blood at the base of a rock outcrop where something had clearly made its stand.
The trail led them, another half hour on, to the mouth of a cave cut into a low ridge of glazed rock, its entrance rimed with frost thick enough to look almost deliberate, like the ice itself had grown there to guard whatever lived inside.
They didn't rush in. Instead, the four veterans settled, beckoning to Mo Xuan to come over before mapping out a plan with hand signals. One soldier circled wide to check for a second exit, another marking escape routes back toward open ground, the scarred man crouched at the entrance listening for movement before anyone set foot inside.
"Three of us go in," the scarred man decided, pointing at one of the others, then at Mo Xuan. "Two hold the mouth in case it bolts past us. New blood — you're with us."
Mo Xuan nodded and followed him into the dark.
The cave narrowed quickly, frost thickening on the walls the deeper they went, until the air itself seemed to carry a faint blue luminescence that served as a source of illumination. Twenty paces in, they found the first body. Another lay farther inside. One had died quickly. The other clearly hadn't.
Mo Xuan placed the bodies in a storage bag provided by the stronghold. They found a third soldier alive, though barely, curled into a crevice too narrow for anything larger to follow, frostbitten and half-conscious but breathing.
Mo Xuan moved quickly, applying what he could from his own supplies, pressing precise points along the man's meridians to slow the bleeding beneath the frostbite before easing him into a deeper, safer unconsciousness. He made quick hand seals afterwards, weaving a thin concealing formation around the crevice.
They were still surveying inside when they felt something wrong. Before they could react, the veteran nearest the cave opening was torn in half. The beast met them in the cave's deepest chamber — a frost lynx, monstrous in scale, its frame looming like a nightmare, its claws sharp. Its fur was rimed white-blue from root to tip, ice crystals forming and reforming along its spine with every breath it drew, each exhale fogging the air. It was wounded already, gouged deep along one flank.
Later, the scarred man would describe the fight as almost disappointingly straightforward, considering how it had begun. The beast's opening ambush was its best move—and its only successful one. The lynx lunged again, faster than before. Its claws carved sparks from the cave wall where Mo Xuan's head had been a heartbeat earlier. The scarred man caught its wounded flank with a heavy slash, forcing it sideways.
"Now!"
Mo Xuan drove low, his sword punching into the shoulder joint where the beast's weight shifted. The limb buckled.
The lynx screamed.
Before it could recover, the scarred man stepped through the opening and cut deep across its throat. Blood hissed against the frozen stone.
Less than five minutes after it began, the cave fell silent.
At dawn, Mo Xuan and the others walked back through Northwatch's gates, carrying the lone survivor on a stretcher, the weight of losing one of their own hanging over every step. When the gate sentries counted the party through and saw four figures instead of five, the yard's usual noise dropped into something close to silence. There were no signs of the rest of the dawn team apart from the one survivor on the stretcher, identifiable by his uniform.
That same afternoon, they held a farewell ceremony for the departed. The fallen soldiers' names were carved into the black stone of a monument near the fortress's eastern wall, among dozens of others claimed by the frozen plains before him. Each name was a small, permanent record of someone who had once walked out those gates and never returned. Fresh snow settled silently across the newly carved name before the chisel's dust had even blown away.