Time, in the Frostbloom Garden, was measured not in seasons, but in the slow, stubborn battle against the cold. A year passed. The blizzard of Lin Xuan's first days had settled into a perpetual, fragile frost.
To the outside eye—to the maids who changed his silken blankets, to the distant elders who received quarterly reports—Lin Xuan was a medical anomaly. A miracle of lingering. The infant who should have withered before his first spring was still breathing. His silver-flecked eyes, once clouded with the haze of weakness, now held a disconcerting clarity. He was quiet, preternaturally so, his cries rare and brief. He observed the world with the focused, unnerving stillness of a deep pool.
But the miracle was a facade over a grinding, invisible war.
The Celestial Yin Physique was a boundless, frozen sea within him. It leeched warmth, strength, the very spark of growth. At one year old, he could not sit up unassisted. His limbs were slender, pale as moonlight, lacking the plump vigor of other clan children. He was weaker than a babe half his age, a fact noted with pitying sighs and whispered derision. He was the Lin Clan's fragile, living paradox.
Inside this failing vessel, however, the soul of an assassin was meticulously plotting his own salvation.
The memory had surfaced not in a flash, but in the slow, quiet hours of the eternal northern twilight. Lying in his cradle, watching the frost crystals bloom on the windowpane, a fragment of a past life had dislodged from the depths of his consciousness: a mission in the fiery foothills of the Southern Crimson Mountains. A target, a rogue alchemist obsessed with cosmic dualities. A looted, unrecorded jade slip, its contents hastily scanned and memorized before being secreted away, never reported to the Baiye Tower, and certainly never given to Zhang Li.
The Celestial Yang Ascent Technique.
It was not a combat art. It was a foundational cultivation method, obscure and profoundly delicate, designed not to create Yang energy, but to awaken and nurture the slumbering spark of primordial Yang present in all living things. It was the complementary opposite, the sun to the moon, the furnace to the frost.
Hope, sharp and desperate, had flared in Lin Xuan's mind. But followed immediately by crushing limitation. He was an infant. His meridians were hair-fine, unformed. His dantian was a nebulous cloud. He could not assume postures, cycle qi in complex patterns, or meditate for hours.
So, he adapted. The Sharpest Shadow had always been a master of using what was available.
His cultivation began with breath. The weak, shallow breaths of a frail body. He focused on the sensation of air entering—not just as sustenance, but as a vehicle. With each inhalation, he imagined not the cold Yin of his surroundings, but a single, impossibly faint particle of warmth, drawn from the very core of the world. He visualized it as a golden mote, a dust-speck of sun. He guided it, not through defined meridians he didn't yet have, but on the idea of a central pathway, down to the space below his navel.
The process was agonizingly slow. For months, he felt nothing but the relentless, draining cold. Doubt gnawed at him. Was this a fool's hope? A dying man's delusion?
Then, one day during his mother's morning vigil, as she fed him a broth infused with precious, Yang-aligned spirit herbs (a vast expenditure of her personal resources), he felt it. A flicker. Not heat, but an absence of cold. A minute point of neutrality in the endless glacial sea of his being. It was the first ember.
Tears had sprung to Lin Feng's eyes that day, though she misunderstood their cause. "You seem brighter today, my little frostbloom," she'd whispered, kissing his cool forehead.
From that day, the ember grew. Lin Xuan worked in the spaces between sleep and waking, in the moments of quiet while being held. He used the potent, expensive herbs his mother procured not just as medicine, but as fuel for his silent, internal furnace. The Celestial Yang Ascent Technique was a whisper of a flame, and he fed it with meticulous care.
He did not try to fight the Yin. That was the instinct, the mistake his clan's elders would have made—to oppose, to suppress. The technique, in its profound wisdom, spoke of harmony. The Yang was not a weapon to smash the ice, but a hearth to sit beside it. Gradually, imperceptibly, he began the delicate work of mingling them.
At the deepest core of his awareness, where the vast Yin churned, he introduced the nascent Yang. He didn't force a blend. He let them orbit one another, a dance of opposites. The Yin, sensing its natural counterpart, seemed to still its ravaging hunger slightly. The draining leak slowed from a torrent to a trickle.
This was why he lived. This was the "vibrancy" others saw—not health, but a cessation of active dying. His spirit, no longer being dragged into the abyss, shone more clearly in his eyes. His body, while still devastatingly weak, stabilized.
The clan took note. The one-year assessment was a formal affair.
He was brought before a council of elders, wrapped in furs against the chill of the main hall. Patriarch Lin Zongyan observed him from his high seat, his gaze inscrutable.
The scholarly elder, Lin Bo, performed the diagnostic. The jade tablet glowed, its light still a brilliant, cold silver, but now… there were threads within it. Faint, almost invisible filaments of gold, weaving through the lunar radiance like dawn breaking through a frosty haze.
"Astounding," Lin Bo murmured, his academic curiosity piqued. "The Yin physique remains dominant, pure and potent. Yet… the rate of deterioration has slowed by nearly seventy percent. His life force, while still feeble, is coherent. It is as if his constitution has… found an uneasy peace."
Elder Lin Mei sniffed. "A temporary reprieve. The body's stubborn will to live. It changes nothing. Look at him." She gestured dismissively at Lin Xuan, who lay quietly on the examination cushion, his large silver eyes taking in every face, every nuance of tone. "He cannot lift his head for long. He cannot grasp a rattle. He is a hollow vessel with pretty light inside. The world of cultivation is closed to him."
Lin Feng, standing stiffly to the side, flinched but held her tongue, her hands clenched in the folds of her gown.
Patriarch Lin Zongyan leaned forward. "The herbs his mother provides?"
"They help,"Lin Bo admitted. "But not to this degree. This is… internal. A mystery."
A mystery I will keep, Lin Xuan thought, meeting his great-grandfather's gaze with an unsettling calm. My first secret in this new life.
"Continue the resources," the Patriarch decreed after a long pause. "But mark this: his survival is noteworthy, but survival is not strength. The Lin Clan thrives on strength, on power that can shape the frozen wastes and defy the heavens themselves." His eyes rested on Lin Xuan, and for a moment, the infant assassin felt the weight of those centuries again. "He has passed one trial—the trial of existence. But the trials of this clan await. When the time comes for the other children to awaken their spirits, to walk the Path, what will he do? Watch from his cradle?"
The words were not cruel, but they were absolute. They laid down the future battlefield. Lin Xuan understood. His current miracle was merely permission to remain on the starting line. The true test—cultivation, martial prowess, contribution to the clan—loomed ahead like an insurmountable glacier.
As he was carried back to the Frostbloom Garden in his mother's arms, Lin Xuan looked past her worried face, out at the endless, snow-swept peaks of the Northern Region.
Inside his frail body, the silent furnace continued its work. The dance of Yin and Yang was a hair's breadth more synchronized than the day before.
Let them see a hollow vessel, he mused, the ghost of his old resolve solidifying in his infant heart. Let them see weakness. I have survived betrayal and death. I have nurtured sunfire in a tomb of ice.
The trials are waiting. Good.
So am I.