Dawn in the Abyssal Training Caverns was not marked by light, but by sound. A deep, resonant gong—struck somewhere in the caverns' heart—shook the walls and echoed through the dormitory cavern, jolting Lin Xiao from a thin, anxious sleep.
"Up! Now!" bellowed a junior disciple, a boy with a pockmarked face and cruel eyes, as he stalked between the pallets, kicking those who moved too slowly.
The new recruits stumbled into a ragged line in the Receiving Hollow. The glowing green pool cast the same sickly light, but the chamber was colder, the air tasting of damp stone and cold sweat. The overseer, his scarred face impassive, stood before them with two other instructors.
The first instructor was a wiry man in his thirties with a pinched, severe face and hair pulled into a tight topknot. He moved with a nervous, bird-like precision. The second was a woman, broad-shouldered and solid as a granite pillar, her arms crossed over a leather chestplate. Her expression was one of bored contempt.
"You are raw ore," the overseer's gravelly voice began, cutting through the shivering silence. "We are the forge. Your bodies will be tempered, your spirits broken and remade. You will be separated. The physically robust," he nodded to the female instructor, "will go with Instructor Bo. You will learn to be the anvil—to endure, to hold the line. The rest," his pale eyes swept over the smaller, quicker, or more cunning-looking boys, "will go with Instructor Jiang. You will learn to be the hammer—to strike fast and vanish."
His gaze lingered for a moment on Lin Xiao, the only girl, small and tense at the end of the line. A flicker of something—calculation, perhaps—passed through his stone-like eyes before he dismissed it. She was placed with Instructor Jiang's group.
Instructor Jiang's training area was a vast, secondary cavern called The Echoing Hall. Stalactites and stalagmites dotted the space like jagged teeth, and the ceiling was lost in shadow. The floor was rough, uneven stone, worn smooth in patches by generations of shuffling feet. Along one wall stood racks of rudimentary, blunt training weapons: wooden staves, battered iron swords with dulled edges, short spears, and a few pairs of hooked knives.
"Choose," Instructor Jiang said, his voice sharp and reedy. "The weapon that feels like an extension of your anger. You have one minute. Those without a weapon will fight with their hands. Permanently."
The boys surged forward in a frantic scramble, pushing and elbowing. Lin Xiao hung back, watching. The larger boys gravitated toward the heavy axes and broadswords. The quicker ones snatched up the knives and short swords. The desperation in the air was palpable, a raw, animal fear.
Lin Xiao's eyes were drawn not to the largest weapons, but to a specific rack. There, among a few neglected blades, was a jian—a straight, double-edged sword. This one was a training version, its tip rounded and its edges blunted, but its form was elegant and clean. The hilt was simple wrapped cord, the guard a plain disc of tarnished brass. Unlike the heavier dao sabres, it spoke of precision, of technique over brute force. It reminded her, in some deep, unformed way, of the quiet, sharp intellect her mother had encouraged in her—a tool for a keen mind, not just a strong arm.
As she reached for it, a bony elbow shoved her aside. It was a scrawny boy with narrow, calculating eyes who grabbed a pair of hooked knives. He sneered at her, but said nothing. Lin Xiao ignored him, her fingers closing around the jian's hilt. It felt… correct. Balanced. An instrument rather than a bludgeon.
"Good," Instructor Jiang's voice snipped behind her, making her jump. He looked down his nose at her choice. "The fool's weapon. It requires skill you do not have. You will learn to hate it before you learn to use it."
The training began, and it was a descent into a new kind of hell. Physical conditioning was not exercise; it was systematic dismantling. They ran laps around The Echoing Hall until lungs burned and legs buckled, the uneven stone turning ankles and scraping knees raw. They held horse stances until muscles trembled and screams were torn from throats, while Instructor Jiang walked among them, striking slack postures with a thin bamboo cane.
"Your body is a vessel!" he shrieked. "A cracked vessel holds no Qi! A weak vessel shatters!"
Lin Xiao pushed herself beyond what she thought were her limits. Her early, secret training with her mother had given her a foundation of discipline the other boys lacked, but it was a child's foundation compared to this brutal architecture. Her muscles screamed in protest, her palms blistered from gripping the jian during endless guard positions.
After what felt like an eternity of agony, they were allowed a brief, disgusting meal of watery gruel and hard tack in a communal mess cavern, a low-ceilinged room reeking of spoiled food and despair. The boys ate in sullen silence, too exhausted for rivalry.
Then, they were assembled in a smaller, circular chamber known as The Kiln. It was warmer here, the air dry and tinged with the scent of ozone and ash. In the center of the room was a large, flat stone dais inscribed with a complex circular diagram that seemed to pulse faintly with a deep blue light.
"Now," Instructor Jiang said, standing before the dais. "The first technique of the Midnight Blade Castle. The Azure Spark Strike." He held up his hand, palm outward. "It is a simple ignition art. A spark to light a campfire, to cauterize a wound, to signal in the dark. Nothing more."
He performed the same demonstration the overseer had: a flicker of blue light in his palm, a sharp forward motion, a hiss as it struck a clay target on the far wall, leaving a blackened mark. The boys watched, a spark of desperate hope in their eyes. This was power. Tangible, elemental power.
"The formula is simple," Jiang continued, his voice dripping with condescension. "Draw Qi from your dantian. Channel it through the Meridian of Ember Flow in your arm. Compress it at the Laogong point in the center of your palm. Release it with intent. Do not think. Do not deviate. The pattern is everything."
He made them sit in a circle around the dais. Lin Xiao felt the strange energy radiating from the inscribed stone; it seemed to vibrate in harmony with something deep inside her, a faint, answering hum in her own core.
One by one, the boys were called to try. The results were pathetic. Most produced nothing but a weak puff of air. A few managed a sizzling sound and a wisp of smoke from their palms. One boy, overzealous, caused a small, painful backfire that blackened his own hand and earned him a beating from Jiang's cane for his "arrogant deviation."
Then, it was Lin Xiao's turn.
Whispers and snickers followed her to the edge of the dais. "The girl's turn to cry," someone muttered.
Ignoring them, she closed her eye, focusing inward as her mother had taught her years ago. She found the warm pool of energy in her lower dantian—small, untrained, but there. She envisioned the pathway Jiang described, willing the energy to flow. It was like trying to thread a needle with a trembling, numb hand. But she persisted, pushing the Qi toward her palm.
A sensation of heat, then pressure, built in her center. Unlike the others who seemed to be squeezing water from a stone, for Lin Xiao, it felt more like trying to hold back a slowly building wave. She focused on the compression, on the point in her palm.
She snapped her hand forward.
A spark erupted from her palm. Not a sputtering ember, not a wisp of smoke. A clean, sharp, azure-blue spark the size of a coin, that shot straight and true across the chamber and struck the center of the clay target with a crisp snap-hiss. The mark it left was not a smudge, but a distinct, deeply charred dot.
The chamber fell silent.
Instructor Jiang's pinched face went utterly still. His bored contempt evaporated, replaced by a wary, calculating intensity. He looked from the perfect mark on the target to Lin Xiao's small, flushed face, her eye wide with her own surprise.
The other boys stared, their expressions a mix of shock, envy, and newfound fear.
"Again," Jiang commanded, his voice quiet.
Lin Xiao, heart pounding, obeyed. She focused, repeated the process. This time, the spark came easier, quicker. It was slightly weaker, but still steadier and hotter than anything the boys had produced.
A third time. It flickered, inconsistent, the strain showing on her face as her untrained Qi reserves dwindled.
"Enough," Jiang said. He studied her as if she were a strange insect. "A fluke of affinity. Do not let it inflate your worth. You are still ore. Unrefined, useless ore." He turned to the group, but the damage—or the revelation—was done. "The rest of you, witness? This is what proper focus yields. Even a girl can manage it. Back to work! Everyone will produce a spark by nightfall, or you will not sleep!"
As the boys returned to their frantic, futile attempts, Lin Xiao retreated to her place, the blisters on her hand pulsing. She clutched the training jiang in her lap, feeling the weight of dozens of hostile glances. But beneath the fear and exhaustion, a tiny, defiant ember glowed.
The technique was a lie. Instructor Jiang called it simple, common. But the way the energy had wanted to flow for her, the profound depth she had sensed in that brief moment of compression… it felt anything but simple. It felt like a whisper of something vast, ancient, and powerful. A secret clothed as a mundane tool.
She had attracted attention. The wrong kind. But she had also taken the first, true step on the path. The path of the blue flame.