The Hidden Library became Lin Xiao's sanctuary and her crucible.
For a week, she returned every dusk to the cavern chamber. It was a place of ghosts. Not the spectral kind, but the ghosts of forgotten arts and dead masters. The air was a permanent, damp chill that seeped through her thin trainee robes, carrying the scent of decaying paper, mineral-rich stone, and the faint, metallic tang of ink older than she was.
Nie Luo was her constant shadow there. At fourteen, he was lean and wiry, all quiet efficiency. His black hair was cropped short, a practical choice in the brutal environment. His face was narrow, with sharp cheekbones and watchful, dark eyes that missed little—the way a guard shifted his weight, the pattern of patrols, the exact location of a promising scroll behind a crumbling pillar. He moved with a silent, economical grace, a stark contrast to the clumsy, blustering power favored by most trainees. In the library's gloom, he was a piece of the silence itself.
Their third was Du Kang. A year younger than Lin Xiao at twelve, he was small for his age, with a quick, bird-like energy. His face was round, often smudged with dirt or ink, and his eyes were a bright, clever brown that darted constantly, taking in mechanisms, locks, and structural weaknesses. Where Nie Luo was silent water, Du Kang was a chattering stream, always pointing out a hidden compartment in a shelf or a loose floorstone that could hide their pilfered scrolls. He was clever with his hands, able to fashion simple picks from scrap metal and understood basic trap mechanics from a stolen manual on fortification. His ambition, however, was a quiet, simmering thing. He often spoke of life after the caverns with a tangible hunger. "Imagine having your own workshop," he'd whisper, tracing the diagram of a complex lock. "Not just fixing things, but *designing* them. Creating something that makes people say, 'That's Du Kang's work.'" There was a longing in his voice that went beyond survival—it was a thirst for recognition, for a *place* in a world that had discarded him.
Lin Xiao, at thirteen, was changing. The softness of her childhood was gone, stripped away by hunger, violence, and loss. She was still slender, but a wiry strength now corded her arms and legs. Her most striking feature, aside from the rough-spun black patch over her right eye, was her remaining left eye—a deep, unsettling shade of grey that could seem stormy or still as a mountain lake. Her black hair, once neatly braided by her mother, was now a ragged, chin-length curtain she kept tucked behind her ear. The pain in her socket had subsided to a persistent, dull ache, a phantom limb of sight that reminded her of her vulnerability with every turn of her head.
Their routine was simple. During the day, they endured. They performed the rote, brutal drills of the *Azure Spark Strike*, Lin Xiao's control over the cool blue ember at her fingertips growing more instinctual, though she carefully hid its true potential. They sparred, ate meager rations, and navigated the constant, petty cruelties of the cavern hierarchy.
But at night, they stole time.
Under the feeble glow of the lichen, they devoured stolen knowledge. Nie Luo focused on strategy, logistics, and the foundational theories of Qi flow from orthodox texts. Du Kang hoarded anything on mechanics, chemistry, and architecture.
Lin Xiao's obsession was the fragments on anatomy and esoteric strikes. She found a water-damaged scroll from the "Veiled Dagger Brotherhood" that spoke of the *"Severing Palm"*—a technique to deliver Qi like a surgical blade into the body's nexus points to disrupt tendons and meridians. Another fragment, from a text on "The Illusory Self," discussed how the mind's intent could be severed from the body's Qi, causing paralysis. The concepts were dangerous, incomplete, and resonated with something cold and precise awakening within her.
She began to practice in the deepest, most isolated corner of the library, where the only light came from a single, distant crack in the ceiling. Her target was a stalagmite worn smooth by time.
Nie Luo's voice came softly from the shadows one evening as he watched her settle into a basic stance. "You know… I can still see the bones of the Midnight Blade's *Rock-Shattering Fist* in your form." He stepped closer, his head tilted. "But you're twisting it inside out, aren't you? Instead of forcing Qi outward to break stone… you're pulling it inward. To sever something."
Lin Xiao gave a tired nod, a bead of sweat tracing a path down her temple. "The Fist is a hammer. This… needs to be a scalpel. It's not about breaking the whole tapestry—just cutting the right thread."
"It's all theory," Du Kang chimed in, not looking up from a scroll littered with schematics for some kind of dart trap. He sounded less like a worried friend and more like an engineer stating a fact. "A fascinating one. And a lethal one. Get the focus wrong by a fraction, and you won't be severing any connections—you'll be saying goodbye to your own meridians." He finally glanced over, his expression cool and analytical. "You'd drop before you knew what went wrong."
Lin Xiao's jaw tightened. "I'm aware." Her reply was quiet, hollow. The persistent, phantom ache behind her empty eye socket was reminder enough. Some costs you only had to pay once to remember forever.
She started with visualization. Standing before the stalagmite, she would extend her palm, not touching it, and imagine a thread of azure energy, finer than a spider's silk, leaving her fingertips. She imagined it not striking the surface, but passing *through* it, seeking the invisible lattice of stress points within the stone. Her Azure Soulflame, that wild spark fragment, flickered in her core. She learned to cool it, to condense it, to turn its destructive heat into a needle of focused, chilling intent.
Weeks passed. Her failures were silent and exhausting. She would stand for hours, her arm trembling, her Qi dissipating harmlessly against the rock. Sometimes, a tiny crack would appear on the surface, but it was just the crude force of her will, not the surgical cut she sought.
One night, frustration boiled over. The memory of Gao's thumb gouging into her eye, the feeling of her world halving, surged up with a bitter tide. It wasn't just practice anymore. It was necessity. *Adapt or die.*
With a silent snarl, she stopped visualizing and *felt*. She felt the vulnerability in the rock, the fault lines of its creation. She felt the echo of her own loss, the severed connection between her eye and her mind. She didn't push her Qi. She *guided* it, with a whisper of intent as cold as the abyss around them.
Her palm touched the stalagmite.
There was no loud crack, no shower of stone. Just a faint, almost inaudible *ping*, like a crystal glass tapped with a fingernail.
She pulled her hand back. A hairline fracture, perfect and straight, ran six inches deep into the heart of the formation. The stone around it was utterly unchanged. It wasn't broken. It was… *divided*.
A stunned silence filled the niche.
Nie Luo stepped forward, his eyes wide. He ran a finger along the fracture. "It's… clean. Like it was always there."
Du Kang scrambled over, his clever eyes alight with a different kind of interest. "The precision…" he breathed. "Think of the applications. Not for breaking doors, but for breaking *locks*. For cutting support beams without noise…" He looked at Lin Xiao with a new, appraising expression. It wasn't just camaraderie she saw there now. It was the look of someone recognizing a valuable, dangerous tool. "What will you call it?"
Lin Xiao stared at the fracture, then at her palm. The phantom ache in her eye socket seemed to sharpen, a sympathetic echo to the cut she'd made in the stone. This technique was born from her phantom pain, her phantom eye, and severed what others thought was whole.
"**Phantom-Severing Palm**," she whispered, the name settling into her bones like a vow.
Later, as they secreted their scrolls away, Du Kang lingered. He watched Lin Xiao carefully re-roll the anatomy scrolls, her movements sure and focused. "You know," he said casually, "a technique like that… it's more than just surviving the caverns. It's a legacy. The kind of thing that could make a name for someone. Earn them a real position, not just a cell." His tone was light, musing, but his eyes held a fleeting, covetous glint as they rested on the scroll in her hands—the source of her power. It was the look of a boy who dreamed of a workshop, imagining not just creating traps, but perhaps one day controlling the mechanisms of fate itself.
Nie Luo, watching from the doorway, said nothing. But his gaze lingered on Du Kang's thoughtful, ambitious face for a moment too long before shifting back to Lin Xiao, a silent, unspoken vigilance hardening in his eyes.
The Ghost was forging her weapon. And in the shadows, another was already starting to calculate what that weapon might be worth