Xuanji's Flowing River Palm caught the first bandit's blade at an angle, redirecting it wide. Without qi behind the form, the redirection was soft, a suggestion rather than a command, and the blade still nicked his sleeve on the way past. He stepped back. His heel found loose gravel and slid.
The second bandit came low.
Xuanji twisted sideways, felt the rush of air where his stomach had been, and kept moving. No technique in what he was doing now. This was Tobi Miller fighting, all instinct and geometry, reading the angles the way he used to read crowd density at Fisherman's Wharf. The first bandit was the screen, the second was the lifter. He'd run this grift himself a hundred times, just never from the wallet's perspective.
A loose stone sat near his right foot, the size of a fist. He scooped it and threw it at the first bandit's face. The throw was meant for him to flinch, not to injure, buying a half-second of space. The stone connected with a cheekbone and the bandit staggered sideways, swearing in a dialect Xuanji's borrowed tongue couldn't parse.
The half-second evaporated. The second bandit closed the gap in two steps, seized Xuanji's wrist, and wrenched his arm behind his back. The hold was practiced and cruel, bending his elbow past the angle where tendons started to scream. Xuanji's knees buckled. His forearm pressed flat against the bandit's bare hand.
Skin on skin. Sustained.
Something inside him opened like a valve.
The sensation bore no resemblance to Qiao Luwei's diagnostic touch. That had been a stream, cool and precise, threading through his meridians with a physician's care. This was a flood. Raw technique poured through the point of contact in a scalding rush, and it carried everything with it. The mechanical data came first: how to harden skin, how to compress qi into a subcutaneous lattice, how to lock muscle fibers into a density that could turn a blade. But underneath that, tangled through it, the technique carried the man himself. His hunger. His fear. The flat desperation of a person who fights because flight was never an option. Xuanji tasted stale rice and mountain water. He smelled unwashed wool. He felt the bandit's knuckles ache from old fractures that had healed crooked, and beneath all of it, a fury so pure it had worn itself smooth, like a river stone polished by decades of current.
His vision went white.
His body locked rigid, every muscle contracting at once, teeth clamping shut so hard he felt the pressure in his jaw. The world reduced to a bright, featureless plane, then came roaring back in fragments: firelight, gravel, the bandit's grip loosening because Xuanji had stopped struggling and dead weight was harder to hold.
Steel sang through the air.
Jin Mo's saber caught the bandit across the forearm in a single efficient stroke. The man released Xuanji and reeled backward, clutching a wound that sheeted red in the firelight. The first bandit, the one with the stone bruise darkening his cheek, took one look at Jin Mo and ran. His boots scattered gravel as he vanished up the slope into smoke.
"Move." Jin Mo's voice hit like a slap. He grabbed a handful of Xuanji's collar and hauled him sideways, behind a boulder the size of a horse. The motion was not gentle. Xuanji's shoulder struck rock, and the impact traveled down his spine in a bright line.
He was standing, technically. His legs held his weight. His hands hung at his sides, fingers twitching in small, involuntary pulses. The skin of his forearm felt wrong. Denser. As if the tissue beneath had been packed with something that hadn't been there a minute ago. The iron-skin effect flickered across the surface in visible ripples, his flesh dimpling and tightening in patterns he couldn't control.
"Freezing gets you killed." Jin Mo positioned himself between Xuanji and the slope, saber still drawn, eyes tracking the darkness above them. His shoulder wound from the earlier arrow had bled through its dressing, a dark stain spreading across gray fabric. He didn't seem to notice. "You freeze, you die. Straightforward arrangement."
Xuanji opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again. "Still here."
Jin Mo didn't look at him. "Barely."
Over Jin Mo's shoulder, through the gap between the boulder and the slope, Xuanji caught a last glimpse of the bandit who'd grabbed him. The man had retreated twenty paces uphill and stopped. He stood hunched, holding his uninjured arm, the one that had gripped Xuanji's wrist, and staring at his own hand. He flexed his fingers, then flexed them again. Turned his palm over, examined it, turned it back. His expression was the confused, violated blankness of a man reaching for his wallet and finding an empty pocket.
Then the smoke shifted and he was gone.
=====
The fighting ended in the way that fights between disciplined soldiers and desperate outlaws always do: abruptly, without ceremony, with bodies on the ground and the survivors too exhausted for triumph.
An Quan appeared from the treeline, running a headcount with a calm that bordered on mechanical. His robes were dirt-streaked. A line of blood crossed his left palm where he'd caught a blade, or given one, Xuanji couldn't tell which. He called names. Each disciple answered. Everyone was breathing. Jin Mo's shoulder wound was the worst of it.
Jianyu's voice filled the silence before it had a chance to settle.
"Six. I counted six that went down in the main push." He was pacing near the secondary cook fire that someone had managed to relight, his energy too big for his body, hands carving shapes in the air as he narrated. "The big one with the topknot nearly caught me on the backswing, but I pivoted into Breaking Wave and put him through a tree. You should have heard the sound it made."
Two of his followers nodded along, adding details Jianyu hadn't asked for.
Fei Luhua sat on a flat rock ten paces from the group, working dried blood from between her knuckles with methodical attention. She'd fought harder than Jianyu and talked less about it. When he called over to her, asking if she'd seen him take the topknot bandit, she looked up.
"I was busy."
Jianyu's mouth opened, closed, rerouted. "Well, in any case. A clean operation. Father will be pleased."
"Rotation." An Quan cut through the retelling without raising his voice. "First watch: Wei Xuanji and Guard Mo. Second: Fei and myself. Third: Jianyu and Liu." He distributed the assignments the way he gave all instructions, as completed facts, requiring no discussion. "Sleep while you can. We move at first light."
Jin Mo grunted acknowledgment. The camp settled.
Xuanji sat against a rock at the edge of the firelight, deliberately outside the circle. He rolled up his left sleeve. The forearm was mottled in the low light, the skin faintly discolored where the absorption had left its mark. The discoloration looked nothing like a bruise. He pressed a thumb into the flesh and felt it resist, the tissue pushing back with a solidity that hadn't existed twelve hours ago. Iron Skin Conditioning. The name surfaced from the flood of stolen data with unsettling familiarity, as though it had always been there, waiting.
The technique sat in his meridian network like a stone swallowed by a snake: present, undeniable, difficult to process. Where Qiao's diagnostic touch had worked with a scalpel's precision, this technique bludgeoned. Everything about it was crude, forced, the work of a man who'd trained his body through repetition and pain rather than precision. And layered beneath the technical information, the emotional residue still clung. The bandit's hunger, his rage, his animal certainty that softness meant death.
Xuanji pulled his sleeve back down.
The fire below subsided to rust-colored embers. The camp went quiet except for Jianyu's cronies murmuring in their tent and the occasional pop of a splitting log. Xuanji climbed the short slope to the watch position, a rocky outcrop with clear sightlines down both approaches. Jin Mo was already there, sitting with his back to a boulder, saber across his knees, shoulder freshly dressed with clean linen.
Neither spoke. The silence weighed nothing. It was just the absence of words between two people who'd survived the same hour and hadn't yet figured out what to say about it.
The cold deepened.
Xuanji waited until Jin Mo's attention had been fixed on the northern approach for a solid minute, then pressed his right hand flat against the rock beside him. He pushed the stolen technique outward, slowly, the way you'd test a bruise. His skin hardened. He felt the transformation travel from palm to fingertips, the surface tightening, the tissue beneath compressing into something approaching stone. The qi drain was immediate. His Heart Meridian clenched, a fist behind his sternum, and started to leak. He held the hardening for three seconds, five, then disengaged and pressed two fingers to his wrist, running Qiao's diagnostic sequence to patch the bleed.
Two techniques, back to back. The cost was staggering. Sweat stood out on his temples despite the cold. His fingers trembled as the meridian stabilized, the leak slowing to its baseline drip.
"You did something out there."
Xuanji's hand stilled. Jin Mo hadn't moved. His eyes were forward, fixed on the dark. But he'd seen.
"I fell over and got grabbed," Xuanji said. "Heroic stuff."
"You weren't useless." The words came out like they'd been dragged. Jin Mo adjusted his saber. "That's new."
Xuanji leaned back against the cold rock. "Low bar."
Jin Mo grunted. The conversation ended the way his conversations always did, abruptly, without resolution, as if language were a resource he couldn't afford to waste. His attention returned to the terrain.
Xuanji ran the inventory the way he used to run his weekly budget. Two stolen techniques: Qiao's diagnostic pulse, sustainable, fine-motor, his only tool for keeping the meridian from hemorrhaging. Iron Skin Conditioning, brute-force, expensive, thirty seconds at most before his qi reserves bottomed out. One memorized martial art, the Flowing River Palm, which he could perform without qi but couldn't power with it. And underneath everything, the cracked foundation, his Heart Meridian leaking qi faster than his body could regenerate it. Two apps running on a dying battery. He needed more, but more meant a faster drain, and the math that followed was the same math that had governed his entire previous life: how many days of food, how many dollars short, how many corners left to cut before the floor gave out.
The fire below was nearly dead. Ash flaked upward in the heat and dissolved against the dark. Somewhere in those mountains, a bandit who'd seen their party composition and their route of march had escaped into terrain he knew better than they did. That fact sat at the back of Xuanji's mind like an unpaid bill.
He looked down at his left hand.
The fingers had curled while he wasn't paying attention. Not into a fist. Into a formation: thumb pressed against the base of the ring finger, index and middle extended, pinky tucked beneath the palm. The position was precise, deliberate, and completely alien. He recognized neither Iron Skin nor Qiao's diagnostic pattern in the shape. Something older. The fingers held the shape for one breath, two, then relaxed as if a string had been cut.
Xuanji stared at his hand for a long time.
Adrenaline. Combat stress. Some residual twitch from Xuanji's original muscle memory, surfacing under fatigue the way old habits surface at three in the morning. That was the explanation that made sense. He flexed his fingers, shook them loose, and put it away.
The moon tracked its arc above the ridge. Jin Mo sat unmoving. The camp below was dark and still, the cooling embers throwing just enough light to distinguish shapes from shadows. Beyond the ridge, the mountains held whatever they held, and said nothing about it.