An Quan had them up before the light reached the valley floor.
"Sweep the camp," he said, standing over the cold fire pit with his arms folded. "Weapons in one pile, personal effects in another. Document anything you find." He paused long enough for his gaze to touch each of them. "We're not scavenging. We're reading."
Jianyu yawned and reached for a dead bandit's short sword, testing its balance with a lazy wrist rotation. His followers drifted toward the heavier weapons, cataloging steel the way merchants catalog inventory. Fei moved to the perimeter without being asked, checking the tree line for signs of a second camp or a supply cache. Jin Mo was already gone, tracking boot prints up the eastern ridge, his armored silhouette shrinking against the gray slope.
Xuanji was assigned supply inventory. The least investigative task, the one you give the person you trust to count but not to think. He knelt beside a collapsed canvas lean-to and began sorting through sacks of grain, dried meat, and jars of rough medicinal paste. The supplies were better than he expected. Mountain bandits living off raided caravans shouldn't have standardized provisions, uniform sacking, a consistent quality of preserved food that suggested a reliable source.
He filed the observation and kept counting.
Across the camp, An Quan searched the body of one of the two larger bandits, the ones who'd moved with coordination instead of desperation. He worked with surgical patience, emptying pouches, checking seams, turning out pockets. When he found it, his hands stopped.
A leather pouch, palm-sized. Inside: three brass tokens, each one stamped with a sigil Xuanji recognized even from twenty paces. The Wei Clan crest. Supply chain authorization markers, the kind used to approve resource transfers between clan outposts. Xuanji had seen a pile of similar tokens on the accounting office desk during his brief orientation. They tracked grain, equipment, and personnel movement across Wei territory.
An Quan held one token between his thumb and forefinger, studying the stamp. His expression didn't change, which told Xuanji more than any reaction would have. He lowered his hand and turned his head. "Guard Mo."
Jin Mo materialized from the slope. An Quan said something too low for Xuanji to catch, then pressed the pouch into Jin Mo's hand. Jin Mo looked at the tokens, at An Quan, and closed his fist around them without a word.
"Young Master Wei." An Quan's voice carried now, pitched for Jianyu. "A moment."
Jianyu crossed the camp with the easy stride of a man who'd already decided the mission was a success. An Quan held up one of the tokens he'd kept back. Jianyu glanced at it.
"Supply marker," Jianyu said. "So they raided a caravan that was carrying them. It's what bandits do."
"These are current-quarter stamps. The last authorized caravan through this region was six weeks ago. None were reported raided."
Jianyu shrugged, already turning back toward his weapons pile. "Someone lost them. Outpost guards are careless. You know how frontier posts run."
An Quan watched Jianyu walk away. He said nothing. He pocketed the remaining token himself, tucking it into his inner robe with the deliberate care of a man handling evidence, and returned to his search.
Xuanji kept his hands busy and his face empty. He'd watched enough street-corner deals go sideways to know the shape of this: An Quan had found something that scared him, brought it to the person with authority, and been waved off by someone who couldn't afford to care. Two people with different priorities looking at the same object and seeing different things. In his old life, this was the moment you memorized the license plate and walked the other direction. You never knew when a detail became leverage.
He stacked the last of the grain sacks and moved to the next pile.
Jin Mo returned from the eastern ridge ten minutes later, sweat cutting lines through the dust on his neck. He found An Quan sorting through a bandit's bedroll.
"Trail goes cold past the second switchback. At least one, maybe two. They had hours on us."
An Quan nodded once. "Noted."
The word hung flat in the mountain air. Both men understood what it meant: someone out there knew their route, their numbers, and their fighting strength. Neither said this out loud. Jin Mo returned to the perimeter. An Quan continued his search. The camp settled into the mechanical rhythm of people processing what they'd survived.
=====
The descent followed the same trail in reverse, though everything felt different in daylight. The switchbacks that had seemed treacherous in darkness were merely steep. The cliff edges that had promised death were manageable drops onto scree. The horses moved with more confidence, and the party spread into a natural formation: An Quan on point, Jianyu and his two followers clustered in the middle, Fei trailing with the supply horses tethered end to end. Xuanji and Jin Mo brought up the rear, the rearguard position, which was the polite term for the slot nobody wanted.
During the first rest stop, while the others watered horses at a narrow stream, Xuanji ducked behind an outcrop of lichen-covered granite. He pulled back his sleeve and focused.
Iron Skin Conditioning activated across his forearm in a slow wave, the tissue hardening beneath the surface, his skin taking on a faint mineral sheen. He counted. Five seconds. Eight. Ten. His Heart Meridian clenched, the familiar ache blooming behind his sternum, and he disengaged. Two fingers to his wrist. Qiao's diagnostic sequence threaded in, patching the leak, coaxing the damaged meridian back toward baseline.
The dizziness hit after the patch, a few seconds of the world tilting before his balance corrected. He steadied himself against the rock and cataloged the data. Iron Skin alone: thirty seconds before critical drain. Adding Qiao's patch afterward: the patch itself cost almost nothing, but sequencing the two left him light-headed for about ten seconds. In a fight, ten seconds of impaired balance was a death sentence.
He pulled his sleeve down and walked back to the horses.
An hour later, Fei Luhua dropped back from the supply string. Her horse fell into step beside Xuanji's without any visible command, as if the animal had made the decision independently. She didn't speak. She watched him for long enough that the silence took on weight.
"You're sitting your horse differently."
Xuanji glanced at her. "I'm sitting on a horse. I'm not sure there's a wrong way."
"Your center of gravity dropped about two inches since yesterday. Your hands are quieter on the reins. You used to grip like you were afraid the animal would throw you." She tilted her head. "Now you're distributing tension through your forearms instead of your wrists."
The specificity of the observation landed like a cold stone in his gut. She wasn't guessing.
"Almost dying will do that," he said. "The body figures things out when the alternative is a long fall."
"Fear doesn't teach you forearm engagement. Someone who trains teaches you that."
"Then maybe I'm a natural."
Fei held his gaze for three full seconds. Then she pulled her reins left and rode forward, back toward the supply string, without another word. The silence she left behind carried more accusation than anything she could have said.
Behind them both, Jin Mo rode with his usual granite expression. His eyes tracked from Fei's back to Xuanji's hands on the reins, lingered there, then returned to the trail. He said nothing.
The party rode on. Jianyu's voice drifted back from the middle of the formation, recounting the battle to his followers for the third time, each retelling slightly more heroic than the last. An Quan's corrections came as quiet redirections: "Left fork," "Watch the loose section," "Single file through here." The mountain shrank behind them. The foothills flattened toward the valley that held Wei Clan territory, and the compound waited somewhere beyond the haze.
=====
High on the ridge, in the shadow of a rock overhang the Wei party had passed beneath an hour earlier, two men crouched in the scrub.
The first was lean, quick-eyed, dressed in the same dull grays the dead bandits had worn. He watched the last of the horses disappear around a bend below, counting silently. Six riders. Three supply horses. Two sabers visible, one bow case, provisions for three days. He committed the details to memory the way a worker commits a foreman's orders: precisely, because mistakes had consequences.
The second man sat against the rock behind him, flexing his right hand. Open, closed. Open, closed. He'd been doing it since dawn.
"My arm's hollow," the second man said. His voice was rough, stripped of any pretense. "The one who grabbed me. Something happened."
"You got cut."
"I didn't get cut. My skin is fine. Inside is wrong. It's like someone reached in and scooped." He flexed again, harder, the tendons standing out along his wrist. "The strength that was there yesterday isn't there."
The first man turned from the ridge. "Nerve damage. I've seen it before. It'll come back."
It wouldn't. Both of them knew it. The second man kept flexing anyway, staring at his palm with the dull focus of someone trying to recognize a face that had changed overnight.
The first man stood, brushed dirt from his knees, and started up the ridge in the opposite direction from the Wei party's descent. He had twelve hours of hard travel ahead of him. Someone was waiting for his count, his assessment, his map of the trail and its blind spots. The bandits hadn't been operating alone, and the man they reported to would want to know how badly the night had gone.
The second man followed, still flexing.
Behind them, the ridge stood empty. Wind moved through the scrub. Far below, faintly, the sound of hooves on gravel thinned and vanished, and the mountains kept their silence.