By the next night, Yuan He understood something important about the sect.
It had more ways to hit you than fists.
The Merit Hall had left him with ink-smell in his nose and a new kind of anger in his throat, the kind that didn't flare hot but sat there, heavy, like a weight you carried because putting it down would mean admitting you were trapped.
He did not admit it.
He waited until the dorm noise sagged into its late-night rhythm: snores, mutters, an occasional footstep to the latrine, the soft scrape of straw. Not silence. Just less attention.
Then he slipped out again.
"Elemental Interlock," he murmured once, tasting the name like a private joke. "Version…"
He stopped himself.
He didn't have paper. He didn't have ink. He had memory.
He had constraints.
"No heroics," he whispered.
Night air met him like cold water. The herb yard was darker than the dorm yard, cleaner, quieter. The drying racks were a familiar fence of shadow and reed, and behind them he could sit without being seen by anyone who wasn't trying.
If someone was trying, he told himself, he would stop.
He sat. He listened.
Distant insects. A dog. The soft whisper of leaves.
No footsteps close.
Good enough.
He set his tongue, relaxed his jaw, and placed his hands in the seal. He closed his eyes.
He ran the neutral cadence first, slow and exact, until the anchor returned.
Then he did it again. Same result.
Repeatable.
"Okay," he breathed, and the word was more for his nerves than for the world. "Start."
One earth-leaning breath, just weight and settling, sand in a jar. The anchor stayed put.
Then metal, just edge and boundary.
A thin static traced along his forearms. It faded cleanly when he went neutral again.
A candidate signal, at least.
So far, nothing was new.
New was the point.
"One variable," he whispered. "Just one."
Water.
In his head, water was always the easier element. It was the thing you used to cool a system down. To smooth rough edges. To carry heat away.
That might have been superstition.
It might have been true.
Either way, he couldn't keep guessing forever.
"Water," he murmured.
He reset to the anchor, then walked earth into metal again. The same faint static. The same clean fade.
He waited until his body felt like itself.
Then he added water-focus as the only change: coolness, flow, letting the anchor loosen without slipping.
For a heartbeat, it felt…right.
Not stronger. Not brighter. Just like something inside him had moved from pile to loop. Like gears that had been grinding had finally found their teeth.
He almost smiled.
Then the anchor shifted.
Not gone. Just displaced.
It rose a finger's breadth, as if pulled upward by a tide, and nausea followed it—quick and light, like the first hint of motion sickness.
His body tightened reflexively.
That tightening fed back into his breath.
It wobbled once.
Then it started to drift.
Yuan He opened his eyes.
"Abort," he whispered immediately.
He dropped the seal. He put both palms on the cold ground and breathed normally, shallow and careful, until the nausea stopped climbing.
He didn't force it down. He didn't fight it. He watched it.
On Earth, panic was a fuel.
Here, panic was an accelerant.
He counted.
One breath.
Two.
Three.
The nausea peaked and then began to fade, as if it had hit a wall and bounced back.
The anchor sensation dissolved into ordinary emptiness. No heat. No stabbing pain. No pressure spike in his chest.
His heart beat fast, then steadied.
He stayed still until he could honestly say: I am not getting worse.
Then he let out a long breath that was not part of any cadence.
"Okay," he muttered, voice dry and shaky. "So water is… rude."
He chuckled once, small and unwilling.
He ran a recovery check the way he'd promised himself.
Ribs: sore, unchanged.
Head: clear.
Stomach: unsettled, fading.
Dizziness: mild, gone.
Heat: none.
Agitation: none, except the part of him that wanted to try again right now to prove he wasn't afraid.
He ignored that part.
He looked at the drying racks as if they were a whiteboard.
Neutral was stable. Earth was stable. Metal produced the same thin static.
Water made the anchor lift, nausea follow, and his body enter a guarded state.
A candidate cause list formed in his mind without effort.
Applied water incorrectly. Too "loose." The anchor loses its seat.
The order is wrong. Metal to water creates a mismatch at this scale.
Wrong timing. Maybe water needs less duration?
Mental state: degraded. The dorm stress, the Merit Hall, the bullies, shitty situation in general.
He swallowed.
He wanted a clean answer.
He didn't get one.
He got something better than an answer.
He got bounded failure.
The procedure had done what procedures were supposed to do. It had prevented him from turning a weird sensation into a catastrophe.
He sat for another minute until he could feel his breathing settle back into normal, until his hands stopped wanting to clench.
Then he stood.
Not triumphantly. Not dramatically.
Just…carefully.
"Data," he whispered, as if the word could turn fear into something useful. "I got data."
He slipped back to the dorms the way he'd come, keeping to the shadows, keeping his face neutral, keeping his complaints inside.
When he reached his bunk, he lay down and stared into the dark.
The world still thought five elements were useless.
Sun Ba's world still thought he was a pouch waiting to be emptied.
The Merit Hall still had rules that could be bent against him.
None of that had changed.
But something else had.
He had a neutral cadence that repeated.
He had a metal-step signal that repeated.
And now he had a failure mode that didn't kill him.
He let his eyes close.
"Tomorrow," he murmured, barely audible, "we change one thing."
Then, because he couldn't help himself, he added, "And we do not let the water be rude again."