The pine roots had grown into his dreams.
Thick and slow, they pushed through the dark soil of his sleep, curling through memory, breath, and bone. He could feel them now even when he was awake—that strange sensation of weight beneath the skin, as if his very flesh had begun to anchor itself to something far deeper than the body.
He didn't know what it meant, only that it felt right.
It was on the twenty-seventh morning since the lynx had died, beneath a split-bark pine east of the trail, that the shift came. No thunder split the sky. No divine light poured from his pores. There was no blazing dragon of energy, no spectral lotus blooming in his chest.
Instead: silence.
He sat cross-legged in the damp shadow of the tree, breath slow and steady, the Stone Root Method etched into every motion of his muscles. It wasn't elegance. It wasn't clean. His cultivation was not some gleaming script handed down through generations—it was patched together from instinct and grit, from watching the curve of roots and the way soil bent before rain.
But it worked.
As his breath sank lower than it ever had, something settled. A heaviness in the gut—not illness, but power. His bones pulsed once with quiet warmth. His muscles flexed, and this time, the tension didn't sting. It deepened. Like a cord pulled tight just before release.
The world didn't change.
But he had.
Second Stage of Body Refining.
He opened his eyes slowly.
There was no joy on his face. No elation. Just the stillness of stone reshaped. It felt earned, yes—but not finished. As if his body, now denser and steadier, was already waiting for more. As if the foundation he had so stubbornly laid down was only the first paving-stone on a path that would climb forever upward.
What he didn't know—what no one had told him, because no one even knew he was cultivating—was that in the time he had clawed his way to the second stage of the most basic physical path, a talented cultivator born with proper spiritual roots might already have been at the seventh or eighth stage of Qi Refining. Even average disciples in outer sects, trained in established techniques with mentors to guide them, would be well past the third or fourth stage by now.
His progress would be considered glacial.
But Li Yao did not know this.
He only knew that the stone in his belly had finally begun to sing.
He returned to the village just past dusk, keeping to the edges where the trees grew thick and shadows long. Green Pine hadn't changed on the surface—smoke still curled from low chimneys, and the same dusty footpaths wove between garden plots and storage sheds—but the atmosphere was brittle. Children stayed indoors. The usual gossiping women by the well spoke in hushed tones. And the dogs barked at night now, not in alarm, but with warning.
The fear had taken root. It didn't shout. It whispered.
Li Yao stayed quiet, watching, listening. Every cracked window and drawn curtain was another truth unspoken. Even Uncle Wei, whose steps usually thundered across the courtyard, walked with quieter boots these days.
The village was bracing for something it couldn't name.
And Li Yao… he could feel it too. In the marrow. In the way the air seemed thinner when he breathed deep. In the way his pulse occasionally skipped a beat when there was nothing near.
That night, he sat cross-legged beneath the same pine tree where he'd first touched the breath of qi. He ran through the Stone Root Method again, slower now, more precise. His body had grown heavier—but in the way a mountain grows, not a burden. When he finished, he remained still for a long time.
He no longer felt the forest was simply watching him.
He felt it was testing him.
His hands flexed in his lap.
The shrine.
Uncle Wei had spoken of it in that roundabout way he used when something frightened him more than he wanted to admit. A forgotten ruin. A blacksmith who might not be quite sane. Fire that burned the wrong color. All of it sounded like madness. Or worse—like myth dressed in the skin of truth.
But it was the only path forward. There were no sects nearby. No schools. No elder cultivator waiting in a pavilion with wise eyes and a long beard to pass down secret knowledge.
If he wanted to forge ahead, he needed steel.
And there was only one place to find it.
Before dawn, he prepared.
Not hurriedly, and not with ceremony. Just quiet necessity. He spread his pack across the floor and checked each item twice. A coil of pine rope, tightly wound. A bone-handled knife he'd honed until it gleamed. A bundle of dried mushroom stalks, known to soothe qi overexertion—bartered from Auntie Mu.
The lynx corpse had been worth more than he expected. The beast's bones had gone to a merchant in the valley below; its pelt sold to a trader who liked rare colors. With the coin, Li Yao had asked Auntie Mu for things most wouldn't think to request: smoked tendon strips from the beast's haunch, talon scrapings preserved in ash, and a small clay vial filled with powdered inner organ—she hadn't said which.
"For drawing out heat," she'd said. "Or putting it back in."
He didn't ask for details. Auntie Mu's knowledge was strange and old, and she never gave anything away freely.
Still, she'd pressed a sprig of dried jasmine into his hand before he left her shop. "Burn it only if you're bleeding inside and can't stop it," she said. "Not outside. Inside."
He tucked it carefully into a linen pouch.
He brought no sword. There was none to bring. And no talismans—he had no spiritual roots, not truly. What he carried instead were calloused hands, a well-trained body, and something far harder to name.
Conviction, perhaps.
The kind of stubbornness that doesn't yield to logic or fear. The kind of hunger that asks no permission.
He tied the last cord of his pack and stepped outside.
The sky was still dark, streaked with the faintest inkling of grey. No birds called. No wind moved. The silence was full of waiting.
The path to the shrine lay southward, past the riverstones, past the boundary where most villagers turned back. He had never gone that far. Few had. But Uncle Wei's voice echoed in his memory: "If you make it through the woods, speak gently. Don't ask for what you think you want. Ask for what you need."
He would remember.
And he would go.
The pine boughs swayed once above him, then stilled.
And Li Yao began to walk—not with a hero's stride, but with the steady, patient pace of stone that had decided it must now become fire.