The blade rode light at his hip.
Too light, in fact. Lighter than iron should be. Lighter than bone. It felt like a memory more than a weapon, as though it hadn't been forged but unearthed—plucked from some dream he hadn't known he was dreaming.
Li Yao didn't name it.
He didn't trust things with names that came too quickly. Let it remain nameless, blank as the blacksmith's expression when he handed it over. Let it earn its name.
The shrine sank behind him, swallowed by mist and tree-shadow. No farewell was given. None was expected.
The journey back to Green Pine Village took longer than the walk out, not because the trail was harder, but because the world felt different beneath his feet now. Like the path itself had shifted while he was away. The pines leaned just a little closer. The silence between birdsong stretched a little longer. And the riverstone trail, once mossy and weathered, seemed too clean, too intentional.
As if something had swept it recently.
He didn't look back.
That night, Li Yao made camp in a hollow beneath a sloping hill, well away from the beaten trail. He built no fire. Not because he feared discovery—though he did—but because the heat that burned in his chest now felt enough. His body still pulsed with the residue of the forge, his blood carrying it like embers tucked into the folds of muscle and bone.
He unsheathed the blade.
No gleam caught the moonlight. The metal was dull, practical. It bore no script, no blessing, no emblem. Not even a maker's mark. Just steel. Worn and grey. Silent.
He held it in both hands and tried to imagine what it would look like stained red.
The thought didn't come easily. He had killed—yes—but it had been a beast, not a man. There had been no choice. No question. But this… this was different. This was a tool designed for something precise. Clean or cruel. And it waited now, silent and ready, as if it already knew what he'd do with it.
He didn't sleep.
Not fully. His body rested, but his thoughts were restless, turning like a millstone in the dark. Faces came to him unbidden—Uncle Wei's tired eyes, Auntie Mu's crooked smile, the silver-eyed woman who had not given her name.
And then, as if from nowhere: his mother.
He hadn't thought of her in months. Not since the winter when the old dog died and he'd buried it behind the hut, her old shawl wrapped around his shoulders. He didn't know if she had been a cultivator. He didn't know if she'd even wanted him to be one.
All he remembered was her voice one night when he was small, whispering to him beside the fire:
"Some things you burn not to destroy, but to see what remains."
He didn't understand it then.
But now, with the blade beside him and his muscles aching from a growth that came not from talent but grit, he thought he might be beginning to.
He returned to Green Pine Village in the pale light before dawn. The fog clung to the ground in damp fingers, and his boots left prints on the threshold of his hut that the dew couldn't quite erase.
No one saw him arrive. No one asked where he'd been.
But as he passed, shoulders stiffened. Conversations faltered. Not in fear, exactly—but recognition. That quiet shift in a village when someone no longer seems like one of your own.
They didn't see a sword, or a robe, or the markings of a sect.
But they saw a distance in his eyes. A strange weight in his step. As if some part of him had walked too far to ever fully come back.
Li Yao sat at the edge of the old well and unpacked his things. His blade lay across his lap like a question he didn't yet know how to answer.
He thought of the shrine. The broken altar. The cracked voice of the mad blacksmith murmuring to the forge.
"Bring me your first kill. Not beast. Not animal. Kill. Bring me the feeling."
Li Yao didn't know what disturbed him more—the words, or the way they echoed inside him with no resistance.
He had thought strength would bring clarity.
Instead, it brought choices.
And choices brought consequence.
He stared at the sword.
And had he been listening closely—truly listening, not just to sound but to silence—he might have caught it: a note, a hum, buried beneath thought. The blade answering not to words, but to the feeling behind them. Faint. Hungry.
Almost... patient.
But he didn't hear it.
Not yet.
Instead, he rose. The sun had not yet cleared the ridge, but his day had already begun. The feeling in the air had changed—subtle, but sharp. Like the forest had begun to exhale.
And something was riding in on its breath.
He didn't know when it would strike, or from where.
But the flame in his chest stirred. Quiet. Waiting.
He would be ready.