The morning mist hung heavy over the outer compound, coiling through crooked alleys and dust-slick courtyards like a living thing. The sun, half-lost behind a veil of clouds, cast a sickly gray light that clung to the clay rooftops of the Jin Clan like mildew.
Jin Wu-ren stood barefoot on the training field's eastern edge, the earth cold beneath his soles. His breath fogged faintly as he completed the final stance of his morning form—a slow, deliberate sweep of his right arm, his fingers brushing against unseen qi lines only he could sense.
He held the position for a moment longer, then exhaled and let his arms fall.
His soul core pulsed. Faintly. Weakly. But it was there.
"Faster," he muttered. "I'm advancing too quickly for a normal child… but too slowly for someone on a clock."
He flexed his fingers. A hint of spiritual energy flared between them—then sputtered out like a candle in a breeze.
He scowled. Not in frustration, but calculation.
"Three years, maybe less, before I'll draw the wrong kind of attention. Elder Jin Rou has already begun sniffing around. Jin Hui's been following me too loosely to be subtle."
He didn't need to confront them yet. That would come later. Right now, he needed strength—layers of it, like armor stitched beneath a commoner's robe. Enough to withstand scrutiny, but not enough to spark alarm.
He turned his gaze to the training field proper. A handful of outer disciples were gathered there, sluggishly going through morning drills. Boys and girls aged six to eleven, overseen by an aging instructor whose spirit root had long withered from disuse.
Wu-ren watched them in silence.
Later that morning, in the outer compound's modest kitchen courtyard, Wu-ren slipped between smoke and footsteps. He moved like a shadow, barefoot on stone, his small figure weaving between crates of drying herbs and bundles of rice straw.
He waited until the assistant cook stepped away to berate a scullion, then deftly snatched a half-roasted sweet yam from the fire pit. It sizzled in his palm, but he didn't flinch.
"I once fasted on a glacier for six years," he thought wryly, "and now I steal potatoes."
He slipped the yam into a fold of his robe and vanished around the corner.
Behind the main kitchen was a low wall with a cracked basin and a rusted rain barrel. A forgotten corner. No eyes watched it. There, he crouched and pulled the yam free.
"This," he muttered, "is cultivation too."
Not the yam. Not the heat. The act.
Stealing just enough not to be noticed. Watching for patterns. Memorizing shadows. All of it trained instincts that had dulled during his reign atop the heavens. The habits of a child-soldier emperor born again in a child's flesh.
"Power," he whispered, "starts where pride ends."
He finished the yam in silence and dusted off his hands.
Back in the Archive Cavern, hours later, Wu-ren lowered himself onto the cold stone floor. The flame from his stolen candle fluttered weakly in the stale air. A single jade slip lay in front of him, the script etched into its surface glowing faintly with qi.
"The Spiral Binding Sutra," he thought. "In my former life, I took this from the Sect of Falling Stars after defeating their Patriarch in single combat. He begged for mercy with his daughter kneeling beside him."
He traced the first three lines with his mind's eye.
'Collapse the body into stillness. Anchor the soul to breath. Unbind the spine from time.'
The technique wasn't powerful by immortal standards. But it was elegant—a method for folding spiritual awareness into the body's nervous system, allowing the practitioner to sense attacks before they were fully formed.
In his current state, it would take weeks to properly imprint.
But he wasn't in a rush.
"If I build my foundation right," Wu-ren murmured, "no storm will shake it."
As he breathed, qi moved through his meridians—not in torrents, but in threads. Fine, barely visible. Fragile, yes. But guided with purpose.
He fell into stillness. The cavern faded around him. Only breath remained.
Meanwhile, the Jin Clan elders were stirring.
That afternoon, an emergency meeting was called in the Hall of Ancestral Jade—a grand, echoing chamber near the inner compound's heart, adorned with murals of dragon-slaying forebears and golden lotus carvings that shimmered with trapped light.
Elder Jin Rou sat nearest the jade dais, arms folded in front of her robes like a queen before her court. Elder Yun Fan, bald and hunched, muttered quietly to her left. The other four elders, all senior outer-branch representatives, sat in stiff silence.
At the center of the chamber knelt a sweating, trembling figure—Jin Shan.
His face was pale. His ribs were still healing. But the fear in his eyes came not from injury… but from shame.
"He used... something," Jin Shan mumbled. "A technique. Not a common one. I felt it burn when he attack me. I don't know what it was, but I've never felt qi like that before."
"And you're certain?" Elder Yun Fan asked. His voice was soft, but there was steel beneath it.
"Yes."
Jin Rou narrowed her eyes.
"So. The child hides more than he shows."
She rose.
"I'll test him myself."
---
The air in the Archive Cavern grew thick with incense smoke.
Jin Wu-ren sat cross-legged, his hands forming subtle seals as he guided threads of spiritual energy along mapped-out pathways in his body. Each breath was deep, measured—drawn not from instinct, but from memory, a thousand years of disciplined cultivation compressed into a body no older than five.
"The qi here is stale," he thought, frowning faintly. "Thin. Unaligned. No elemental influence, no natural flow… but manageable."
He exhaled slowly, directing a trickle of energy into his dantian. The sensation was like dipping a ladle into a cracked cistern—only to draw out a whisper of water and shards of stone. His soul core was still fractured from his death. He felt the sharp edges of it when he focused too hard, like glass buried in flesh.
But it was healing.
Every breath made it stronger.
"Even broken, I am far beyond what this world would expect from a five-year-old."
His consciousness wandered, briefly, to the past. A different body. A different world.
He had been nineteen when he learned the Spiral Binding Sutra, gifted to him by a defeated foe—Patriarch Lin Zhun of the Sect of Falling Stars, who chose death over servitude after a crushing defeat on the Celestial Frost Plains. Wu-ren had spared Lin's daughter, Shen Lian, for her bravery… and taken the sect's legacy techniques as spoils.
Lin Zhun had died with pride. Shen Lian had sworn vengeance.
"And eventually became my disciple," he mused with irony. "The same one who later betrayed me."
That thought simmered like old blood in his mind, but he pushed it aside.
Dwelling on past betrayals would weaken him.
Footsteps echoed from above.
They were light, almost imperceptible. But to Wu-ren's enhanced senses, trained through a thousand lifetimes of evading assassins, it was as loud as thunder.
Three sets.
One heavy and deliberate. One cautious, respectful. And the third…
The third was wrapped in spiritual intent.
"Elder Jin Rou."
He opened his eyes.
---
Jin Rou stepped through the threshold with the bearing of a queen inspecting a ruined temple. She wore crimson today, the color of blood and authority, her black hair swept into a crown of jade pins. Her face was calm, but her eyes… her eyes searched like blades.
Behind her stood two silent retainers—silver-robed elders from her private guard—and a younger disciple named Jin Hui, a slim boy with a calculating glint behind his practiced smile.
Jin Wu-ren rose slowly to his feet.
The candlelight flickered.
"What an unusual place for a child to meditate," Jin Rou said lightly, letting her voice echo through the cavern. "Most five-year-olds prefer playgrounds and porridge."
Wu-ren bowed politely, just deep enough to avoid disrespect. "This place is quiet, Elder. And the old texts help me think."
"Think? At your age?"
Her tone was amused, but her eyes never stopped moving—scanning the script on the walls, the jade slips, the smoldering incense. She stopped near the array of minor scrolls Wu-ren had arranged like a makeshift altar.
"You lit incense," she said, almost idly.
"I copied what I saw in the ancestral hall," he replied. "I wanted the atmosphere to feel… reverent."
She arched a brow.
"He's lying," she thought. "But convincingly."
Jin Rou crouched, picking up a faded jade slip.
"Do you know what this is?"
"Yes. It's a record of the clan's tax levies from the year of the Locust Famine."
"And this?"
"Treatise on Body Alignment by Elder Jiu Qing. Mostly incorrect."
She chuckled.
"You have a sharp tongue for a child."
Wu-ren smiled mildly. "I only speak what I've read."
She set the slip down and stood.
"I've heard… stories. That you fought with Jin Shan. That you injured him."
"I defended myself."
"With technique?"
He said nothing.
She stepped closer.
The pressure in the room shifted. Like the coiling of a serpent, unseen but unmistakable.
"Show me," she said softly.
Wu-ren hesitated.
Not out of fear.
But out of strategy.
He needed to show just enough.
He extended his hand, palm open.
Then slowly, with careful breath control, he executed a simplified form of the Spiral Binding Sutra—just the first layer. Just enough to tighten the muscles in his arm and vibrate the qi lines along his spine.
His fingers blurred.
The air hummed faintly.
A strike—fast and elegant—stopped inches from Elder Jin Rou's waist.
She didn't move.
But her eyes gleamed.
"That's no outer sect technique," she whispered.
"It's something I felt during a fever dream," Wu-ren lied smoothly. "A… memory that didn't feel like mine. I tried to copy the movement. I'm sorry if it's improper."
Jin Hui snorted softly behind her.
But Jin Rou raised a hand to silence him.
She studied Wu-ren long and hard.
Then, to everyone's surprise, she smiled.
"Remarkable," she said. "You may continue to train here. In fact, I'll have someone bring you more slips."
Her tone was light, but her eyes had hardened.
She was calculating now.
"He's dangerous. Too dangerous to ignore. But too promising to waste."
She turned and swept out of the cavern like a storm retreating over mountains.
The cavern felt colder after Elder Jin Rou departed.
Jin Wu-ren remained perfectly still, letting the echoes of her presence dissipate like incense smoke. The two candles beside him guttered, one of them finally giving out with a hiss, plunging the Archive Cavern into half-darkness.
"She suspects," he thought.
Not enough to act. Not yet. But enough to start watching. Enough to start planning.
Which meant he had to plan faster.
He stood slowly and stretched, rotating his joints in slow, deliberate arcs. His bones ached—not from age but from the strain of accelerated qi circulation. His young body was adapting fast, but it wasn't built for the techniques he knew. Even simplified, the Spiral Binding Sutra stretched muscle and meridian to the brink of tearing.
And he wasn't done.
He moved to the back of the Archive Cavern, past the decaying scrolls and fractured jade slips. He stopped in front of a stone wall nearly covered in mildew and moss. To most, it would've looked like the natural terminus of the chamber.
But to Wu-ren's trained senses, the air was too still. Too uniform.
He placed his hand against a faint, spider-web crack in the stone, closed his eyes, and pulsed a wisp of qi through it.
There was a click.
And a whisper of stone grinding against stone.
The false wall receded slightly and then shifted to the side, revealing a narrow crawlspace barely large enough for a child.
Wu-ren ducked inside.
---
This was his true hiding place.
A smaller chamber carved during an old renovation, then abandoned. At its center was a broken pedestal of black jade. The slab atop it was cracked in two, but the etching still glowed faintly with residual energy.
A forgotten fragment of a formation.
It once held a spirit-gathering array—primitive, compared to the great formations of his past life—but enough to condense ambient qi in a localized area. Enough for a child to train in secret without raising suspicion.
He had restored part of it. Not with tools or resources—he had neither—but with sheer knowledge. A simple five-point rune alignment. A rotating cycle of six breathing techniques. He could maintain the flow for thirty minutes at a time before the array shorted out.
"Thirty minutes a night. Two hours a week. In ten weeks, I'm at Early Qi Gathering. In six months… I might touch the Foundation Stage."
It was pathetic, compared to the lightning-swift breakthroughs of his former life.
But it was also progress.
The crawlspace had no light.
And yet, as he sat and drew the array into motion again, the room seemed to glow faintly with pale-blue runes.
He began another cycle.
---
His mind wandered as his qi flowed.
Not to this life—but the previous one. To a memory sealed deep behind the gates of his soul core.
A battle in the Western Sky Gorge. Three against one.
Tian Yao—Emperor of the Mortal Heavens—stood alone, surrounded by three rival Immortal Monarchs: Yan Zhi of the Azure Sea, Lady Yue of the Moon-Eye Pavilion, and Xian Lu, his own former disciple.
Each one a legend. Each one desperate to stop him from ascending to true godhood.
He remembered the feel of shattered ley lines. The scream of wind blades peeling mountains. The spiral lotus of destruction he'd formed with the Threefold Heaven-Severing Art—a technique no mortal was meant to wield.
They'd forced him back.
But only barely.
"I killed Yue with a single thrust. Yan Zhi bled out over nine hours. Xian Lu… you survived."
He clenched his jaw.
The betrayal still burned.
He had raised Xian Lu like a son. Trained him in secret arts. Given him the authority of a Crown Prince within the Celestial Empire.
"And yet he called my rule… a tyranny."
Suddenly, the array dimmed.
Wu-ren snapped back to the present.
The qi had dropped. Someone had triggered the outer threshold.
He stood up fast, extinguished the remnants of the array, and slipped out through the crawlspace, resealing it before the moss had even stopped fluttering.
He reached the main chamber of the Archive Cavern just in time to see a child about his age peering in through the entrance.
A girl.
Long black hair, tied with a single silver thread. Wide, curious eyes. Dirt-streaked robes and calloused hands from hauling water or cleaning courtyards.
"Outer compound servant," he guessed.
She looked startled when she saw him.
"Oh! I—I didn't know anyone was down here," she said quickly.
He smiled faintly. "Most people don't."
"I… uh… Elder Jin Rou told me to bring you this." She held up a cloth-wrapped bundle. "Said it was 'reading material for your clever little brain.' Her words, not mine."
Wu-ren took the bundle and nodded.
"Thank you."
The girl didn't leave right away.
She glanced at the walls, the old slips, the faded ink. Her eyes were sharp, though she tried to hide it.
"You read all this stuff?"
"Some of it."
"Why?"
"It's quiet here."
She wrinkled her nose, but smiled. "Weird."
Then, without another word, she turned and walked off.
He watched her go.
Alone again, Wu-ren unwrapped the bundle.
Inside were five scrolls. Not jade slips, but parchment—handwritten, copied from older originals. He recognized two of them immediately.
"Intermediate-grade body-forging techniques. Nothing impressive… but she's testing me again."
He set them down carefully and stared at the stone wall.
"Good. Let her test me."
"I will pass them all."
He sat.
And once more, began to cultivate.