The jade's warmth was a constant, unsettling presence against Li's skin, a secret sun burning over his heart. In the days that followed, it became the silent partner to their grim campaign. The Thorn struck twice more. A lone sentry posted at a ford vanished without a sound. A two-man scouting party, sent to find the missing messenger, was found days later by their comrades, their throats slit by a blade of stone, their bodies arranged in a silent, mocking tableau.
With each strike, Li felt the jade pulse in response. The warmth would intensify, a wave of heat that spread through his chest and down his limbs, leaving behind not exhaustion, but a strange, invigorating clarity. His senses sharpened. In the darkness, he could see the individual veins on a leaf. He could hear the scuttle of a beetle over soil twenty paces away. The forest, once a place of hidden threats, now whispered its secrets to him. He could feel the life humming in the trees, the slow, patient pulse of the earth beneath his feet.
It should have felt like power. Instead, it felt like a possession.
He moved with a preternatural silence that even Lao remarked upon. His spear drills, once a struggle of muscle and will, became fluid, effortless dances. He could hold the most taxing stances for hours, his body as still and unmoving as the ancient cedars. The flint blade of his spear never dulled; it seemed to sharpen itself, its edge glinting with a faint, hungry light.
Mei was the first to voice the change she saw in him. They were resting in a new hideout, a hollow beneath the roots of a massive banyan tree, after a long night of observing an Azure Cloud camp.
"You don't blink as much," she said quietly, her eyes studying his face in the dim light. "And your eyes… they have a little green in them now. Like moss on a stone."
Li looked away, his hand instinctively going to the jade beneath his tunic. He could feel its rhythmic thrum, a counter-beat to his own heart. "It's the jade," he admitted, his voice low. "It's… changing me."
Lao, who had been listening, nodded slowly. "The Heart of the Mountain is not a tool, Li. It is a symbiont. It feeds on your intent, your will, your… actions. In return, it grants you a fraction of its own ancient strength. But it is a hungry guest. The more you feed it, the more it will demand."
"What does it demand?" Mei asked, her voice tight with worry.
"Purpose," Lao said, his gaze fixed on Li. "It was created to protect this land. Its purpose is defense. But power is a river that can easily overflow its banks. The line between protector and predator is thin. The jade does not care for the distinction. It only knows the result. It feels the blood of those who threaten its domain, and it is… satisfied."
The word hung in the air, ugly and final. Satisfied.
Li remembered the cold hollow he'd felt after his first kills. That hollow was now being filled, not with his own sense of justice, but with the jade's ancient, alien approval. It scared him more than any Azure Cloud soldier.
Their campaign of shadows was working. Officer Jiao's forces were becoming paranoid. Patrols that were once confident now moved in tight, nervous groups, their heads constantly on a swivel. They no longer strayed far from their main camp. The valley, for them, had become a green labyrinth of sudden, silent death. They called their phantom enemy the "Forest Demon."
But a cornered animal is at its most dangerous. Jiao's response was not a retreat, but an escalation of brutality. Unable to find the Thorn, he turned his fury on the valley itself.
It was Mei who brought them the news, her face ashen. She had been scouting near the northern ridges.
"He's burning it," she said, her voice trembling with a mixture of horror and rage. "Not villages. The forest itself. He's using fire-arrows and oil. He's creating a firebreak, a wall of blackened earth to hem us in. He's… he's scarring the land."
Lao's face, usually an impassive mask, twisted in a rare spasm of pure fury. "The fool," he snarled. "He wounds the mountain itself."
That night, from their high vantage point, they saw the orange glow on the northern horizon. Not the concentrated fire of a village, but a wide, crawling line of destruction. The scent of smoke, thick and choking, carried for miles on the wind. Li felt the jade on his chest grow hot, almost painfully so. It wasn't a pulse of satisfaction this time. It was a throb of raw, elemental anger. A deep, resonant vibration that seemed to travel up from the ground, through the soles of his feet, and into his bones.
The land itself was in pain.
A new sensation flooded Li—not the jade's clarity, but its rage. It was a vast, ancient fury, the anger of millennia of slow growth being consumed in an afternoon. It filled him, burning away his own fear, his own calculated caution. The cold, focused Thorn was gone, replaced by something primal.
"We have to stop him," Li said, his voice a low growl that didn't sound entirely like his own.
"We cannot fight fire with a spear," Lao said, though his own hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists.
"We don't fight the fire," Li said, his jade-touched eyes glowing in the dark. "We fight the one who lights it."
The plan that formed was not one of shadows or subtle strikes. It was born of the mountain's wrath. They would find the crew tasked with setting the fires. They would not just kill them. They would break them. They would send a message that could not be ignored.
They found the fire crew at dawn, a group of ten soldiers led by a hulking sergeant. They were working at the edge of the devastation, lighting torches from a central fire, preparing to advance the line. Behind them stretched a swath of land blackened and smoldering, a wound on the green flesh of the valley.
Li did not wait for a signal. He did not plan an ambush. The jade's heat was a furnace in his chest, its fury his own. He walked out of the tree line and into the clearing of ash and stumps, his spear held loosely at his side.
The soldiers saw him and froze for a moment, stunned by the audacity. Then the sergeant laughed, a coarse, ugly sound. "The Forest Demon! Just one scrawny brat!"
Li didn't answer. He simply looked at them, and as he did, he let the jade's power flow through him. He felt his connection to the land solidify. He could feel the pain of the scorched earth, the silent scream of the burning trees. He channeled it all, focusing it into his gaze.
The sergeant's laugh died in his throat. The other soldiers took a step back. There was something wrong with the boy's eyes. They weren't human. They were the color of deep jade, and they held the cold, implacable weight of the mountain itself.
Li took a step forward. The ground beneath his feet seemed to tremble. It was a subtle vibration, but enough to make the soldiers stagger.
"You defile this place," Li said, his voice echoing with a resonance that was not his own. It was the voice of the valley, deep and grinding. "You will burn no more."
He moved then. It was not the swift, silent strike of the Thorn. It was a storm. He was a blur of motion, his spear a green-tinged arc of death. He moved with a strength and speed that was impossible, parrying blows with his ironwood shaft, shattering swords with his flint point, moving through the soldiers like a scythe through wheat.
He was not just fighting them. He was the land's vengeance made flesh. A soldier lunged at him; Li sidestepped and the man's foot sank into the ash-covered ground as if it were quicksand, trapping him. Another swung a axe; a root, blackened and seemingly dead, erupted from the soil and wrapped around his ankle, yanking him off balance.
The sergeant, bellowing in terror and rage, charged. Li met his charge, not with a dodge, but with a raw display of power. He dropped his spear and caught the man's descending sword arm with his bare hand. There was a crack of bone. The sergeant screamed. Li held him fast, his jade-green eyes boring into the man's soul.
"Tell Jiao," Li whispered, the words carrying on the smoky wind. "Tell him the Mountain is awake. And it is hungry."
He released the man, who crumpled to the ground, clutching his shattered arm. The remaining soldiers, those who could still move, broke and ran, scattering into the burnt forest, their courage utterly shattered.
Li stood amidst the carnage, his chest heaving, the jade blazing like a ember against his skin. The power receded, leaving him drained and shaking. He looked at his hands. They were clean.
Mei and Lao emerged from the trees, their faces etched with awe and fear. They had witnessed not a battle, but an execution. They had seen the weapon they were forging, and they had seen how easily it could slip from their control.
Li picked up his spear. The flint blade was unmarked. He looked at the retreating soldiers, then at the line of fire he had stopped.
The Thorn had drawn blood. But the Waking Heart had tasted it. And Li knew, with a cold certainty, that it would not be so easily sated again.