The rest of the squad engaged without shouting or hesitation, their movements shaped by countless battles fought long before Mo Xuan had ever arrived at Northwatch, each warrior settling instinctively into the gaps between their companions.
Mo Xuan tightened his grip on his spear.
An Ironhide Burrower slipped past Captain Jiao's flank and lunged toward a young recruit whose formation had broken. Before the recruit could react, Mo Xuan's spear moved. The banner pole remained strapped to his back. With a sweeping motion, he knocked the beast upward. Before it reached the peak of its arc, he drove the spear skyward, the tip punching clean through its abdomen. Blood sprayed across the frozen ground.
The beast collapsed.
Another beast burst from the snow behind him, trying to sneak up. Mo Xuan pivoted and ripped the banner pole from his back. He swept the pole into the air, spun once, and smashed it into the beast mid-leap, sending it flying into the distance.
By the time the last Ironhide Burrower fell, streaks of black and red stained the snow.
Captain Jiao surveyed the aftermath, looking at everyone. Some had a few scratches, but there were no casualties. His gaze lingered on Mo Xuan for a single heartbeat before moving on.
After strapping the pole across his shoulders, Mo Xuan pulled his weapon free from the beast carcass and studied it for a moment, blood still dripping from the tip in slow drops that froze halfway to the ground. Captain Jiao's boots crunched past him, unhurried. Mo Xuan noted the same thing everyone else in the squad had likely noted by now — the captain never once raised his voice, and somehow that made his approval or disapproval carry further than shouting ever could have.
"Clean up. Reform and move out," Captain Jiao said, and the squad obeyed without discussion, clearing the loose scattering of bodies around the kill site and all traces of the battle before drawing back into a column with the same practised ease they'd shown breaking apart into the defensive arc minutes earlier.
A recruit near the rear — the same younger one whose formation had broken — kept glancing sideways at Mo Xuan as they fell into step, clearly working up to something. He was around the same age bracket as Mo Xuan; his spear held a fraction too tight even now that the danger had passed.
He opened his mouth several times, but each time closed it again without speaking.
One of the veterans walking a few paces ahead — a woman with a burn scar running from her jaw down into her collar — glanced back, nodded to Mo Xuan, then turned her head.
They walked in relative silence for a stretch after that, boots crunching in a steady rhythm against packed snow, the wind picking up enough to make conversation feel like an unnecessary expenditure of breath. Mo Xuan let his mind drift over the fight again, replaying it the way he'd learned to replay every real engagement since the trial zone — not to relive it, but to extract whatever it had to teach him before the memory softened into something less useful.
A broken line was an opening, and an opening was where beasts and men alike found their way to a kill. He filed the thought away beside everything else the border had already taught him in less than two weeks — that survival here wasn't a matter of individual strength so much as the absence of gaps, and that his own strength only mattered so long as it allowed him to become the shield wherever the line fractured.
Further up the line, two of the veterans had struck up a low conversation, their voices pitched to carry only as far as the recruits closest to them.
"New one's got decent instincts," one of them said, tilting his head back toward Mo Xuan without quite looking at him.
"Decent," the other repeated, unconvinced. "He put a spear through a Burrower's gut on his first patrol. That's not decent. That's excellent."
"You can tell by how he chokes up on the grip." The first veteran shrugged.
"Doesn't matter. Dead is dead," another added.
"The Captain noticed too. Saw him linger."
"The Captain lingers on everyone the first week. Doesn't mean anything yet."
"Didn't say it meant anything."
"Just said he noticed."
The exchange dissolved back into silence after that, neither of them inclined to pursue it further. Mo Xuan caught every word of it without appearing to, his expanded consciousness making eavesdropping less of an effort.
He felt no particular reaction to the praise, or to the caution wrapped around it. Both were accurate as far as he could judge. He had put a spear through a Burrower's gut on his first patrol. He had not yet earned anything beyond a captain's passing glance, and glances, as the second veteran had pointed out, carried no weight on their own out here.
The recruit who'd frozen earlier eventually fell into step beside him, working up his courage in visible stages before finally speaking again. "How did you know it would come from behind? The second one."
"I didn't," Mo Xuan said. "I just trust my instinct."
"Instinct?" The recruit frowned, clearly expecting a more satisfying answer than that.
Mo Xuan nodded. He considered how to put the rest of it into words. The recruit turned that over for a moment, trying to map the advice onto something concrete.
The snow thickened again as the afternoon light began its slow retreat, the gate of Northwatch still hours distant. Mo Xuan let the conversation around him fade into background noise and turned his attention inward instead, toward his own thoughts.
The recruit who'd frozen fell into step beside him one final time, this time without needing to work up any courage first.
"Thank you," he said. "For earlier."
Mo Xuan nodded once and didn't offer anything further, because there was nothing more to say.
By the time Northwatch's walls finally rose out of the grey distance, the sky had darkened into true evening, and the squad's earlier tension had settled into the particular, bone-deep tiredness that came after surviving a patrol. Two sentries flanked the entrance, wrapped in enough layers of fur that only their eyes showed, and, upon noticing Captain Jiao, they waved them through without a word.
Mo Xuan walked through the gates with the rest of them, his spear resting easy across his shoulder now, the weapon no longer a stranger in his grip. Inside, the fortress opened into a wide, packed-earth yard ringed by barracks. Lanterns were being lit along the walls, cold-fire lanterns that threw light without warmth, casting everything in a pale, bluish cast. Behind him, the frozen wilderness swallowed the last of the daylight.
At the requisition hall, a clerk accepted Captain Jiao's patrol report without looking up. A bronze token clicked onto the counter and slid toward Mo Xuan. Even the veterans pocketed their tokens without a word.
The next day, life surged with brutal purpose. Hammer strikes rang from the blacksmith forges, captive spirit beasts roared in reinforced cages as handlers subdued them, medicinal herbs simmered in cauldrons throughout the Alchemy Quarter while formation masters adjusted shimmering arrays that pulsed like beating hearts.
Northwatch Stronghold was a living war machine, forged to hold back the endless threat from the northern beast mountains. Every person here was fighting for something. Mo Xuan took in the sight quietly.
To survive here, resources were indispensable, and every single one was earned. No handouts, only merit. The entire stronghold functioned on this brutal but fair system.
Beast tamers wrestled frost-furred wolves into submission to bolster the scout units. Alchemy teams brewed recovery pills day and night; their work was the thin line between life and death for soldiers on winter raids. Formation wardens climbed icy walls to repair cracked defensive arrays that kept the beasts at bay, and Blacksmith apprentices forged spearheads, hammering metal until their knuckles bled.
Every role contributed, every contribution was counted, and every count became merit.
Merit was the lifeblood of Northwatch. Every patrol, every forged weapon, every repaired array, every refined pill became another entry in the fortress's ledger. With enough merit, a soldier could enter its vaults of ancient battle manuals, forgotten treatises, rare techniques, and cultivation insights gathered across centuries of border warfare. Without it, nothing was free.
No pills. No techniques. No weapons.
Here, resources were not given. They were earned through sweat and blood.
Days settled into a strict rhythm. Mo Xuan went on patrol at dawn and trained with his team later in the day. The weapon felt unwieldy at first, its length throwing off his balance, its weight refusing to move with the familiarity of a sword. He drilled until his shoulders burned, repeating thrusts and sweeps until the motions no longer felt like borrowed movements but his own. Each morning, the spear shook less in his grip.
A few days later, Captain Jiao told him he could stop using the spear and return to his original weapon. He also stopped serving as the banner-bearer.
Mo Xuan walked slowly along the length of the central yard, letting the noise and motion of the place settle. He had spent his few days at Northwatch learning to survive its patrols. He understood now that surviving the patrols had only ever been the smallest part of what this place demanded of him.
A line of recruits filed past the requisition counter ahead of him, each one presenting a small bronze token before receiving whatever the ledger said they'd earned the right to. The system simply ran, indifferent and exact.