By the time Tai Lung turned nine, pain had lost its novelty.
It did not disappear. It did not lessen. It simply stopped demanding attention. Like background noise in a city one had lived in long enough, it became something the mind stepped around rather than confronted.
Five years. That was how long he had been training the Dragon Warrior Codex. Three years since he had first been brought into the Music Pavilion and placed before an instrument. His days now moved between two disciplines that appeared unrelated on the surface, yet increasingly felt like different expressions of the same thing.
Organ Fortification had begun at the start of the year.
Unlike earlier stages, it did not announce itself with spectacle. There were no visible changes, no immediate gains in strength or speed. Instead, it worked inward, patiently and without mercy. Breath was regulated until the lungs burned. The heart was stressed, slowed, then forced to surge again. Blunt impacts landed against his torso in measured intervals, never enough to bruise, always enough to remind him that something fragile still lived beneath the muscle.
Yan Zhen watched everything.
"This stage is quiet," his master had said. "That's why it kills the careless."
Tai Lung understood.
During the worst moments – when breath refused to settle, when his chest felt too tight to expand – there was only one thing that kept him steady.
Pride.
Come on, Roman, he told himself. This is nothing. Which road in Europe doesn't have bodies buried beneath it? That you buried?
The thought grounded him.
He remembered boardrooms where a single wrong word ruined lives. Deals signed with smiles that hid poison. A world where suffering was abstracted into numbers and footnotes. Compared to that, this pain was honest. He subjected people to worse, at least in his opinion.
Sometimes, as he endured, another voice surfaced from memory.
The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.
Nietzsche.
The words did not inspire him. They reminded him of who he was. A Man-Eater was his nickname. He sometimes wondered if they would make a film about him too? He really loved the nickname, or would they make them about those old morons first? Wolf in Cashmere and that Raider guy.
During the previous stage – Muscle Layering – Yan Zhen had introduced the furnace.
The first time had broken something in him. Not physically. Mentally.
The chamber had been small, the walls lined with formations that glowed dull red when activated. When the door was sealed and the heat began to rise, Tai Lung understood immediately that this was not ordinary fire.
It burned.
And yet it did not burn him.
The heat pressed inward, sinking through skin and muscle, igniting something deeper. Sweat evaporated before it could fall. His vision swam. Breathing felt optional and impossible at the same time.
Yan Zhen's voice had come calmly through the stone.
"This is a controlled flame. It will not char your flesh. It will only reveal how much of you is unworthy to remain."
Each stage after that had been worse.
Tenfold, his master had said.
Now, sitting cross-legged in the furnace again, Tai Lung sometimes wondered if this was what hell felt like. A place where nothing was hidden, where every weakness was brought to the surface and held there until it either changed or burned.
He did not scream.
He did not pray.
He endured.
When he emerged, his body trembled. His organs felt heavier, denser, as if they had learned a new language of strain.
Music became his counterweight.
In the Music Pavilion, the world softened. His progress there was swift – not because he was exceptionally talented, but because much of the work had already been done in another life. Theory came easily. Harmony, structure, tension and release. His hearing had sharpened alongside his body, a side effect of the Codex Yan Zhen had not bothered to comment on.
What remained was the mechanical labor.
Hours of repetition. Fingers pressing strings until skin thickened and sensitivity deepened rather than dulled.
Sometimes, when the pavilion was empty and no one was watching, Tai Lung experimented.
Fragments surfaced unbidden. A sequence of notes here. A turn of phrase there. Melodies that did not belong to this world. He never played them in full. His skill was not there yet.
Aside from the Codex and the music, hand signs were added quietly.
There was no ceremony to it. No announcement. One morning, between furnace sessions and breathing drills, Tan Na Yu simply told him to stand, raise his hands, and imitate the pattern she demonstrated.
Tai Lung stared.
Then he laughed.
He couldn't help it.
The sequence – interlocking fingers, angled palms, the transitions – looked exactly like the hand signs from a Japanese cartoon he had watched as a child about a blond boy with a fox inside. He remembered boys in his class copying them in hallways and screaming attack names.
He snorted.
"This is… necessary?" he asked, unable to fully hide his amusement. "Can't spells be cast without this?"
Tan Na Yu looked at him in the way one looks at someone who has misunderstood something fundamental.
"Why do you find it funny?" she asked.
He hesitated. The reason sounded childish even to him. He shrugged. "It looks… stupid."
She gestured for him to sit.
He obeyed.
"Why do cultivators not eat in bed?" she asked.
Tai Lung frowned. "Because it's… improper?"
"No," she said. "Because it erases borders."
She met his gaze.
"A bed has one purpose. Sleep. If you eat there, rest there, think there, you teach your mind that there is no separation. Over time, sleep becomes shallow. Waking becomes difficult. The body stops recognizing signals."
She paused.
"That is why we do not linger in bed. Why we meditate in specific rooms. Why we bow before entering certain halls. These are not traditions. They are rituals."
The words settled slowly.
"Hand signs," Tan Na Yu said, lifting her hands again, "are the same. They tell the mind and the qi that something has begun. They define what has begun. At early stages, this separation is not optional."
She lowered her hands.
"Yes," she added, "one day you will cast spells without them. When your qi obeys thought as naturally as breathing. But until then, these signs are scaffolding."
Tai Lung was quiet.
"I understand," he said at last.
She nodded. "Good. Then practice."