The washing came before the counting-a freezing deluge from stone channels overhead that did less to clean the skin than strip the spirit.
It was mechanical, devoid of comfort. The water fell in heavy, rhythmic pulses, cold enough to make the lungs seize.
Blood ran thin and pink across the stone floor, swirling into narrow drains cut with a precision that suggested they were designed to swallow far more than what was being spilled today. Attendants moved among them using long wooden poles to nudge the slow, curt gestures directing the flow. They were shepherds guiding a flock of wounded sheep.
Wounds were looked at once, briefly, with the detached gaze of a merchant inspecting bruised fruit. Soiled bandages were tossed into heaps to be burned. There were no words of comfort for the fallen. Anyone who could not stand was dragged aside, their heels scraping against the wet stone as they were pulled back toward the darkness of the mountain tunnels. No ceremony accompanied their removal.
Xu Qian stood under the downpour until his fingers numbed and his skin took on a translucent, ghostly pallor. The icy pressure did what the adrenaline of the field could not; it dulled the rhythmic ache in his shoulder to a manageable, frozen throb. But the heat was still there-buried deep in the marrow, patient and hungry. When the attendants waved him forward, he stepped out, wrung the icy water from his sleeves, and joined the shivering line of survivors.
They were fewer now. A staggering, hollowed-out fraction of the thousands who had stood at the mountain's base at dawn. Hundreds instead of thousands. The scale of the loss settled as cold, hard fact rather than grief.
They were marched through a gate cut directly into the mountain's heart and into the Outer Hall.
The space was long, rectangular, and oppressive. Massive stone pillars ran down its length, each carved with shallow, geometric grooves that seemed to trap the flickering torchlight rather than reflect it. The air here was different-heavy with the scent of wet stone, old dust, and the sharp, metallic tang of the suppression incense burning in iron braziers. At the far end, a raised platform stood backed by massive doors of black wood, stamped with the iron seal of the sect.
A man waited on the platform.
Age seemed to have forgotten him; his face was a map of hard lines and weathered skin that suggested forty years as easily as sixty. He stood with a spine like a spear-shaft, his robes of charcoal-grey hanging in perfect stillness. His eyes were flat, offering not even the ghost of a welcome.
"Instructor Fan," someone murmured. The name lowered the temperature of the room.
Instructor Fan raised one hand. The hall went silent-a heavy, expectant quiet that made the sound of dripping water from the survivors' robes seem deafening.
"You have been accepted as outer disciples," he said. His voice was not loud, but it possessed a resonance that vibrated in the stone beneath their feet. "Do not misunderstand what that means. Survival and success are not the same thing."
He offered no congratulations. He showed no smile. To him, they were merely the raw material that hadn't broken yet.
"You are martial artists," he continued, his gaze sweeping over the bruised and the bandaged. "You are not cultivators. You are the soil from which cultivation might one day grow. Most soil is barren."
A ripple passed through the hall-not of outrage, but of adjustment. The ego that had carried them through the Judgment Field was being systematically dismantled.
"True cultivation begins at Flesh Tempering," Instructor Fan said. "Most of you will spend your lives reaching for that threshold and die before your fingers touch the frame. Beyond that door lie the realms you have heard of in stories."
He named them then, his voice dropping into a cadence that felt ritualistic.
"Qi Accumulation. Foundation Stabilization. Core Formation. Spirit Manifestation."
He stopped there. He explained nothing about what they meant or what power they granted. To men who had just fought with grit and rusted steel, the names sounded like titles of distant gods.
"If you are asking about the higher paths," Fan said, "you are already asking the wrong questions. You do not look at the peak of the mountain when your boots are stuck in the mud."
A hand rose near the front. It was the young man who had stood beside Xu Qian during the descent, his face pale and his breath hitching. "Instructor," he asked, his voice trembling, "what realm are you in?"
Instructor Fan's gaze fixed on him. The boy seemed to shrink under the weight of it.
"Peak Foundation Stabilization," the Instructor said.
No pride. No elaboration. He said it the way a man might state the height of a wall he had built. To the martial artists in the room, the gap between their mortal strength and Peak Foundation Stabilization was an abyss they couldn't even map. The boy's hand lowered. He asked no second question.
"Discipline matters," Instructor Fan continued. "Breathing matters. Obedience matters more than both. Talent is a flicker of a candle in a windstorm; it is unreliable. Only the method remains."
An attendant stepped forward, carrying a tray of small, wax-sealed cloth packets.
"These are suppression pills," Fan said. "Issued only to those who carried injuries from the field. One per person. Swallow it now, in my presence. If you think to save it, to sell it, or to study it, you will find that the sect's mercy has very narrow banks."
When the tray reached Xu Qian, he took the packet with a numb hand. He broke the seal and placed the pill on his tongue. Bitterness flooded his mouth-a sharp, alkaline sting that tasted of burnt copper and bile. It left a metallic tang that crawled across his tongue. As he swallowed, he felt the effect begin to radiate from his stomach. The heat in his shoulder receded, shoved back into a dull, manageable ache. It felt as though a layer of cold lead had been poured over his nerves. The relief was real, but it came with a warning he could feel in his bones.
"This will not cure you," Instructor Fan warned. "It is a shackle, not a remedy. It will keep you alive and functional for the induction. If you waste the window it provides, that is your choice."
The tray vanished. In its place, another attendant brought forward a stack of thin, cheaply bound manuals.
"These are issued," Fan said. "In this sect, you do not choose your path. The path chooses you based on what you are worth."
The manuals were passed down the lines. Xu Qian felt the rough, fibrous texture of the paper as it met his palm. It was thin, the binding utilitarian and stiff.
"Basic Sword Cultivation Method," Instructor Fan said. "This is your foundation. It is the same for every outer disciple, whether you were a prince or a beggar yesterday."
He waited until the last man had gripped his manual before continuing.
"You will also receive the Standard Qi to Edge Circulation," he said. "This is the sect's breathing method. It is the rhythm by which we live. You will learn it as it is written. You will not modify it. You will not 'improve' it."
His gaze moved, measuring the exhaustion in their eyes.
"Every sect breathes differently," he said, and for the first time, his voice held a trace of something grim and satisfied. "That is how we recognize our own in the dark. That is how we know who belongs to the mountain and who is a thief."
The words settled. Identity as rhythm. Belonging as habit. To change your breath was to change your soul.
"Library access," Instructor Fan said, gesturing toward the black doors behind him. "Passing the entry examination grants you a one-time privilege. Access to Level One."
He paused, letting the weight of the privilege sink in.
"Level One serves the outer disciples. The second and third levels are reserved for the inner and core circles; above them, the fourth remains the domain of elders and stewards. The fifth level's secrets belong solely to the sect leader and the ancestors. Do not let your eyes wander toward doors that are not meant for you."
A man stepped forward from the shadows of the platform. His robes were neater, his expression sharpened by a different kind of hardness-the hardness of a man who managed the accounts of human lives.
"Steward Han Zhi," Fan introduced. "Records, resources, discipline."
Han Zhi gave no speech. He simply inclined his head, his eyes scanning the survivors as if calculating the cost of their future burials. "If you have questions about the rules," he said, his voice like dry parchment, "ask before you break them. We do not accept 'ignorance' as a defense."
The induction ended as abruptly as it began.
They were dismissed in groups, led by silent attendants down a side corridor that felt like a descent back into the mountain's belly. The outer quarters were a series of stone-walled cells, small and damp, designed for four men to a room. There was no luxury here-only straw pallets and a single wooden basin for water.
Xu Qian moved to the pallet farthest from the door. He sat, his movements slow and deliberate, and began the grim task of unwrapping his shoulder. The bandages were soaked through, a mixture of basin water and old blood. He retied the binding with a focus that bordered on trance, his eyes fixed on the flickering oil lamp in the corner.
The pill's effect held, but the phantom heat of the poison was beginning to gnaw at the edges of the suppression. He opened the manual.
The Basic Sword Cultivation Method was plain-brutally so. Diagrams of posture, the grip of a hilt, the alignment of the spine. There were no promises of immortality here, only the physics of violence. He turned the page to the Standard Qi to Edge Circulation. The breathing pattern was jagged. It required a deep, lung-expanding draw followed by a sharp, forced exhale through the teeth. It was designed to harden the diaphragm and sharpen the focus, but as Xu Qian tried to follow the diagram, his injured shoulder flared in violent protest.
His first attempt ended in a sharp gasp. The circulation pattern snagged on the damaged tissue of his arm like a thread catching on a thorn. The heat surged, momentarily overwhelming the pill's cold shackle.
Xu Qian closed his eyes, sweat beading on his forehead. He forced himself to begin the cycle again, slower this time, visualizing the breath as a slow, cooling stream rather than a jagged edge.
By nightfall, the room was filled with the heavy, uneven breathing of his roommates-three other men he didn't know, whose names he hadn't yet bothered to learn. They were all doing the same: clutching their manuals, trying to find a rhythm in a place that wanted to break them.
Xu Qian lay back on the straw and stared at the dark stone of the ceiling. He counted his breaths, forcing his body to accept the cadence the sect demanded, even as his shoulder screamed against it.
Tomorrow, the doors to the library would open.
One choice only.
He needed something that the Basic Method couldn't give him. He needed a way to survive the poison long enough to stop being "soil" and start being a weapon.
The road was narrowing. And in the dark of the mountain, there was no room for a single misstep.