The Ironveil Sect library closed at sundown.
Everyone knew that. Disciples, elders, even the old janitor who swept ash off the stone floors every morning. Sundown meant lamps out, doors locked, go back to your rooms and cultivate like a proper practitioner.
Rhodan had been ignoring that rule for three months.
It wasn't some act of rebellion. Rebellion took courage and everyone at Ironveil had made it clear Rhodan didn't have much of that. It was desperation. Plain and simple desperation, the kind that gets under your skin and doesn't let go.
He pushed deeper into the forgotten stacks. The back section of the library where nobody came anymore. The shelves back here leaned at bad angles and the dust sat so thick on everything you could drag a finger through it and leave a clean line. His lamp threw a small circle of orange light against the dark. The air smelled like old paper and mildew.
Rhodan was nineteen. Tall but not filled out yet, lean in the way of someone who trained but never seemed to get results. Dark hair, young face. The kind of face people described as sweet when they were being nice. When they weren't being nice they just called him weak.
And they usually weren't being nice.
He wasn't thinking about that right now. He was thinking about the scroll tucked under his arm, the one he had found wedged behind a collapsed shelf three weeks ago. The title had been so faded he almost missed it.
The Primordial Yang Absorption Method: A Complete Record.
He had read it six times already. He still wasn't sure he believed what it said.
Rhodan dropped into his usual chair, a cracked leather thing that smelled like rot, and unrolled the scroll across his knees. The handwriting was dense and old. It had taken him two weeks to fully read it. The author was listed only as Brother V, and the opening was equal parts pride and warning.
I have walked a path no man before me dared walk. I have been called broken. Less than a man. I write this not to save my name, which is already ruined, but for the one who comes after me. The one desperate enough to listen.
Yang essence is life. Yang essence is power. And Yang essence, once it has passed through a woman's body and been touched by her Yin energy, becomes something far more refined than what it started as.
The technique is simple. Doing it is not.
Rhodan kept reading. He had read this part six times and every time his jaw went tight.
The technique required a practitioner to absorb Yang essence after it had already been left inside a woman. After it had sat there, mixed with her Yin energy, and transformed into something richer. The method of absorption was direct. Oral. No tools, no delay, straight from the source.
Rhodan stopped reading.
He stared at the wall.
He looked back at the scroll.
He kept reading.
Brother V laid it out plainly. Every sect that had ever found this technique had thrown it away. Not because it failed. Because of what it looked like. Because of what people would say about a man who did it.
They laughed at me, Brother V wrote. They said things I will not repeat here. And I cultivated anyway. And the flame that grew in my core was nothing like what they carried. It was refined. It had passed through something sacred before it reached me and it was stronger for it.
The abilities come slow. Do not expect results in a week or a month. But they come. Fire first, always fire, because Yang essence is heat at its root. Then the body hardens. Then things happen that you won't have words for yet.
Be patient. Be willing. Or learn to be.
Rhodan sat without moving for a long time.
Outside the wind cut across the sect grounds. Somewhere a door shut hard. The lamp flame bent sideways and straightened again.
He thought about his cultivation rank. Ninth tier Initiate. The lowest you could be at his age without being asked to leave. He thought about the assessment coming next month, where Elder Voss would look at his core and write something small and damning in her ledger.
He thought about Cassian.
Cassian, who had tested at third tier Adept last week and gotten a standing ovation in the main hall. Cassian, who was tall and lean and moved like someone who had never once doubted himself. Cassian, who trained two wings over and somehow always had a crowd around him.
He thought about Mya.
Mya was his girlfriend. Had been for eight months. She was four foot eleven with a mouth that never quit and an attitude three times her size. Smart, sharp, loud when she wanted to be and quiet when she didn't. She and Cassian had started training together recently. Study partners, she said. He had no reason not to believe that.
He looked down at the scroll.
Be patient. Be willing. Or learn to be.
Rhodan rolled the scroll tight and tucked it back under his arm. He sat in the dark a while longer. Then he got up and walked back to the dormitory with the scroll hidden inside his robe and his mind turning over and over and not stopping.
He had not made a decision.
That was what he told himself.
He made it back to the dormitory just past midnight. East wing, old building, third floor. The heating runes on his floor worked maybe half the time and tonight was not one of the good nights. He tucked the scroll deeper into his robe and climbed the stairs.
He shared a room with Mya.
That had been her idea, eight months ago, and he had said yes so fast it embarrassed him to think about now. The room was bigger than the singles, which was the practical reason she gave. The real reason, he had believed back then, was that she wanted to be close to him.
He still believed that. Mostly.
He pushed the door open.
Mya was sitting cross legged on her side of the bed, still in her training clothes, a thin white top and shorts that did absolutely nothing to hide the shape of her. She was tiny, barely clearing five feet, with dark skin and natural hair she kept pulled back when she trained. What she lacked in height she made up for everywhere else. Her ass was genuinely obscene for a girl her size, round and full and pushing against those shorts like they owed her something. Her chest was small, barely there, but her nipples pressed through the thin fabric of her top thick and obvious and she had never once cared.
She looked up when he walked in.
"You're back late," she said.
"Library," he said.
"Again." She said it flat, not a question.
He set his bag down by his desk and started pulling off his outer robe. "You know me."
"Sadly."
He almost smiled. That was Mya. No warmth in the words but a kind of lazy affection underneath them that he had learned to read.
Then someone knocked on the door.
Mya's face changed. Not dramatically. Just a small thing around her eyes, a brightness that hadn't been there a second ago. "That's Cassian," she said. "I told him he could come by. We were going to go over the fire refinement drills from today."
"Sure," Rhodan said.
She was already off the bed and at the door.
Cassian filled the doorframe the way naturally large people do without meaning to. He was tall, a full head taller than Rhodan, with the lean proportioned build of someone whose body had decided early on to be exactly right and never deviated. No wasted mass, no softness anywhere. His jaw was clean, his eyes were the particular light grey of someone who had learned that people would keep looking at them, and he had the easy half smile of a man who had never walked into a room and felt unwelcome.
He was, Rhodan thought for the hundredth time, genuinely hard to hate on sight. Which made it worse.
"Rhodan," Cassian said, nodding at him. Not unfriendly. Not particularly warm either. The acknowledgment you gave furniture that you respected.
"Cassian."
Cassian stepped inside and Mya shut the door behind him. He dropped into the chair at Mya's desk like he had done it before, relaxed and comfortable, one long leg crossed over the other. His training whites were still on, open at the collar, and Rhodan could see the clean lines of his chest where the fabric fell open.
"Rough session today," Cassian said to Mya. "Your left stance is still collapsing on the third rotation."
"My left stance is fine," Mya said, climbing back onto the bed and sitting across from him. "Your standards are just stupid."
"My standards got me third tier Adept."
"Good for you. Want me to clap?"
Cassian grinned. It was a good grin, unhurried and genuine, and Mya's mouth pulled sideways in response even though she was clearly trying not to let it.
Rhodan sat at his own desk and opened a book he was not reading.
They talked about training. Mya pulled her knees up to her chest and gestures got bigger as she got more into it, her hands moving, her voice climbing. She was animated the way she always got when something actually interested her. Cassian leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and listened with his full attention, which Rhodan had noticed was something Cassian did. He actually listened. He didn't scan the room or check the door. He just looked at whoever was talking like they were the only thing happening.
Mya talked. Cassian listened and occasionally said something that made her laugh.
Rhodan turned a page he had not read.
After a while Cassian stood to leave. He was the kind of tall where standing up in a room reminded you of his presence all over again. He said goodnight to Rhodan with the same easy nod as before. He said goodnight to Mya differently, quieter, and she walked him to the door and they stood in the doorframe talking low for a minute before he left.
Rhodan did not look up from his book.
Mya came back and flopped onto the bed on her stomach, her ridiculous ass sitting up in those shorts, her chin in her hands. She looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"He's good," she said.
"Yeah," Rhodan said.
"Like genuinely. His core output is almost twice mine and he still makes it look easy."
"Sounds about right."
She glanced over at him. Her dark eyes moved across his face looking for something. Whatever it was she didn't find it or didn't push on it. She rolled over and reached for the lamp on her side.
"Don't stay up too late," she said. "You look tired."
"I'm fine."
The lamp went out on her side. The room went half dark.
Rhodan sat at his desk and waited until her breathing evened out and then he reached into his bag and pulled out the scroll and set it on the desk in front of him.
He read it again. All of it. Slowly.
When he reached the part about oral absorption, direct contact, straight from the source, he sat with it for a long time.
Then he rolled the scroll up carefully and put it in the locked drawer at the bottom of his desk, the one he kept for things he didn't want found.
He looked at Mya asleep across the room. The shape of her under the blanket. The thick dark outline of her hair against the pillow.
He looked at the drawer.
He turned off his lamp.
He did not sleep for a very long time.