By the time Gu Yan reached the lower ravine, the sun had climbed high enough to melt the frost from the upper paths.
Down below, the cold remained.
The ravine cut through the eastern slope like an old wound, narrow at the mouth and wider inside, where broken stone, bent pines, and patches of pale moss clung to damp shadows. The path descending into it was little more than a strip of packed dirt and loose gravel. Few outer disciples liked coming here unless the mission points were worth the trouble.
Today, they were barely worth it.
That was the point.
Han Lei was already there when Gu Yan arrived. He stood near a slanted rock at the edge of the path, one foot braced against it, arms folded, a short collecting blade tucked through the back of his belt. He looked up when he heard footsteps.
"You came."
Gu Yan stopped beside him and glanced down into the ravine.
"I said I might."
Han Lei snorted. "That's the same thing, with you."
There were five other disciples already below, spread through the first section of the ravine. None belonged to the inner court. Two were cutting resin from dark-barked trees near the western wall. Another pair knelt by a damp patch of stone, scraping frost moss into clay jars. The last one stood watch with a spear too long for his own arms.
No one looked relaxed.
Gu Yan noticed that first.
The mission itself was simple enough. Collect resin wood. Gather frost moss. Avoid disturbing the deeper nests of stone lizards and the burrows near the north bend. It should have been routine.
Instead, everyone below kept glancing toward the deeper part of the ravine.
"Something happened?" Gu Yan asked.
Han Lei uncrossed his arms. "This morning, one of the first groups found tracks near the north bend. Bigger than lizards. No one wanted to report it because then the mission would get sealed and the points would vanish."
"So they stayed."
"They stayed," Han Lei said. "Because outer disciples are outer disciples."
Gu Yan looked at the slope again.
That part, at least, made sense.
Low-value missions were often the most dangerous in practice. Not because the threat itself was always greater, but because no one important cared enough to clean them properly. The inner court avoided them. The stewards underreported them. Outer disciples took the risk because they needed points badly enough to pretend the danger was ordinary.
Han Lei jerked his chin toward the trees below. "We'll take the east side. Less resin, more moss. Fewer people."
"More slippery ground."
"You won't fall."
Han Lei said it casually.
Still, Gu Yan noticed.
Yesterday, Han Lei had called him useful. Today, he was already building decisions around what Gu Yan could probably handle. That was how trust usually began in places like this—not through words, but through assumptions quietly made and quietly accepted.
They started down the path.
The lower ravine smelled of wet bark, cold stone, and old rot. Water dripped somewhere out of sight. The further they descended, the quieter the sect became behind them. By the time they reached the first moss line, the shouts from the training yards were gone entirely.
Han Lei crouched near a black rock streaked with moisture and pressed a thumb against the pale growth clinging to its base.
"Good enough," he said. "Still cold."
Gu Yan set his collecting basket down and knelt beside another patch. The frost moss had a thin, silver-white sheen under the shade, soft at the tips and tightly rooted into the cracks beneath. If harvested badly, it lost most of its medicinal value within minutes.
Han Lei scraped at his patch with quick, practiced movements.
Gu Yan was slower.
Not because he lacked skill. Because he was thinking.
The sealed west path. Higher herb prices. Fewer hall slots. Tighter quotas. Now tracks in the lower ravine that no one wanted to report.
Taken alone, none of it meant much.
Together, it suggested pressure.
Not a single event. A narrowing.
Someone was shifting the outer court into a tighter space, reducing easy access to resources while keeping enough missions open that people would keep stepping into worse conditions for the same reward.
He did not yet know whether Zhou Ren understood the whole pattern.
But Qiu Wen would.
"Your hand stopped moving," Han Lei said.
Gu Yan resumed scraping frost moss into the basket. "I was thinking."
"That usually means trouble."
"It usually means someone else's trouble first."
Han Lei gave him a sidelong look, but did not ask more.
They worked in silence for a while.
The moss came slowly. The resin wood more slowly still. The dark-barked trees along the eastern side were older and more twisted than the ones near the outer slope, with resin hardened beneath cracked bark in amber-black veins. Extracting it required patience. Cut too shallow, and you got almost nothing. Cut too deep, and the flow spoiled.
By the time the sun had shifted enough to brighten the upper edge of the ravine, Gu Yan's basket was half full.
Han Lei had nearly filled his own.
"You're getting less than me," Han Lei said.
"I'm not wasting the bark."
Han Lei looked down at his own cuts and grunted. "Fair."
A shout echoed from deeper in the ravine.
Both of them straightened at once.
The sound was followed by the scrape of loose stone and the sharp crack of something hitting rock.
Then silence.
The five outer disciples below the western wall froze where they stood. The one with the spear took two hurried steps back, almost tripping over a root.
Han Lei's hand dropped to the collecting blade at his waist. "That's from the north bend."
Gu Yan was already listening.
No second shout. No immediate roar. No rush of movement.
That was worse.
If it had been stone lizards, there would have been more noise. They moved in bursts, fast and clumsy, scattering pebbles and hissing when disturbed.
This sounded heavier.
"Stay here?" Han Lei asked.
"No," Gu Yan said.
Han Lei looked at him. "You think someone's dead?"
"I think if they're not, they will be if everyone waits."
That was enough.
Neither of them was foolish enough to rush blindly, but waiting too long carried its own cost. Outer disciples did not get saved by the sect unless someone more valuable stood beside them.
Han Lei spat to the side and tightened his grip on the blade. "Fine. We go in far enough to see, then decide."
Gu Yan nodded once.
They moved along the inner wall of the ravine, staying low where the rock narrowed and the tree roots broke the line of sight. The ground grew damper with every step. Twice, Gu Yan saw fresh marks in the mud where something broad had dragged its weight through shallow water.
Not lizard tracks.
Too wide.
Too smooth.
At the mouth of the north bend, Han Lei stopped and raised one hand.
Gu Yan saw it a heartbeat later.
A body lay half-turned against the stones ten paces ahead, one of the outer disciples from the western side. He was still breathing. Barely. Blood had spread across one sleeve and soaked into the dirt beneath him. His spear had snapped in half.
Beyond him, where the ravine narrowed again around a shelf of black stone, something moved.
Not fast.
Not loud.
A scaled back, low and broad, dark as wet ore.
Han Lei's jaw tightened. "Ironback."
Gu Yan understood immediately.
Ironbacks were rarer than stone lizards and more troublesome by far. Not because they were especially fast, but because their hide turned shallow strikes useless and their temper turned every wound into a charge. A fully grown one should not have been this close to the outer collecting zone.
Unless something had driven it down.
Or unless the outer boundary markers had been left to fail.
The thought passed and was set aside at once. It could wait.
The wounded disciple made a raw, choking sound as he tried to push himself up.
The Ironback's head lifted.
Small, deep-set eyes. Thick neck. A hornless skull built more for ramming than biting. It turned toward the movement and shifted its weight forward.
Han Lei swore under his breath.
"We can't carry him before it moves."
Gu Yan's eyes flicked once across the stone shelf, the angle of the wall, the damp ground under the beast's front claws, and the broken resin trunk hanging half-loose above the bend.
"We don't carry him first," Gu Yan said.
Han Lei looked at him sharply. "Then what?"
Gu Yan pointed without turning his head. "See the trunk above the shelf?"
Han Lei followed the line of his gaze. "It's rotten."
"It's cracked through on one side." Gu Yan's voice stayed low. "If it drops at the right angle, it won't kill it. But it should turn the charge."
Han Lei understood quickly. Another useful trait.
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then we run."
Han Lei bared his teeth in something that was almost a grin. "That's not a very reassuring plan."
"It doesn't need to be."
The Ironback lowered its body.
That meant it had chosen.
Han Lei moved first, stepping out just enough to draw its eyes. He slammed the flat of his blade against the rock and shouted. The sound cracked through the ravine.
The beast lunged.
It was faster than its shape suggested.
Han Lei threw himself sideways as the Ironback crashed past where he had stood a breath earlier. Stone split under the impact. Mud and gravel sprayed.
Gu Yan was already moving.
He had taken the narrow path up along the side wall in the instant Han Lei stepped out. Now he drove his foot against the fractured base of the hanging trunk, once, then again, then a third time with all the force his body could gather cleanly.
Pain flared through his ribs from the earlier practice.
He ignored it.
The wood cracked.
The Ironback was turning, its claws gouging at the wet ground as it sought Han Lei again.
Gu Yan hit the trunk a fourth time.
This time it gave.
The dead weight dropped from above, clipping the beast across the shoulder and slamming into the shelf beside it. The impact did not crush the Ironback, but it drove the creature half-sideways and spoiled the line of its charge. It roared—low, harsh, furious—and crashed against the wall instead of straight through Han Lei.
"Now!" Gu Yan shouted.
Han Lei did not waste the opening.
He crossed the distance in two strides, caught the wounded disciple under one arm, and dragged him backward through the mud with brute efficiency. The injured man cried out once, then blacked out.
The Ironback heaved itself upright, shaking splinters and dirt from its scales.
Too fast.
Gu Yan saw that immediately.
The dropped trunk had not done enough.
"Move!" Han Lei barked.
He didn't need to say it twice.
Gu Yan came down from the side ledge and retreated with him, keeping to the inner wall to avoid the beast's direct line. The Ironback charged again, but the wet ground under the shelf betrayed it this time. One foreclaw slipped half a span. Its body twisted just enough to crash shoulder-first into the narrow rock mouth instead of clearing it cleanly.
That was all they needed.
Han Lei hauled the wounded disciple past the bend. Gu Yan grabbed the broken half of the fallen spear from the ground and drove it, not at the beast, but into the thick mat of roots and loose stones beside the wall.
The impact tore more debris down.
Not enough to bury the Ironback. Enough to clutter the narrow passage.
A bad path became worse.
Gu Yan turned and ran.
They did not stop until the first open stretch of the ravine came back into sight.
The other outer disciples had already retreated up the slope. No one had stayed close enough to help. That was also ordinary.
Han Lei lowered the wounded disciple onto a patch of drier ground and sucked air through his teeth. "Still alive."
Gu Yan crouched beside the man and checked his breathing. Shallow. Uneven. Better than dead.
His sleeve was torn open from elbow to shoulder. The wound beneath was not a bite. It looked more like impact and scraping from being thrown across stone.
"He got hit before the charge landed cleanly," Gu Yan said.
Han Lei glanced back toward the bend. "Good for him."
"No," Gu Yan said. "Lucky."
That was when the first two stewards finally appeared at the top path above the ravine, drawn by the noise far too late to matter.
Han Lei looked up and barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all.
"There's your sect."
Gu Yan did not answer.
He was looking at the wounded disciple's broken spear, at the fresh drag marks in the mud, and beyond them, at the dark line where the north bend disappeared into shadow.
An Ironback should not have been here.
That mattered more than the rescue.
And if it was here because the outer boundary had been neglected, then this was not just bad luck.
It was pressure again.
The same pattern, in a different shape.
Less room. Fewer safe paths. More risk for the same scraps.
Gu Yan rose slowly.
Han Lei saw the look on his face. "What?"
Gu Yan's voice was calm when he answered.
"This isn't random anymore."