The remaining weeks passed faster than the first.

  Yan Qiu trained the Broken Jade Sword Art with the twig every morning, running through the first form until his arms ached and then running through it again. The breakthrough to the third stage had changed how his qi moved. It flowed more freely now, and he was starting to channel some of it between his strikes, a small amount that pushed through his arm and into the twig during certain transitions in the form. He saw real progress for the first time.

  The Gale Palm improved the most. He was good at it now, genuinely good. The compression that had given him trouble during Elder Han’s training came easier with his denser qi, and he could gather it in his palm and squeeze it into a tight knot before releasing it against the far wall. The bursts were consistent and each one hit harder than the last.

  The Dust Treading Step was where he saw the biggest change in his movement. He was nearly perfect at it now and could move a lot faster and cleaner than before the seclusion started. After a few days of practice he started experimenting with it. He found that if he compressed a small burst of qi into his feet at the moment of the step, the same compression he used for the Gale Palm, it gave him a sharp push forward that covered more ground than the normal technique. For short distances it looked like he had moved from one spot to another in an instant. He tried it a few times across the room and the result was the same each time, a quick flash of movement that ate up the distance between two points faster than the standard footwork.

  He called it Wind Flash. It was just an improvisation built on top of the Dust Treading Step and the Gale Palm’s compression principle, not a real technique, but it worked well enough that he filed it away for later since the cramped room did not allow him to test it over longer distances.

  His body changed too. The weeks of constant cultivation and training in the enclosed space had pushed impurities out through his skin, and by the end of the month his robes were stiff with dried sweat and grime and the room smelled terrible. His body felt much more refined underneath it though, lighter and more responsive than before.

  On the last day, someone knocked on the door.

  Yan Qiu stood up from the mat and opened it. The sunlight hit him so hard that he flinched and raised his hand to shield his eyes, the brightness almost painful after a month in a room with no windows.

  The disciple standing outside took one look at him, then covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve.

  “You are free to go,” he said, his voice muffled behind the cloth. “Elder Han wants to see you tomorrow morning at the training grounds.” He took a step back. “Please visit the baths before you do anything else.”

  Yan Qiu squinted into the light and nodded.

  The walk back to the outer court felt strange. The paths were the same and the buildings had not moved, but everything looked different after a month of stone walls and darkness, the sky too wide and the air too clean and the sounds of disciples training in the distance louder than he remembered.

  He went straight to the baths. The water was cold and he did not care, scrubbing the grime off his skin and out of his hair until the water turned grey around him. When he was done he put on a clean set of robes from the supply rack and walked to Stone Sparrow Hall.

  The third floor was empty since most of the disciples were out on tasks or training, and the room was quiet except for the creak of the floorboards under his feet. His bed was where he had left it with the blanket folded and his wooden chest sitting at the foot.

  He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. The mattress was thin and the pillow was flat, but after a month on a stone floor it was the most comfortable thing he had ever felt. The tension drained out of his body and he was asleep within minutes.

  He woke to the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

  The light coming through the window had shifted to late afternoon, and the third floor was filling up as disciples returned from their day. Yan Qiu sat up and rubbed his eyes.

  Sun Hao came through the door and stopped. For a moment he just stood there staring, and then his face split into a grin and he crossed the room in three quick strides and threw a fist bump at Yan Qiu’s shoulder.

  “You are back.” His voice was loud and his eyes were wet, though he was clearly trying not to show it, blinking a few times while he kept grinning. “Where were you? Elder Han told us you were sent for punishment, but he would not say anything else. I asked three times.”

  “Seclusion,” Yan Qiu said. “One month in a stone room with no windows and a basket of dried fruit.”

  “A month?” Sun Hao sat down on the bed across from him. “What happened? Was it because of the fight in Sector 2?”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Yan Qiu told him, keeping it straightforward the same way he had told the elders at the Punishment Hall. The four disciples who tried to rob him, the fight, the senior whose qi deviated, the punishment.

  Sun Hao listened without interrupting, and when Yan Qiu finished he shook his head.

  “Those guys deserved it,” he said. “Four against one, trying to take your stuff after you did all the work? That is shameless.” He paused. “How was it in there? The seclusion.”

  “Suffocating,” Yan Qiu said.

  He did not mention the dream or the breakthrough, not yet. They settled back into talking like they always did, trading jokes about the sect and the food and the other disciples, and it felt good to have that again.

  The seniors came up the stairs a while later. Peng Hu saw Yan Qiu first and let out a long breath.

  “Thank heaven you are well,” he said. He dropped onto his bed and the frame groaned under his weight. “We heard you were in seclusion but nobody would tell us why. Tao Wen tried to find out through the Punishment Hall records and they told him to mind his own business.”

  Tao Wen appeared behind him with a book in hand as always, and he looked at Yan Qiu and nodded once with quiet relief visible on his face.

  “You look thinner,” Tao Wen said.

  “I ate dried fruit for a month.”

  “That would do it.”

  They talked for a while and caught up on what Yan Qiu had missed. He let them fill him in on the small things first, the daily routines and the tasks and the weather, and then he asked the question that had been sitting in his mind since the door opened.

  “The foundation assessment,” he said. “Who were the top two? You were certainly one of them, right?”

  Sun Hao’s expression shifted and he looked down at his hands for a moment before answering.

  “Lin Suyin and Gao Yichen.”

  Yan Qiu blinked. “Gao Yichen?”

  “He was actually good,” Sun Hao said, with no bitterness in his voice, just honest surprise. “His Gale Palm was the cleanest in the group, and his Dust Treading Step was solid. He has been training with a private tutor his family hired before he joined the sect, and it showed.” He paused. “Duan Ke was not even considered.”

  Yan Qiu sat with that for a moment. Lin Suyin made sense since she was steady and precise, the kind of person who did not rush anything. Gao Yichen was a surprise, but maybe it should not have been because the kid was annoying but he had real technique behind the noise. And Duan Ke losing was something he had not expected at all.

  “There is something else,” Sun Hao said. “While you were gone, things changed.”

  “Changed how?”

  “Factions.”

  Yan Qiu looked at him.

  “The disciples started grouping up,” Sun Hao said. “Some of the new batch joined senior disciples, some formed their own groups. It happened fast, within the first two weeks after you left.” He leaned forward. “Gao Yichen made his own faction. He has four or five people following him now, mostly kids from merchant families who came in the same batch. Duan Ke joined a senior’s faction, one of the older outer disciples who has been here for two years.” He lowered his voice. “There is already beef between the two factions.”

  “And the elders allow this?”

  “The elders have their own factions,” Peng Hu said from his bed. He was lying on his back with his arms behind his head. “Inner disciples too. It is even more serious up there. The factions serve as a way for inner and outer court disciples to communicate and share resources. It is how things actually get done around here.”

  “Did you join one?” Yan Qiu asked Sun Hao.

  Sun Hao shook his head. “No. The seniors told us not to.”

  Peng Hu sat up. “We told him it is too dangerous if you are not strong enough. Factions protect you, but they also put a target on your back. If your faction has enemies, you have enemies, and you might not be ready for that.”

  “Only Tao Wen and one other from our hall are in a faction,” Peng Hu added. “Everyone else stayed out.”

  Tao Wen did not look up from his book. “I joined because I needed access to certain technique manuals that are only shared within faction networks. It was a practical decision.”

  Yan Qiu looked at the seniors. “Why do you worry about us so much?”

  The question came out simple and direct, and the room went quiet.

  Peng Hu and Tao Wen exchanged a look before Peng Hu rubbed the back of his neck and Tao Wen closed his book slowly. Neither of them said anything for a moment, and it looked like they were going to leave it at that, but then Peng Hu let out a breath and spoke.

  “It started a few months after we joined the sect,” he said in a voice that was lower and more careful than usual. “A lot of disciples from our batch started to vanish. Some left on their own and said they could not handle it, some were badly injured on missions or in fights, and some were just gone one day with nobody talking about what happened to them.”

  He paused.

  “It gets worse whenever a new batch of disciples is accepted. The elders say it is due to the change of environment, or excessive behavior from seniors and factions, or just the natural difficulty of cultivation.” He looked at Yan Qiu. “But I think the cause might be something else. I do not have proof, and I am not going to say more than that.”

  The room was quiet.

  “Let us not talk about this further,” Tao Wen said. “We just want you to be safe, at least until you are strong enough to handle whatever comes. After that, you can only blame yourselves.” He opened his book again. “The road of cultivation is not easy.”

  Peng Hu reached over and patted Yan Qiu and Sun Hao on the back. “Do not worry too much. Just do not go overboard or do reckless things.” He glanced at Yan Qiu. “Especially you.”

  The mood lightened after that. Peng Hu started complaining about the food and Tao Wen corrected him on the exact nutritional content of the rice they were served, and the conversation drifted back to normal.

  Sun Hao leaned over. “Oh, Qiu. There is a letter for you. From home. It came while you were in seclusion.”

  Yan Qiu sat up straighter. “A letter?”

  “It is in your chest. I put it there so nobody would touch it.”

  Yan Qiu looked at Sun Hao and noticed a sadness in his face.

  “What is wrong?” Yan Qiu asked.

  Sun Hao shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, and turned to talk to Peng Hu about something else.

  Yan Qiu did not push it. There were too many things today with the release and the factions and the missing disciples, and Sun Hao would talk when he was ready.

  He opened his wooden chest and found the letter sitting on top of his folded clothes with his mother’s handwriting on the front, neat and careful. He held it for a moment, feeling the weight of it in his hands.

  He would read it before he slept.