The stone room was cold and smelled of wet rock and stale air. The place was hardly maintained.

  Yan Qiu sat on the thin mat with his legs crossed and his palms resting on his knees. The room was not large, but there was enough space to stand and move around. A few pieces of broken furniture sat against the far wall, a stool with one leg missing, the remains of a small table that had split down the middle, and some loose boards that might have been a shelf at some point. There was no window. The only light came from a thin gap beneath the door, a pale strip that shifted with the sun and disappeared entirely at night.

  For the first two days, it was not so bad.

  He cultivated in the mornings, running his qi through the circulation pattern he had figured out on his own back in Blackroot. The energy moved through his channels in slow, steady loops, and each cycle left him feeling a little more settled. When his qi ran low he stopped and rested, and when it recovered he started again. He ate sparingly from the dried fruit in the basket and drank water from the clay jug, and when he was too tired to cultivate he lay on the mat and slept.

  The routine kept him grounded, and for those first two days the silence did not bother him.

  On the third morning, the quiet turned on him.

  He woke up and the walls felt closer than they had the night before. The air was thick and the smell of damp stone sat heavy in his throat. He tried to cultivate and his focus scattered after a few cycles. He tried again and his focus scattered just as quickly. His mind kept pulling away from the qi and reaching for something else, sounds, movement, another voice, anything that was not this room.

  He had heard that cultivators could sit in meditation for months or even years without moving. Some of the elders at the sect had probably spent decades in seclusion, refining their cultivation in silence, perfectly content with nothing but their own qi and the passage of time.

  He could not manage three days.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said to the empty room. His voice sounded flat against the stone.

  He stood up and paced the room. It did not take long to cover every corner of it, and by the third lap the walls already felt familiar enough to be suffocating.

  Among the broken furniture against the wall he found a twig about the length of his forearm, dry and slightly curved.

  He picked it up and held it like a sword.

  He took his stance in the center of the room and began the first movements of the Broken Jade Sword Art. Step, slash, step, thrust, step, sweep. The twig cut through the stale air and his body fell into the footwork without hesitation.

  He completed the form and started again. The movements were clean, and having the space to perform them properly let him focus on the details he usually rushed through. After a few repetitions he started paying attention to the transitions between strikes, the places where the qi wanted to move through his arm and into the blade but could not because he did not know how to let it.

  He stopped and looked at the twig in his hand.

  “There is more to this,” he said quietly. The first form was all he knew, the basic sequence of strikes and footwork that the dream had given him. He had practiced it hundreds of times in Blackroot with a stripped branch and dozens more at the sect with a real sword, and the movements had become natural to him. But the technique had a name, the Broken Jade Sword Art, and a name like that obviously could not have only a single form.

  He did not have a manual, or even an instructor who could guide him through it. All he had was the muscle memory and the feeling of the form, the qi pulling through his arm and toward the blade at certain points in the sequence.

  He filed the thought away and moved on.

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  When the sword practice grew stale he switched to the foundation techniques. The Withered Wind Breathing was still the one that gave him trouble. His old circulation method and the sect’s breathing pattern did not sit well together, and every time he tried to run the Withered Wind cycle properly it clashed with the flow his body had learned first. It was nearly impossible to do it cleanly no matter how many times he attempted it, so he set it aside and focused on what he could actually do. The Dust Treading Step he practiced in short sequences across the room, working the weight shifts and the timing of the qi flow through his legs. The Gale Palm he drilled in bursts, compressing qi in his palm and releasing it against the far wall. The compression was still rough, but it was getting smoother with each attempt.

  The days fell into a rhythm. Cultivate, practice the sword art, work the foundation techniques, eat, sleep. The room did not change and the silence did not break and the strip of light under the door was the only way he knew whether it was day or night.

  He was getting closer to something. He could feel it in his cultivation, a pressure building at the edges of his channels as his qi grew denser and heavier. Each cycle pushed a little further, held a little longer, and the energy in his body was thickening toward a boundary he could sense but not yet reach.

  After a few more days, the burning came back.

  It started in his chest, a low heat that spread outward through his ribs and settled behind his sternum. He recognized it immediately. He had felt it back in the village and again in the city. This was the first time it had come while he was at the sect. As he kept cultivating it grew heavier.

  He stopped cultivating and sat with the heat in his chest, thinking.

  The closer he got to a breakthrough, the stronger the sensation became. That was the first thing he noticed. It was not random. It tracked with his cultivation.

  He thought back to the village. He had been doing hard physical labor for weeks, pushing his body to tirelessness every day, and one morning he had woken up with this burning in his chest. He had not known anything about cultivation back then, so he had assumed it was just his body giving out from too much work. But looking at it now, all of that labor had been pushing his body toward something without him realizing it. Then the day he had cultivated as the elder instructed, the sensation had hit him so hard that a fever followed, and on the third night of the fever the dream had come.

  He sat with that for a while and turned it over in his head. The burning came when his body was being pushed toward a major change. And whenever the burning got bad enough, the dreams followed. He had not seen the connection before because the instances were spread apart and he had not been paying attention. But now, sitting alone with nothing to distract him, the pattern was clear.

  If his guess was right, he would see those dreams again in a few days.

  He had two options.

  He could leave the path of cultivation entirely and never experience those things again. It was a really unsettling thought, the idea of just stopping, but at least the dreams would not come back.

  Or he could go further and face whatever the dreams showed him next. That was even more terrifying.

  He chose the second.

  If he wanted to know the meaning behind these dreams, he needed to cultivate properly. There was no other way to reach the answers. Running from it would only leave him wondering for the rest of his life, and he was not willing to live like that.

  A fragment surfaced as he sat there, faint and half-formed. He had read it somewhere, or heard it, or dreamed it. A line, something about dying. The rest of the words were gone and the memory was not vivid at all, just a blur where a sentence used to be.

  Was his memory getting blurry? Maybe he was just being paranoid from the suffocating room. He had been in here long enough that his thoughts were starting to feel less sharp, and he could not tell anymore whether he was remembering something real or imagining it.

  He let it go. But the fragment stayed with him anyway.

  Even if I die.

  He kept cultivating.

  Three more days passed.

  The burning in his chest grew heavier with each cycle. It spread from his sternum into his shoulders and down through his arms, a deep heat that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. His qi was dense now, pressing against the walls of his channels, and every circulation felt like pushing water through a pipe that was too narrow.

  He slept poorly. The heat woke him in the middle of the night and he lay on the mat staring at the darkness above him, waiting for it to ease enough that he could close his eyes again.

  A few nights later, he fell asleep with the burning still in his chest.

  He woke gasping.

  His heart was hammering and his skin was slick with sweat and the heat in his chest had turned into something sharp and bright, like a blade pressed flat against the inside of his ribs. He sat up on the mat and pressed both hands against his sternum and breathed until the sharpness dulled.

  The dream was still there, vivid and heavy behind his eyes. He tried to hold onto the details because it felt like they would help him, like there was something in there he needed.

  His theory was right. The breakthrough, the burning, the dream. They were connected, and now he had proof.

  He closed his eyes and started pulling the dream back, piece by piece.

  One by one, the details came back to him.