Yin Hu stepped out of the courtyard and pulled the gate shut behind him.
Ta Rae's branches scraped against the wall on the other side, reaching for him through the gap before the latch clicked. A single leaf poked through the crack between the gate and the fra, trembling with the desperate energy of a cat watching a parent leave for work. He could hear the tree's trunk creak as it strained against its roots.
"I'll be back in an hour," he said to the gate.
The leaf trembled as though to show its great sorrow then slowly retracted. Of course, it went with theatrical reluctance.
Spoiled rotten. How the hell do I raise a tree to not be so needy?!
Yin Hu turned and looked at the bright day that surrounded him. The morning air carried the faint scent of sweat, wood polish, a stall of food that he was one hundred percent positive was illegal considering the bureaucratic nature of YellowHearth City, and the residual sll of herbs and plants.
He walked at a pace that suggested a man with nowhere urgent to be and all the ti in the world to not be there. Hands clasped behind his back, chin level, eyes roaming and surveying everything, and robes catching the breeze. The Ancient Being persona had settled into his bones so deep he wasn't sure where the act ended and the man began anymore. Not that he was upset at it.
It was his identity now, for better or worse.
Cultivator Row was alive with its usual morning energy.
Kids running with packages, clothes, boxes, and a dozen other items.
Disciples swept courtyards.
Masters barked corrections.
Soone was attempting what sounded like a guzheng solo but might have been a cat trapped in a storage crate and fighting for its escape.
He kept his eyes forward and his pace steady through it all.
The plan was simple. Walk to the shop, enter through the back door where no custors, hidden sages, arrogant young masters, or anyone with functioning eyes could spot him, and check on the shop and Zhong Da. Maybe even drink so tea if the one-ard man had finally gotten over his bizarre refusal to sit at the sa table. Then he would leave the sa way he ca.
Simple and invisible to anyone that would bother him.
The kind of errand that required zero interaction with the wider world and produced zero complications.
Yin Hu turned the corner past the herbalist, this place had the strongest sll of herbs and plants, with the cracked sign and stopped.
Two boys, maybe thirteen, stood in the narrow gap between buildings with their feet shoulder-width apart, knees bent, chins tucked, left fists forward, right fists back, and elbows tight against their ribs. They weren't sparring with long sticks and spinning kicks.
They were drilling.
"One!" the taller boy shouted.
Both left fists snapped forward. Clean and direct. No wind-up or a dozen little telegraphed moves the dojo’s had been teaching.
"Two!"
Both right fists followed with the sa line and effective strike.
"Step!"
They shifted laterally, lead foot planted at forty-five degrees, rear foot pushed, centre of gravity stayed low, with not an ounce of the spinning windups and theatrical shouting of techniques and their linages at the sa ti. They ducked their heads, made space, and then returned to the starting position.
Yin Hu blinked.
I-Isn’t that my technique? Err… the boxing one-two I taught Jun and Shui?
He watched them run through the combination a few more tis. The footwork was rough, the timing slightly off between them, and the taller boy kept dropping his guard hand after the second punch, but the bones of it were there. The structure, philosophy, efficiency of movent, and darting speed. Strip everything unnecessary and put force into a target as fast as physically possible.
It was his boxing technique.
Where did they learn that? Did Jun teach soone? Did Shui? When? How many people?
He filed it away and kept walking.
Two blocks later, he noticed the banners.
The first one hung from a pole jamd into the gap between two buildings. Pale green cloth with a symbol stitched into the centre. A gorgeous Jian that was elegant, slender, unmistakably a straight sword rendered in darker thread, and for so reason very familiar to him. A white tassel hung from the poml, stitched with enough care that soone had spent real ti on it.
He didn't recognize the banner in its totality as this was the first ti he had seen it.
He kept walking.
A second one appeared at the next intersection. Sa pale green with the Jian in the center of it. This one was larger, stretched across the gap between two buildings like a bridge made of cloth that was catching the morning light and throwing a faint green shadow across the packed earth below.
Another one hung from the eaves of a dojo he'd passed a dozen tis before. The dojo's original banner, a red thing with a crane mid-kick that had always made him wince, was gone and was replaced by the pale green.
Yin Hu's pace didn't change nor did his expression.
His hands remained clasped behind his back and his chin remained level. His robes continued to catch the breeze in that effortless way.
But his eyes moved as he surveyed every single building he passed with growing confusion.
Every dojo he passed had swapped its colours.
The Mantis Claw of Ruin and Destruction banner was gone. The Snakes Ascension into Dragonhood banner was gone. The howling werewolf thing's banner was gone. All of them replaced by pale green cloth with the sa Jian and white tassel repeated with minor variations in size, quality, and the occasional creative interpretation of what a tassel looked like by soone who had clearly never seen one up close.
What the hell happened to Cultivator Row?
He turned another corner and found a courtyard he'd walked past a week ago. It had been small then, belonging to a single dojo with maybe forty students and a patriarch who sat on an elevated platform sipping tea.
The courtyard was not small anymore.
Three of the five surrounding buildings had been dismantled. The rubble cleared, the ground levelled and packed hard. What remained was a training field that stretched wider than anything else in the district and standing in that field, arranged in rows so precise they looked drawn with a ruler, were hundreds of cultivators.
Maybe even more than a thousand all of them in perfect lines like an army and doing one thing.
They were all punching.
"One!"
A thousand left fists snapped forward in unison. The sound was a single crack that bounced off the remaining walls and rolled down the street like distant thunder.
"Two!"
All of their right fists followed.
"Step! One! Two!"
The formation rippled with movent. Feet scraped packed earth, bodies shifted, and fists flew.
The technique was unmistakable his technique.
Taught to two girls in a broken down clearing hidden inside a wall that was more dilapidated than the house itself had been nearly two years ago, refined through thousands of repetitions, beaten into their muscle mory until it beca as natural as breathing.
Now being perford by what had to be over a thousand people he had never t and never given permission to learn a single thing from him or his disciples.
Yin Hu stared for a few seconds.
Then he turned away and kept walking toward the shop.
I'm going to check on Zhong Da. That's what I'm doing. I'm checking on Zhong Da. I'm not going to think about the banners. I'm not going to think about the technique. I'm not going to think about how many people just threw my punch in perfect synchronisation because if I think about it I will have to ask questions and the answers to those questions will make do sothing I'll regret before lunch.
He passed two more courtyards that both had the pale green banners. Both also had disciples drilling the one-two combination. One of them had a girl, maybe fifteen, correcting a boy's elbow placent with the exact sa two-finger push he had used on Jun when she had struggled with keeping her elbow tucked.
Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about it.
He rounded the final corner before the shop's back alley.
An old man stood in the middle of the road.
Not blocking it, exactly.
More like occupying it with the quiet authority of soone who had been standing in roads long enough that the roads had learned to accommodate him. White hair pulled back but loose enough to fra a face that was all angles and patience. Deep lines carved by decades of squinting at things that disappointed him. A fra that should have been frail at his age but carried itself with the kind of structural integrity that ca from a lifeti of physical discipline and continuous Qi reinforcent.
His eyes were half-closed.
Seven students flanked him that were all excited, young, earnest, and broad-shouldered. All wearing white robes, they had the Jian sewed onto their chests, and carrying themselves with the careful posture of people who had recently been taught to stand properly and were still getting used to the novelty. Four of them had bruised knuckles. Two had the slightly dazed expression of people who had been punching air for hours and hadn't fully returned to the world of normal human interaction.
The seventh was fidgeting with a pale green sash tied around his waist.
The old man's half-closed eyes opened fully as Yin Hu approached.
They locked onto him with a sharpness that had no business existing in soone that ancient. His pupils contracted and his weight redistributed, subtle enough that a mortal would have missed it entirely, centre of gravity dropping half an inch as his body settled into sothing that wasn't a stance but wasn't not a stance either.
He took a few steps toward Yin Hu and stopped.
The seven students stopped with him, arranging themselves in a loose semicircle behind their master with the practiced ease of people who had done this formation a thousand tis.
The old man stared.
Yin Hu stared back.
The silence stretched for a dozen seconds as they had a silent staring competition that Yin Hu was, for reasons he wasn’t quite sure about, determined not to lose.
It took nearly a minute before the old man blinked and Yin Hu let out a satisfied smile.
"Hello, Senior," Yin Hu said. He let the warmth into his voice because the old man's gaze carried no hostility. Curiosity, yes. Intensity, absolutely. But the kind of intensity that ca from genuine interest and friendly competition rather than the superiority and arrogance he t so often. "How can I help you?"
The old man began to stroke his beard as he studied Yin Hu’s face. "Do I know you?"
Yin Hu shook his head. "I have never t you before, Senior. Would you like to know ?"
The old man's lips pressed together as his fingers resud their slow journey through his beard. The students behind him exchanged glances that communicated volus of confusion in the universal language of juniors who had no idea what their master was doing but knew better than to interrupt.
One of them, the fidgeting one with the pale green sash, apparently did not know better.
He stepped forward with the eager energy of a young man who had recently been given sothing to be proud of and intended to deploy that pride at every available opportunity. His chest puffed and chin lifted. His hands found his hips in a pose that he probably thought looked authoritative but actually looked like he was trying to keep his trousers from falling down.
"This is the esteed Patriarch Duan of the Stone River School!" the student announced with the volu and conviction of a town crier who had been told his job depended on being heard a dozen blocks over. "Founding elder and senior advisor of the Green Grass Blades Sector of the—"
Patriarch Duan's hand moved.
It was fast.
His palm landed flat across the back of the student's head with a crack that made two of the other students wince in sympathy.
The student yelped as he shut his mouth. He gave the senior a betrayed look and hurriedly moved back to his spot in the semi-circle that surrounded Yin Hu. The young man stood very, very still with his eyes fixed on the ground and his ears turning a shade of red that suggested the blood rushing to them carried both pain and the dawning realization that he had made a significant tactical error.
Patriarch Duan's hand returned to his beard as though it had never left. His eyes hadn't moved from Yin Hu's face during the entire exchange. "Forgive the boy. Youth and enthusiasm make poor companions when neither is tempered by the wisdom to know when silence serves better than speech."
Yin Hu's expression didn't change, but sothing behind his eyes filed the interrupted sentence away in a drawer he'd open later. Green Grass Blades Sector of the... sothing. Connected to the pale green banners, the Jian with the white tassel and to the hundreds of cultivators throwing his technique in perfect rows.
All of which he was not about to think about right now because he had more important things to do said thinking about.
Naly what type of tea he was planning on drinking when he finally reached the shop.
"Nothing to forgive," Yin Hu said. "The young should be passionate. It's the old who need to be careful."
Duan's beard-stroking slowed. A sound escaped him that might have been a laugh if it had committed to the journey, but it stopped halfway and settled into a low hum of approval instead. "If you would be so kind to indulge an old man's curiosity. I can sense..." He paused as his brow furrowed. His fingers stopped on his beard entirely. "No. That's the problem. I can't sense you. Not a trace or a whisper. Not a single thread of Qi, cultivation base, intent, domain, or anything else that would tell what manner of man stands before –"
He leaned forward half an inch.
Yin Hu smiled wide. At least the system had its tiny benefits for him.
"–very strange indeed."
The smile morphed into sothing warm and genuine that reached his eyes because the old man reminded him of the kind of person he wished more cultivators were. Direct without being aggressive and curious without being invasive. He could have been arrogant and made a scene or worse, done sothing to trigger his weird System allotted Dao flashes that terrified old people and made his anonymity a wistful dream.
"I'm no one special. My na is Yin Hu and I've co with a couple granddaughters and a few friends who follow everywhere. Looking for no trouble and hoping to recruit so disciples if I get lucky."
Patriarch Duan laughed. Full-bodied and rough around the edges, the sound of a man who had heard sothing genuinely funny for the first ti in weeks and wasn't going to waste the opportunity. His shoulders shook and beard swayed. Two of his students looked at each other with wide eyes because they had apparently never heard their patriarch laugh before and weren't entirely sure the sound wasn't a precursor to violence.
"You will find it easier," Duan said as the laughter subsided into a grin that carved new lines into his weathered face, "to pick out a white hair on a surly red-furred ox's hide than to recruit in this city. The rchant Emperor's hold on YellowHearth City is founded on control and regulations that make my head spin. And I've been spinning for ninety-three years."
"We found that to be true," Yin Hu laughed with him. The sound surprised him. He couldn't rember the last ti he'd laughed with a stranger. Not the polite, performative chuckle of the Ancient Being persona, but an actual laugh born from shared frustration and the absurdity of bureaucratic systems that existed solely to make simple things impossible.
He liked the old man.
The realization arrived without fanfare or analysis.
No strategic calculation, no assessnt of threat level, no cataloguing of potential advantages or risks, or an attempt to get away as fast as possible.
Just the simple, uncomplicated recognition that Patriarch Duan was the kind of person Yin Hu would have chosen to sit and drink tea with. A person who was easy to make conversation with as well.
"Would you like to grab so tea later?" Yin Hu asked. The invitation left his mouth before the persona could intercept it. "I have an errand I must run and will be back later in the evening."
Patriarch Duan's grin softened into sothing contemplative. His half-closed eyes studied Yin Hu's face one more ti, searching for whatever it was he couldn't sense, couldn't feel, couldn't identify. Finding nothing. Finding the absence of everything. And apparently deciding that the absence itself was interesting enough to warrant further investigation over hot water and leaves. He shook his head with a wry look. "And your granddaughters don't do them for you? Sha. What has this generation co to?"
Yin Hu's smile held, but sothing shifted behind it.
He began to reminisce about the situation he had found Shui and Jun. The pyramid of skulls, Shui’s innocent, but clearly traumatized eyes, the hardened horror that was etched upon Jun’s face, and the situation they had found themselves stuck in. He could still sll the stench of the Silver Mountain Gang and the danger they had been in with the Gang Boss that lorded over the area.
Yin Hu shook his head. "Don't bla them too much. I was not there for much of their upbringing, but they've been developing quite well so far. Working on their independence lately."
Patriarch Duan's expression changed.
The wry amusent faded and the half-closed eyes opened fully for the second ti and what looked out of them was not the curious elder or the laughing old man or the silent observer who sat in corners and waited. Sothing that recognized the specific texture of a sentence spoken by a person who carried guilt about ti they couldn't get back and children they couldn't protect from things that had already happened.
Duan's gnarled fingers left his beard and folded together before him.
"I see," he said. Then again, quieter. "I see."
A breath passed between them. The seven students stood in their semicircle, forgotten by both n, existing in the peripheral awareness of a conversation that had shifted from pleasantries into sothing neither had planned for.
Patriarch Duan's folded hands tightened once, then relaxed. His chin dipped in a nod that carried the weight of ninety-three years of watching children grow into adults and adults grow into disappointnts and the rare, precious few who grew into sothing worth the effort it took to raise them. "This is a conversation best had over tea. I best co later today so we can explore the developnt of the youth and how best to go about it."
The old man laughed as he patted his belly.
Yin Hu laughed with him and raised his hand in a wave as the old man turned. The seven students scrambled to reform their semicircle, the smacked one giving Yin Hu a wide-eyed look over his shoulder before hurrying after his patriarch. Their footsteps faded down the street, punctuated by the faint sound of Duan correcting soone's posture without breaking stride.
Yin Hu watched them go as his hands lowered.
The smile lingered for a few seconds longer than the persona usually allowed before it settled back into the neutral mask. He stood alone in the middle of the road with the pale green banners hanging from every eave and the distant crack of hundreds of fists hitting air rolling through the streets like a heartbeat the entire district had learned to share.
Good man. Reminds of the kind of elder I'd want in the clan. Patient and observant. Doesn't talk unless he has sothing worth saying.
Ninety-three years old and still learning new techniques without asking permission.
He turned toward the shop's back alley and resud his walk.
I'll figure out the banners later. And the technique… And whatever a "Green Grass Blades Sector" is. And why an entire district of dojos decided to rebrand overnight. And who taught over a thousand cultivators my punch combination. All of that can wait until after I've checked on Zhong Da and had so tea that Ta Rae hasn't gotten its greedy branches into first.
His boots clicked against the stone.
Everything is fine. Probably.
The back door of the shop appeared at the end of the alley. Yin Hu reached for the handle. He paused with his hand on the wood. Sothing was not right… but not quite wrong either. Yin Hu wasn’t sure what to make of the situation and could only hope the girls were safe.
He was just grateful for Zhong Da and Wu Xui.
They kept an eye out for the girls when he was busy lounging and drinking gallons of tea with a greedy Ta Rae.
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