The crying stopped before he wanted it to. That was the strangest part — some deep animal function of this new body decided he was finished grieving before the mind riding inside it agreed, and Li Wuchen found himself staring up at a smoke-stained ceiling, silent, while the rest of him screamed on the inside.Think. It was the first coherent order he gave himself, and it steadied him the way orders always had, back when he'd had three hundred disciples waiting on his word. You are not dead. You are also not sixty-one. Work from there.The midwife — a broad, tired woman with flour-dusted forearms — wrapped him in a cloth that smelled of woodsmoke and lye soap, and passed him to another woman lying exhausted in the bed. His mother, he understood, in this life. A stranger's face, kind and worn, looking down at him like he was the only good thing that had happened to her in a long while.He had no memory of this woman. No memory of this village. Which meant, if his instincts about the pul

Village tyrants, Li Wuchen had learned over sixty-one years, came in a predictable range of sizes. He'd crushed sect-lords who commanded armies. He'd broken emperors who thought their qi made them gods. Somehow, none of that experience made the current problem any less irritating: a landlord's son named Duan Hu, fourteen years old, built like a young ox, and utterly convinced that the orphanage's meager rice stores existed for his personal amusement."Pay the toll," Duan Hu said, for the third time that month, planting himself in the orphanage's dirt yard with two friends flanking him like poorly trained hounds. "Or I tell my father the temple roof needs 'repairing' again. You know what that means."It meant the landlord's men would come and take twice what Duan Hu was currently extorting, under cover of a legitimate-sounding tax. Everyone in Stone Hollow understood the arrangement. Nobody had the standing to refuse it.Xiao Chen — small, unremarkable, seven years old and two months i

The encounter with the fox-girl stayed with him for weeks — not as fear, exactly, though there had been plenty of that in the moment, but as a kind of pressure at the back of his thoughts, the way a half-remembered dream will nag at a person long after waking. Eight times before. She had said it so plainly, the way one might mention the weather, and Li Wuchen — Xiao Chen, he was trying harder now to hold that name in his own mind, if only to keep some thin membrane between the boy he was pretending to be and the man he still was underneath — had spent every quiet hour since turning the words over.Eight loops before his. Eight other people, or perhaps eight versions of the same unlucky soul, dying and waking and dying again, somewhere in the folds of whatever mechanism governed this. He did not know if that made his own situation better or infinitely worse. It meant, at least, that the rules — whatever they were — had some kind of consistency. It also meant he was very far from the fi

Green Pine Sect sat in the folded hills three provinces south of anywhere Li Wuchen's first life had ever taken him, which he understood now to be entirely the point of choosing it. No history here waited to ambush him with familiarity. No faces from his old memory might turn a corner and unravel his careful anonymity. Whatever happened within these walls would happen fresh, shaped by choices he was making for the first time in either of his lives.The sect itself was, as Old Bao had promised, solid rather than grand — terraced training grounds cut into hillsides thick with the pine trees that gave the sect its name, a modest central hall with the sect's founding tablets, dormitories arranged in practical rather than ostentatious rows. Nothing like Nine Heavens' soaring mountain peaks and cloud-wreathed halls, the grandeur he remembered from decades of calling it home. Green Pine looked like what it was: a sect built by people who cared more about producing capable cultivators than im

The breakthrough came three nights after the team returned from Whiteflow Ridge, though "breakthrough" was, Li Wuchen would later think, too clean a word for what actually happened.He had been meditating alone in the small grove behind the outer disciples' dormitory — a habit he'd kept up since Stone Hollow, the quiet predawn hours the only time he could reliably find privacy enough to push his cultivation without an audience asking uncomfortable questions about his pace of progress. The fight at Whiteflow Ridge had shaken something loose in him, he suspected — not fear, exactly, though there had been plenty of that in the moment his aging mind and child's body had nearly failed to keep pace with each other fast enough to survive. Something more like clarity. A reminder, visceral and immediate, of exactly how much distance remained between the cultivator he had been and the cultivator he currently was.He drew breath, circulated the hybrid foundation technique he'd built from fragmen