Time, Li Wuchen had learned across two lives now, had a way of compressing itself in memory even as it stretched out endlessly in the living of it. Four years passed at Green Pine Sect the way four years always passed for a cultivator with real work to do — in a blur of dawn training sessions and evening theory lectures, punctuated by the occasional sharp, vivid day that stood out clear as glass against the general wash of routine.He was eleven years old now, in this life's accounting, and had climbed to Core Formation's early stage — a full realm ahead of where Nine Heavens' orthodox tracking would have placed a disciple of his age and years of training, though carefully, deliberately, not so far ahead that it drew the kind of attention he still wasn't ready to answer for. Sun Rui, whose raw talent had always outpaced his caution, sat at mid Core Formation already, the acknowledged prodigy of their year's intake, a position he wore with the easy, good-natured arrogance of someone wh

The methods collectors, as Elder Feng had taken to calling them in the sect's closed-door strategy sessions Li Wuchen was technically too junior to attend but managed, through careful positioning and a well-timed reason to be nearby, to overhear more of than anyone realized, did not remain a distant rumor for very much longer.Three months after the Whiteflow Ridge search party's return, a lone figure appeared at the edge of Green Pine's outer training grounds during the dead hours before dawn — not sneaking, not hiding, simply standing at the tree line in plain, unremarkable robes bearing no sect's mark, watching the grounds with the patient stillness of someone who had chosen to be seen.Li Wuchen, keeping his own predawn training schedule out of a habit now four years deep, was the one who noticed the figure first.He did not approach directly — four years and one death's worth of caution had taught him better than that — but circled wide through the tree line's shadow, close enoug

The attack came without warning, three weeks after Sun Rui's confrontation, in the deep hours of night when Green Pine's defenses ran thinnest and its disciples slept heaviest.Li Wuchen woke to the sound of the outer perimeter wards shattering — a sound like distant glass breaking, magnified a thousandfold, that every cultivator at Green Pine had been trained since childhood to recognize instantly and without hesitation. He was moving before conscious thought fully caught up with instinct, pulling on training robes and reaching for the short blade he'd carried since his first year at the sect, some deep animal part of him already cataloguing exits, allies, and the fastest routes to whatever crisis had just torn through defenses that were supposed to hold against exactly this kind of intrusion.The scene that greeted him in the central training grounds, when he arrived moments later alongside a dozen other roused disciples, confirmed the worst of what the shattered wards had promised:

The war camp, Li Wuchen learned over the following weeks, belonged to something called the Wei Alliance — a loose confederation of clan militias banded together against a rival power the adults referred to only as "the Southern Throne," in tones that suggested both fear and a long, exhausted hatred worn smooth by years of repetition. His mother, a camp healer named Lian Xiu, tended wounded soldiers with a competent, weary skill that spoke of years doing exactly this work, and said little about Wei Chen's father beyond a brief, closed-off mention that he had "gone south with the third column, three winters back," delivered in a tone that made further questions feel unwelcome.It was, Li Wuchen understood within his first month in this new thread of existence, a considerably harder world than either Stone Hollow or Green Pine had offered. Food ran short more often than not. Disease moved through the crowded camp with grim regularity. The cultivation he witnessed among the militia's figh