The problem, Ren Xiao decided within his first hour of consciousness in this wretched, starving, twig-thin body, was that everything about it lied to him.Forty years of muscle memory told his legs to move a certain way, and his legs simply did not have the strength to obey. His hands remembered the exact weight and balance of seventeen different blades, and these hands shook too hard to hold a training sword steady for longer than a few breaths. His mind still calculated angles and openings with the same cold speed it always had that, at least, the fall through death hadn't touched but the body meant to execute those calculations was a broken instrument, undernourished and untrained, with a cultivation root the sect records apparently rated as unworthy of classification.He had escaped the training yard with his life and very little else. A scraped forearm. A twisted ankle he was fairly sure wasn't actually his own bad luck so much as this body's chronic malnourishment making every

Fear did not fit Elder Kang.Ren Xiao's memory of the man — thin, precise, punctilious about paperwork and disciple curfews, a man who ruled his small domain through petty consistency rather than any real strength held nothing that explained the look now crossing his face. Not surprise. Not the mild professional interest an elder might show toward an unusual test result. Fear, raw and immediate, the kind that lived in the body before the mind had time to talk it down.It lasted less than two seconds. Then Elder Kang's expression closed over like a shutter dropping, and he sat back down with the stiff, deliberate calm of a man forcing his own face into order."A minor fluctuation," Elder Kang said, too quickly, to the courtyard at large. "Occasionally happens with roots this suppressed, when they're finally, properly stimulated. It means nothing. Reclassification denied." He made a short mark on his ledger, refusing to meet anyone's eyes, least of all Ren Xiao's. "Dismissed. All of y

Mei Lian did not knock this time. She shoved the shed door open hard enough that it cracked against the wall, and the first thing Ren Xiao saw in the grey morning light was the color drained from her face."There's a body at the eastern wall," she said, before he'd even fully sat up. "One of the night watch. Throat cut. Whoever did it walked straight past two ward stations to reach the outer dormitories, and nobody noticed a thing until his replacement found him twenty minutes ago."Xue Wuchen felt the shape of the night's events rearrange themselves instantly into something colder and more deliberate than he'd first assumed. Not a retreat, then. A cleanup. The intruder hadn't simply failed and fled he'd killed the one witness capable of confirming exactly which route he'd taken into the sect, and exactly which wards had failed to stop him."Why are you telling me this," Ren Xiao said carefully, keeping his voice at the register of a boy still catching up to being awake, "instead of a

The archive building sat at the far northern edge of the sect compound, half-swallowed by old cedar trees that had been planted, according to Ren Xiao's borrowed memory, long before any currently living elder had taken their oaths. It looked, in the moonlight, like exactly what it was meant to look like: unremarkable, unimportant, the kind of building nobody thought to guard closely because nobody thought there was anything inside worth stealing.Xue Wuchen had built an empire, in part, on understanding that the most dangerous secrets were rarely kept behind the most obvious doors."Here," Mei Lian breathed, crouched beside a narrow gap between two support stones on the building's eastern wall, invisible unless a person already knew precisely where to look. "The ward lattice hasn't been refreshed since the old archivist retired. There's a blind spot right along this seam, wide enough to slip through if you don't mind losing some skin."Ren Xiao studied the gap, then studied his own bo

The figure that emerged from the archive's outer shadows moved with the same trained, economical grace Ren Xiao had felt in the dark of his own shed two nights before not identical, but cut from the same discipline, the unmistakable signature of someone who killed for a living and had long since stopped finding anything remarkable about it.Mei Lian moved first, placing herself half a step in front of Ren Xiao with her blade already drawn, and in that single instinctive motion Xue Wuchen felt something shift in his estimation of her that surprised even him she had not hesitated, not for a heartbeat, despite having every reason in the world to leave a stranger's secret to fend for itself."Sect grounds," Mei Lian said, voice low and hard. "You're trespassing on sect grounds. Leave now, or the alarm bells will do the rest of this conversation for us."The figure a woman, Ren Xiao judged from the build and stance, face obscured beneath a dark wrap did not ans