Chapter 10 — The Moon's Pulse: Tashkent and the Fourth Chain
Arin woke with the taste of iron on his tongue. The aftermath of the arena still hummed in his joints — ache wrapped like rope around muscle and bone — but the silver light that had once trembled faintly beneath his skin was back, steadier, responding when he drew breath. The rings in his eyes moved a fraction quicker than the night before; when he fed a slow wave of Qi into his Dantian they rotated with a small, impatient whisper, as if the moon itself leaned nearer to listen.
He did not go to sleep. There was no time for that in the thin hours before dawn. He had promised himself a climb, and the promise was an ember he could not allow to die.
The Moon-Forged Body was a ladder of nine links. The scrolls in the Pavilion had set them out cleanly — names like a string of silver beads:
1. Silver Vein Awakening — awaken Qi flow through the blood.
2. Lunar Breath Formation — align breath with celestial rhythm.
3. Bone of the Night — strengthen the skeleton with internal Qi.
4. Moon-Pulse Resonance — merge heartbeat with Dantian rhythm.
5. Flesh of Still Waters — temper muscles for fluid Qi flow.
6. Veil of Frost — enhance skin defense and cold resistance.
7. Core Reflection — concentrate Qi into the abdomen for stability.
8. Mirror of Serenity — achieve harmony between breath and mind.
9. Eternal Crescent — complete transformation; body and Qi flow as one.
He already carried the first link in his veins; the second had been a partial, a weathered terrace he had half-climbed. But when the silver rings sang faster at a breath of Qi, he realized the path did not have to be linear like a straight road. Some bridges could be built in the middle of rivers — if one held steady enough.
Arin read the scroll again by lamplight, though the words had stopped being mere instructions. They were a map of how his body might be reshaped, a patient architecture of cold and rhythm.
Tonight he would finish second level properly. he would push into the third. If the third took his marrow and did not leave him broken, then he would attempt to unite the marrow's new cadence with his heart and Dantian: the fourth link, Moon-Pulse Resonance. That was the dream burning steady behind his ribs — to bring his heartbeat and core into the same slow drum, so that sword and bone moved as a single organism.
He steadied himself and began.
The second link required breath that was not merely inhalation and exhalation. It required an ancient patience: the moon's breathing. The scroll's phrasing felt like a prayer.
Sit with spine vertical, eyes closed.
Draw breath as if filling a lake, then condense it into the Dantian until the chest is empty but the abdomen full.
Match your inhale and exhale to imagined moon pulses — long, cool, indifferent.
Cycle for an hour, then rest; repeat into the night until the breath cannot be stolen by nervousness.
He practiced until the breath flattened his mind into a metallic calm. In the small hours the lamp hummed; his inhalations were slow, so slow that the world beyond the window started to fall away. Each inhale tasted of cold metal and river stone. Each exhale carried that cold into the muscles and left them easier.
The mark of success: his chest no longer shivered when he targeted Qi through his meridians. The breath had been tamed. Where before his Qi pulses had stuttered in impatience, now the flow ran as a silver thread, constant and sure. The rings in his eyes slowed when idle, and when he fed Qi the rings sped with no fumbling — elegant
Effect unlocked: subtle extension of endurance; the practitioner can hold concentrated Qi longer and avoid panic breath that breaks technique. The ability to draw Moonlight Qi into lungs and condense it into chilled pulses gave Arin a steadier hand and clearer mind. He felt an immediate, clinical difference: his parries ceased to wobble; his steps found a quiet midpoint.
He slept for an hour and woke with the taste of moonlight still in his mouth.
The Third Link — Bone of the Night
This was the one that scared the Pavilion elders. Where Lunar Breath was persuasion, Bone of the Night was coercion: a command to the marrow to hold light like steel. Arin had felt the raw edges of this when he forced himself to train after the tournament. The memory of that cracking inside him was not pleasant — but it had also shown him a path.
There were three phases, the scroll said: the Rill, the Hollow, and the Temper.
1. The Rill — Opening the Path: circulate chilled Lunar Qi through the spine in thin threads; visualize the marrow's canals widening like frozen streams thawing. Practice with low-impact movement: slow sword draws and bare-foot pacing that force the Qi into the long bones.
2. The Hollow — Filling the Marrow: once the path is open, the Qi must settle. Use weighted postures to compress the Qi into bone — hold deep stances while feeding breath into the Dantian for three cycles at a time. Pain will come; welcome it.
3. The Temper — Solder the Marrow: finally, induce controlled micro-fractures of Qi tension that, when healed by cold Lunar breaths, leave the marrow denser. This required a breath pattern that alternated heat and cold in the Qi — a dangerous exercise if the cadence failed.
Arin worked on the Rill for nearly a day. He paced barefoot across the cold stone of his courtyard, sword across his shoulders, feeling the Qi as thin silver wires slipping into the marrow channels. He practiced the low posture Lorian had taught him — knees soft, spine straight, breath a slow siphon to the Dantian.
On the second day he moved to the Hollow. He raised his sword across his chest and held a horse-stance as long as he could, driving the breath into his bones. Each time the world narrowed to the slow tick of his pulse, and small lights — the faintest like fireflies — danced beneath his skin where the Qi settled.
The Temper was the cruelest. He allowed himself to cycle blast pulses — short, hot pushes of Qi from Dantian to bone, followed by lunar breaths that cooled them into place. Each cycle felt like forging a fine needle inside him: the heat expanded, the breath collapsed, and with each repetition his marrow seemed to settle into a tighter lattice.
He nearly vomited with the effort; sweat beaded cold at his temples; his limbs shook. Once, the marrow coalesced with such pressure that it felt like glass within his femur had fractured and then knitted into something harder. Pain like an animal, then a stillness like a sealed spring.
Effect unlocked: denser skeletal structure. Joints could withstand more violent redirections of force; bones echoed less on impact; strike absorption improved significantly. More than the physical, the marrow held resonance — a channel for the moon's subtle pulse to move through the skeleton and be felt as timing rather than as tension.
And then, the moment when the third link closed properly: a soft, internal chiming, like a bell struck under water. He knew he had made a different kind of vessel of himself.
He sat for many minutes after, drawing breath.
If the second link gave me steadiness of breath, the third gave me steadiness of bone, he thought. And with both, the pulse is not so far.
The Tashkent Step — A New Tool
It began as a footwork lesson, but became more: a technique that aligned footfall, breath, and marrow resonance into a single responsive pattern. In the margins of the Moon-Forged scroll someone, long ago, had sketched the word Tashkent in a tidy hand. The Pavilion elder had said nothing about the name when Arin borrowed the scroll; sometimes the old scripts kept their secrets.
The Tashkent Step was a moonwalk, but not the sort the layfolk imagined. It was a cadenced shifting: small, almost imperceptible steps timed to the marrow's micro-tremor, allowing the practitioner to read an opponent's weight change as if it were audible. For a sword user, this was gold.
Practice barefoot on chilled stone at night, each toe roll a whisper.
Time each footfall to a breathing cycle: inhale across two steps, exhale across two.
As your marrow resonance deepens (third link), feel the shifted beat under your foot. Step in response to the marrow's tremor and not to sight.
Combine with small, half-slashed movements of the blade — a brush, a feint, a draw — and internalize the rhythm until movement is essentially reflex.
Arin practiced Tashkent in the shallow hours. He found that once the third link had settled, the footwork made the silver rings spin quicker when he fed Qi: a small, elegant synergy. The step let him tread into the exact beat of an opponent's strike before the mind had time to decide. It felt like listening to a heartbeat and stepping in the spaces between beats.
From this came the name he would soon murmur in the ring: the Tashkent Step was not a flashy technique, but an architecture of timing. It would make his crescent strikes seem to find the seams in defenses.
The Fourth Link — Moon-Pulse Resonance
The fourth link was an intimate thing. Where the third forced bone to take Qi like steel, the fourth asked the heart and Dantian to beat as one. It was not merely structural; it was rhythmic. It was the marriage of marrow rhythm and central pulse.
It was dangerous.
It was also the reason the silver rings turned quicker whenever he fed Qi. The ring phenomenon had not been a random quirk; it had been a compass.
1. Measure: sit and bring awareness to both heart and Dantian pulse separately. Count the beats, learn their small misalignments.
2. Sync: use the Lunar Breath Formation to slow the heart enough that the Dantian can be guided toward it. This involved breath ratios: inhale to 4 counts, hold 1, exhale 6 — a pattern that nudged the Dantian's rhythm physically.
3. Anchor: apply the Tashkent Step's footfeel as a third metronome under the body; let footfall resonate with marrow and heartbeat.
4. Fuse: in full meditation, feed Qi gently from Dantian into the chest on the exhale, then return it on the inhale, encouraging the heart to accept the Dantian's pacing. Repeat until the two pulses waver as one.
He tried the Measure and found the ordinary, impatient heartbeat. It galloped sometimes; his Dantian moved in slow, patient turns. They spoke different tongues. The task, then, was to teach them to listen.
The Sync was the first humiliation. He could not force his heart to slow enough. It wanted to race. He sat through the first failed attempts with a jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached. Once in a while his entire body shuddered and the marrow's resonance splintered, threatening to throw him into sickness. Each failure left him hollow and spent.
But breath is patient if the will is patient. He drew the Lunar Breath again, this time letting the breath that filled his ribs be colder, thinner, like water through reeds. The exhale lengthened; the heart, compelled by the slow coolness of chest, gave its whispered consent. The Dantian tightened in reply, as though pleased it had been recognized.
The anchor was the elegant punishment: footstep and breath together. The Tashkent Step had taught him to hear small changes underfoot; now he used that sensation to further coax the heart. When foot met stone in the correct rhythm, his body hummed in a small unified way.
Fusion happened in no single breath. It was not grand; it was subtle. After twelve hours, when the sun had crawled low and the lamp had guttered twice, he felt the first shift: his chest's beat and the Dantian's churn, previously separate, now brushed together like two people learning to speak the same language. The rings in his eyes—that curious omen—spun with a new eagerness. They were no longer ticked by random Qi; they measured the ratios. When he breathed in the new pattern, the rings accelerated to a brisk dance.
And then—when he allowed an expressionless silence and fed a clean pulse of Qi through, his entire being thrummed in response.
There was a thin, crystalline sound inside his skull — like the clicking of a careful clock. The Dantian answered immediately, the heart softened, and the marrow sang underfoot. The Moon-Pulse Resonance sealed with a sensation like being drawn into a single note.
Effect unlocked: the heart and Dantian synchrony allowed Arin to sense an opponent's timing as if it were a muscle in himself. He could preempt motion by a breath's fraction. The Tashkent Step provided a rhythmic anchor; combined with the Moon-Pulse, his sword strikes found seams in defenses and resisted being overwhelmed by brute force. His endurance leapt again; now, even when struck with vehemence, he felt the blow's timing and could redirect through the marrow without pain flaring. The silver rings in his eyes no longer merely shimmered — they quantified rhythm, giving him a microsecond advantage in timing.
He rose, trembling but whole. Something in his chest had settled into a slow, patient drumbeat that felt like a blessing. His sword felt less foreign at his side; it moved as if anticipating his intent.
Arin sat on the small wall outside his cottage and watched the eastern edge of the world pale. The mountain silhouettes faded from black to blue to gold. He could still feel the new cadence pulsing through him — a private song shared between bone and heart.
He thought of Drevin in the arena, heavy as a millstone and worthy. He thought of the crowd's voices — their disbelief, their sudden, tacit respect. He thought of Lorian's measured face and Kaelis's narrowed eyes. The younger boy let a small laugh lift up from his ribs. It was not triumphal; it was a gravity-softened relief.
I'm not the strongest, he told himself. But I can keep time with greater things now. That is enough for this day.
The first warm rays of sunlight crowned the valley. Where night's silver had lent him subtlety and marrow, day's gold promised tests and sharpened edges. He replaced his sword on his back with hands steadier than before and walked back toward the Pavilion.
He was not naive: higher links waited, and each would require more bone, breath, and something gentler than force — patience. But the Moon-Pulse had sewn a new stitch into his body; it would steady his steps in the arena yet.
At the gate, he paused and looked back once toward the path where the moon still lingered faint along the horizon. He touched his chest and felt the two beats together — a duet, a small instrument tune.
Arin exhaled slowly.
During the last several days, disciples had fought through their rounds one after another — but Arin's scroll had remained blank.
His matches simply had not been scheduled yet.
His portion of the bracket was arranged so that his first appearance would not take place until the final stretch of the preliminaries. That was why he had been absent.
Why no one had seen him.
Why rumors had begun to stir.
Some disciples claimed he was hiding after defeating Drevin.
Some whispered he was injured.
Others insisted he was receiving secret training from the elders.
But the truth was far simpler.
He had no matches these days — so he had used every heartbeat to sharpen himself.
To temper bone and breath.
To reach the Moon-Pulse.
To turn absence into growth.
Arin looked toward the arena once, the morning sun spilling over his newly strengthened form, and a faint, confident calm crossed his features.
Let them wonder, he thought.
Tomorrow, his name would finally be called.
And when he stepped into the ring…
he would not be the same boy they remembered.