The mountain did not change, but the boy who climbed it had.
Jon Snow placed his boot on a narrow lip of granite, the air thin and sharp as broken glass in his lungs, and pushed upward. There was no heave of effort, no desperate scramble for purchase. His body simply rose, fluid as water defying gravity, his weight shifting before his feet fully settled. The pack on his back—heavy with supplies and scrolls and the accumulated weight of expectation—might have been filled with feathers for all the burden he felt.
He remembered the first time he had climbed this path. He had been a broken thing then, lung-sick and desperate, dragging himself up the Stone Tiger's mountain on limbs that trembled with every step. Each breath had been a negotiation with damaged tissue. Each handhold had been a prayer. He had been chasing a dead man's legend—Arthur Dayne's ghost, Marcus Chen's borrowed memories, anyone's story but his own.
He remembered the second time. Returning for Marrow Refinement, carrying the fear that he wasn't enough, that the foundation the Bone Washing had built would crumble under the weight of what came next. He had climbed with hope then, but hope threaded through with doubt.
This was the third ascent.
Jon paused on a switchback where the mist parted like a curtain, revealing the world spread beneath him. The terraced rice paddies of Yi Ti cascaded down the distant hillsides in patterns of emerald and silver—the paddies flooded for planting, mirror-bright in the morning sun. Villages scattered across the valley floor like pebbles tossed by a careless hand. The road he had traveled wound through it all, a pale thread connecting the fortress he had left to the monastery he approached.
The first time, I climbed toward something I didn't understand, he thought, his fingers finding familiar holds in the rock face. The second time, I climbed toward something I feared.
He touched the cold stone of the cliff, his calloused fingertips reading the grain the way a scholar reads text.
This time, I climb toward something I choose.
His body felt different with each ascent—not just stronger, but more present. The Marrow Refinement had done its work well. He felt dense now, heavy in a way that had nothing to do with burden. It was like the difference between a wooden sword and one forged from castle steel; both had the same shape, but the steel sword was packed with potential that wood could never hold. His breath came effortlessly in the rarefied air, drawing sustenance from an atmosphere that would have left the old Jon gasping.
He carried more than supplies. Master Zhi's scroll—the treatise on integration that the dying scholar had pressed into his hands—rode secure against his spine. The meditation stone hummed gently at his hip, a fragment of the mountain's silence made portable. And against his chest, beneath his tunic, the jade wolf pendant absorbed the heat of his skin, warm as a promise.
But the heaviest thing he carried was invisible.
General Kai saw him as a weapon being forged. Sun Cao saw him as a rival who had stopped being a rival and become something more complicated—a standard to reach for, perhaps, or a mirror reflecting inadequacy. Master Zhi saw him as a vessel for knowledge that might otherwise die with him.
And Mei Ling...
Mei Ling saw him as Jon. Just Jon. Which was somehow heavier than all the rest combined.
"Six months," he reminded himself, resuming the climb. We have three months here to learn the impossible. Three months at the fortress to integrate it. Then the tournament.
It wasn't enough time. It couldn't possibly be enough time.
But the timeline wasn't his to dictate. He could only fill the unforgiving minutes with as much work as his body could survive and his mind could process. The road would be what the road would be. His task was simply to walk it.
The mist thickened as he climbed higher, turning the world to grey wool, muffling sound until only his heartbeat and footsteps remained. The monastery emerged from the white silence like something dreamed rather than built—ancient stone walls the color of thunderclouds, wooden gates black with age, and roof tiles green with centuries of moss.
The gates stood open.
Jon slowed. Usually, the gates were shut—a barrier that tested resolve, a silence that asked whether the climber truly wished to enter. But today, a figure waited in the opening, grey robes fluttering in the wind that never stopped blowing at this altitude.
"Jon Snow." The monk's voice was soft, barely louder than the wind. "Master Feng expects you."
Brother Chen. Jon felt warmth spread through his chest despite the cold. Chen had been the one who left rice cakes outside his door during the dark days of Bone Washing, who had cleaned the blood from the meditation stones without comment or judgment, and who had treated Jon's suffering as simply another part of the mountain's rhythm.
"I came as soon as his message arrived," Jon said, bowing his head.
"He knows." Chen stepped aside, gesturing Jon through. "He has been preparing."
Jon walked through the gate, and the sensation washed over him immediately—a feeling of settlement, of coming to rest after long movement. The smell of incense and pine, familiar as his own heartbeat now. The sound of wind chimes singing in the eaves, each note precise and patient. The sight of monks moving through the colonnades with the deliberate slowness of men who had made peace with time.
He wasn't a trespasser anymore. He wasn't a foreign curiosity tolerated for political convenience.
He was a son of this mountain. It had claimed him during the Bone Washing, tempered him during the Marrow Refinement, and now it waited to see what he would become.
A monk sweeping the flagstones looked up as Jon passed—Brother Wei, who had once spent three hours correcting his stance without speaking a single word. Wei nodded, a simple acknowledgment between equals. Jon returned it.
Winterfell is in my blood, Jon thought, walking the familiar paths toward the central courtyard. But this place is in my bones.
The central courtyard was as he remembered it—swept stone, ancient pine, and the flat meditation rock worn smooth by generations of students who had knelt upon it, broken upon it, and transcended upon it. Master Feng Huang stood beside the rock, hands clasped behind his back, looking at nothing and everything.
He didn't turn as Jon approached. He didn't need to.
"You've returned."
"You summoned me, Master."
Now Feng turned. His face was a landscape of weathered stone, wrinkles carved by decades of mountain wind and internal cultivation. But his eyes—his eyes were young, bright with an intelligence that saw through flesh to structure, through words to meaning.
"I suggested. The choice to come was yours."
"There was no choice," Jon said, setting his pack on the stone. "The training isn't finished."
Something flickered across Feng's expression—not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. "No. It isn't. And what comes next will be harder than anything before."
"I'm ready."
Feng looked at him the way a smith looks at steel before the final tempering—assessing, measuring, and calculating what heat the metal could survive.
"You think you are," he said softly. "That is not the same thing."
Master Feng's private quarters were a study in deliberate emptiness.
Jon had never been allowed inside this room. During the Bone Washing and Marrow Refinement, the inner sanctum had been forbidden—a space reserved for masters, not students. Now, following Feng through the narrow doorway, he understood why.
The room was smaller than his cell. The walls were bare stone, unadorned by scroll or painting. The floor held only rush mats worn thin by years of meditation. A low table sat in the center, empty except for a single object.
A piece of jade. Pale green, roughly the size of a fist, unpolished and raw. Yet it seemed to hold its own light—a cloudy luminescence trapped within the stone, glowing faintly in the dim room.
"Sit," Feng said.
Jon sat cross-legged, the jade between them like an offering on an altar.
"Do you know why this stage is called Jade Transformation?"
Jon studied the stone. "Because the bones become like jade. Dense. Strong. Harder than ordinary bone."
"That is the surface answer. The answer a child gives." Feng's voice held no criticism, only observation. "If hardness were the goal, we would call it Iron Transformation. Stone Transformation. But jade has another quality—one that makes it precious beyond its beauty."
Feng reached out and lifted the stone. His hands—calloused, dangerous, capable of breaking bone with a touch—cradled it with surprising gentleness.
"Jade is not simply hard. It is carved. It is shaped. A skilled craftsman takes raw jade and creates whatever his vision demands—vessels, ornaments, weapons, art. The stone does not resist the carver's intention. It yields to will while maintaining its essential nature."
He set the jade back down with a soft click.
"Your bones, after marrow refinement, are strong. Dense. A foundation capable of supporting the power your techniques demand." Feng's eyes found Jon's and held them. "But they are fixed. Static. They do what bones do—support weight, protect organs, and anchor muscle. They are structured without flexibility."
"And Jade Transformation changes that?"
"Jade Transformation teaches you to make your bones responsive. To shape them with thought the way a craftsman shapes stone. To harden them when you need armor. To soften them when you need flexibility. To become not merely strong, but adaptable."
Jon frowned, turning the concept over in his mind. "Softening bones? If bones soften, they break."
"Normal bones break," Feng corrected. "Transformed bones adapt."
"How is that possible?" The skepticism leaked into Jon's voice despite his efforts. "Bones don't change because you think at them."
"Don't they?" Feng's eyes glittered with something like amusement. "What did Marrow Refinement teach you?"
Jon recited the lessons he had absorbed over months of practice. "To feel my bones. To cultivate the golden light. To guide my body's natural rebuilding toward specific ends."
"And what is Jade Transformation but the absolute refinement of that principle?" Feng leaned forward, his presence filling the small room. "You learned to guide growth over months. Now you will learn to guide change over seconds."
"Seconds?"
"Jade Transformation is instant. Or near enough." Feng's voice was quiet, but it carried the weight of absolute certainty. "A master of this stage can harden his forearm to block a blade that would shatter ordinary bone, then in the next breath soften his joints to slip a grapple that should have torn his shoulder from its socket, then harden again to deliver a strike that cracks stone."
Jon stared at the jade, trying to imagine his own bones behaving like living clay. It sounded like magic—not the subtle internal cultivation he had learned, but something from the stories Old Nan had told in Winterfell. Something impossible.
"You're describing something that shouldn't exist."
"Most mastery seems impossible," Feng said dryly, "until you achieve it."
A silence settled between them. The jade seemed to pulse faintly in the dim light, patient as stone, waiting.
"But understand this, Jon Snow." Feng's voice hardened. "This is not a stage that can be rushed. Bone washing took months of physical breaking. Marrow refinement took months of cultivation. Jade Transformation takes years."
The word hung in the air like a sentence.
"I have three months," Jon said. "Before the tournament."
"I know." Feng's voice held no judgment, only the cold clarity of fact. "You will not master this stage in three months. You may not even achieve the first plateau. But you can begin. You can learn the principles. You can take the first steps on a path that will occupy you for years to come."
"What can I realistically achieve? Before the tournament?"
Feng considered the question with the gravity it deserved. "Awareness, perhaps. The ability to perceive your bones as changeable rather than fixed. The first glimmers of conscious influence." He paused, weighing possibilities. "And perhaps—if you work very hard, and if you possess the talent I believe you do—the ability to harden your skeleton momentarily. A second or two of enhanced density. Enough to survive a blow that would otherwise break you."
"A second?" Jon couldn't keep the disappointment from his voice. "That's all?"
"That is everything." Feng's voice cracked like a whip. "One second of jade hardness could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Between walking away and being carried away in pieces. Do not despise the second, boy. Wars are decided in less."
For three days, Jon Snow sat on the eastern terrace and accomplished nothing.
The terrace was a slab of grey granite jutting out over the abyss, exposed to the rising sun and the endless wind. It was where he had first learned to meditate during the Bone Washing, where he had found the golden light during Marrow Refinement. It felt right to return here for this new struggle.
"Begin as you always begin," Feng had instructed. "Find your bone-sense. Feel the golden light."
That part was easy. Jon closed his eyes, his breathing settling into the rhythmic cycle that had become second nature. His awareness sank inward, past skin, past muscle, anchoring into the architecture of his being. His skeleton blazed in his mind's eye—a framework of golden fire, dense and powerful, the legacy of months of cultivation.
"Good," Feng had said. "Now—instead of simply feeling your bones, try to change them. Start with your right hand. Try to make the bones denser. Harder."
Jon focused on his right hand. He knew these bones intimately—had felt them breaking in Grazdan's compound, had felt them burning during the Bone Washing, and had felt them strengthening during Marrow Refinement. If any part of his skeleton would respond to his will, it should be this.
Harden, he thought. Become stone. Become steel.
He pushed with his mind, bearing down on the bone the way he might bear down on a heavy weight. He visualized the golden light compressing, the marrow turning to iron, and the calcium fusing into something harder than nature intended.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. And again. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached and pushed until sweat beaded on his forehead despite the mountain cold.
His hand remained simply a hand.
By the afternoon of the third day, Jon's skull throbbed with pressure, his patience had frayed to threads, and his bones remained stubbornly, mockingly unchanged.
"Again," Feng said from the shadow of the overhang.
"It's not working." Jon broke his posture, opening his eyes to glare at his own palm as if it had personally betrayed him. "I'm doing what you said. I'm focusing. I'm pushing—"
"You are forcing."
"What's the difference?"
Feng stepped into the light, his robes rippling in the wind. "How do you fall asleep at night, Jon Snow? Do you push yourself into sleep? Do you command your dreams to come?"
Jon paused. "That's different."
"Is it?"
"Sleep just... happens. When I stop trying to stay awake."
"Exactly." Feng sat across from him, settling into stillness with the ease of long practice. "You treat your bones as if they are foreign objects. As if they are a sword you must grip or a stone you must lift. You push at them from outside yourself."
"They're inside me."
"Physically, yes. But in your mind, they are separate. You are the commander; they are soldiers awaiting orders." Feng shook his head slowly. "Soldiers can be commanded. The self can only be allowed."
Jon stared at him, frustration warring with exhaustion. "I don't understand."
"When you activate Thunder Breathing," Feng said, "do you command each nerve to fire faster? Do you order your heart to accelerate?"
"No. I just... do the technique. My body knows what to do."
"Because the technique and your intention have become one. You do not command the thunder—you become the thunder." Feng poked Jon's chest, his finger hard as iron against Jon's sternum. "Jade Transformation requires the same fusion. Your bones must become as responsive to intention as your muscles are. Not commanded. Not forced. Simply... moved."
"I've had eleven years to learn to move my muscles," Jon said. "I've only been aware of my bones for ten months."
"Then you have much work ahead." Feng rose, brushing dust from his robes. "Stop pushing, Jon Snow. Start feeling. You cannot conquer your own skeleton. You can only inhabit it."
The breakthrough came on the ninth day, and it came not through effort but through surrender.
The sun hung high overhead, baking the terrace. Jon was exhausted—not from physical exertion, but from the constant strain of reaching for something that wouldn't be grasped. He had stopped trying to harden his hand. He was simply sitting with it.
His mind drifted. He thought about the letter he hoped would arrive from Mei Ling. He thought about the cat she had named Ghost, the irony of it still making him smile. He thought about the twin swords wrapped in silk, waiting in her room for the day he would be worthy of them.
He thought about his hand. Not as a tool. Not as a weapon. Not as something to be commanded. Just... his hand. Part of him. As much him as his thoughts or his heartbeat or his name.
My hand doesn't need commands, he realized. My lungs don't need orders to breathe. My heart doesn't need instructions to beat.
My bones are me, too. They've always been me. I just forgot to include them in the conversation.
He closed his eyes and let himself drift. He didn't visualize the golden light and didn't reach for the bone-sense. He just felt the presence of his arm. The weight of it. The solidity.
He wondered, idly, what it would feel like if that solidity were absolute. If the spaces between marrow and mineral simply ceased to exist. Not pushing toward the sensation—just... wondering. The way you wonder about a half-remembered dream, reaching for it gently, waiting for it to surface.
What would it feel like to be Jade?
And for one instant—barely a flicker, faster than a heartbeat—something answered.
It wasn't hardness. It wasn't a physical change he could have measured. It was a sensation of potential. A feeling that the structure of his radius was not a fixed wall but a held breath, waiting to be released.
Jon's eyes snapped open.
The sensation vanished instantly, the bone feeling solid and immutable once more. But it had been there. He had felt the gate unlock, even if he hadn't walked through.
"I felt it," he whispered.
He looked up to find Feng standing in the doorway, two cups of tea steaming in his hands. The master had appeared without sound—or perhaps Jon had simply been too deep in his own awareness to notice.
"Describe it," Feng said, offering him a cup.
"It wasn't hardness." Jon struggled for words adequate to the experience. "It was... readiness. Potential. It felt like the bone was waiting. Like it was listening, and for just a moment, it heard me."
Feng nodded slowly, satisfaction settling into his weathered features.
"That is the first plateau. The awareness of potential. Your bones are no longer fixed in your perception—they are fluid. Changeable. You understand now, even if you cannot yet act on that understanding."
Jon looked at his hand, flexing the fingers. The sensation was gone, but the memory of it remained—bright and strange and full of promise.
"How long until I can actually harden them?"
"Days. Weeks. Perhaps longer." Feng sat across from him, cradling his own tea. "But the first glimmer is the hardest step. Many students spend months merely hammering their will against a locked door. You have found the handle."
Jon took the tea. It was bitter and hot, grounding him in the present moment.
"Now what?"
"Now you practice turning the handle. Every meditation, reach for that sensation. Don't try to open the door yet—just touch the handle. Remind yourself it exists. Build familiarity until the sensation of changeability is as natural to you as the sensation of touch."
The letter arrived on the fourteenth evening.
Brother Chen brought it after vespers, a scroll sealed with the green wax of House Kai. Jon waited until the monk's footsteps faded before breaking the seal, settling beside his single oil lamp to read.
Mei Ling's handwriting flowed down the page—elegant, precise, each character formed with the care of someone who had been taught that penmanship reflected character.
Jon,
The fortress feels too large without you. I keep turning corners expecting to find you there, and the emptiness when you're not is becoming familiar in a way I don't like.
Sun Cao trains twice as hard now. He won't say your name without scowling, but he's stopped being angry and started being hungry. I think you showed him something in that demonstration—not just what you could do, but what's possible. He wants to reach that. It's made him better. Less bitter. Almost pleasant, on good days.
Master Zhi's cough is worse. He hides the bloody handkerchiefs, but I've found them in his wastebin. I haven't told him I know. What would be the point? He's determined to die standing up, teaching until the last breath. He says you've given him too many ideas to waste time resting. That sounds like something you would say.
Father is planning the tournament delegation. He hasn't officially named you, but everyone knows. The servants whisper about the Stone Tiger's student, the foreign boy who moves like lightning and stands like stone. I tell them you're just Jon. They look at me like I'm telling them the sun is just a candle.
The swords are still wrapped in silk. I check on them every night—it's become a ritual now. Touching the wolf pommels, feeling their weight, imagining what it will look like when you finally wield them. I dream about it sometimes. You, with both blades, moving the way you moved in the training yard but more. Complete.
How is the new training? You said Jade Transformation would be different. Is it harder? Are you struggling?
You can tell me if you're struggling. I won't think less of you. I might even like knowing you're human.
Write back. I need to know you're still you, even up on that mountain.
—Mei Ling
P.S. Ghost caught a mouse yesterday. He brought it to me like a gift and looked very proud when I pretended to be impressed. I think he's decided he owns the garden now.
Jon read the letter twice, hearing her voice in the careful strokes of her brush. Then he pulled his inkstone closer and began to write.
Mei Ling,
I am struggling. Every day. You don't have to worry about me being human—the mountain reminds me of my limitations constantly.
The training is different. Not painful like Bone Washing, not slow like Marrow Refinement. It's about control—learning to change my bones the way I change my muscles, making the solid fluid and the fixed flexible. It sounds simple when I write it. It isn't. I spent the first week trying to force something that refuses to be forced.
Feng finally explained it in a way I understood: my bones are part of me, as intimate as breath. I don't command my heartbeat. I can't conquer my own skeleton. I can only inhabit it.
Yesterday, I felt something. Just a glimmer—the potential for change, waiting beneath my awareness like a fish beneath dark water. Feng says it's significant progress. I'm not sure I believe him. It feels like one step on a thousand-mile road. But it's a step. And the road is the road.
Tell Sun Cao to keep training. I want a real fight when I return, not a demonstration. And tell Zhi... tell him I'm studying the scroll he gave me every night. The integration he described—I'm beginning to understand it. Internal and external aren't opposites. They're partners. Each one makes the other more than it could be alone.
The swords are safer with you. If I had them here, I'd be tempted to use them before I'm ready, and we both know how that ended last time.
Keep dreaming about them. I dream about them too. About you watching while I finally become what I've been working toward.
Write again soon. Your letters make the mountain feel less far from everything else.
—Jon
P.S. Ghost sounds like a worthy guardian. Better than most wolves I've known. Tell him the garden is in good hands.
He blew on the ink until it dried, then rolled the parchment carefully. He would give it to Chen in the morning.
The lamp flickered, shadows dancing on the stone walls. Jon lay back on his cot, feeling the meditation stone's gentle pulse against his hip, the jade wolf pendant warm against his chest.
Somewhere beyond the mountain, the tournament waited. General Kai's ambitions waited. The great game of Yi Ti's warring factions waited, patient and hungry, ready to consume whatever was fed to it.
But for now, there was only the mountain. The jade stone in his mind. The slow, difficult work of turning bone into something more than bone.
Jon closed his eyes and reached for the handle.