Jon
Sixteen days on the mountain, and Jon's bones refused to listen.
He sat on the worn stone of the training courtyard as dawn light crept over the eastern peaks, painting the ancient pine in shades of gold and shadow. His breath fogged in the cold air, each exhaled a small ghost that formed and faded and formed again. The monastery's rhythm had become his rhythm—rising before the sun, meditation before food, and training before rest. His body knew the schedule now with the certainty of long practice.
But Jade Transformation wasn't yielding.
He could feel his bones. That much he'd mastered in the days since his first breakthrough. He knew the shape of his skeleton from the inside—femur and tibia, radius and ulna, each vertebra stacked precisely upon the last. The golden light of Marrow Refinement glowed steady when he reached for it, a warm presence that had become as familiar as his heartbeat.
But controlling that structure? He focused on making his bones harder at will, just as Feng had described.
Nothing.
He heard the master's footsteps before he saw him—or rather, he heard the absence of footsteps, the particular quality of silence that announced Feng Huang's approach. The Stone Tiger moved the way mountains moved: slowly, inevitably, with a weight that had nothing to do with physical mass.
"Again," Feng said, taking his position three paces away.
Jon extended his left forearm, palm up. Closed his eyes. He reached for the sensation he'd touched on the ninth day—that feeling of potential, of bones waiting to respond.
Become jade, he thought. Not commanding. Inviting. Becoming.
Feng's testing strike landed.
Pain bloomed across Jon's forearm, sharp and immediate. He opened his eyes to see the skin already darkening, another bruise joining the constellation that mottled both arms from wrist to elbow.
"Again."
Jon reset. Reached deeper. He made an effort to locate the door handle that Feng had mentioned, the one he had briefly touched and then misplaced.
The strike landed. More pain. More bruising.
"Again."
The morning passed in repetition. By the time the sun climbed high enough to warm the courtyard stones, Jon's arms were a patchwork of purple and yellow, his concentration frayed to threads, and his patience worn thin as old silk.
"I've done everything right," he thought, staring at his own mottled flesh. I've followed every instruction. I found the door. Why can't I open it?
That evening, Jon sat alone in his cell and examined his failure.
Bone Washing had been agony, but it was something he understood. You endured it. You survived it. There was a clear enemy—the pain—and a clear victory: still breathing when it ended. He had learned to endure in the slave pits of Yunkai, in the hold of the Jade Serpent, and in the thousand small deaths that had marked his journey across the world. Endurance was a language Jon spoke fluently.
Marrow Refinement had required patience, but it was active patience. Cultivating. Growing. Building something from the foundations the first stage had laid. He had learned patience in the garden with Mei Ling, in Zhi's study surrounded by scrolls, and in the slow accumulation of days that had transformed Tianlei from a strange place into something like home.
This journey was different.
This required Jon to trust his body. To believe that his bones would respond if he asked correctly. To have faith in a structure that had failed him—that had been broken and mishealed and damaged beyond repair before Feng rebuilt it from the marrow out.
I don't trust my body.
The thought surfaced like something long submerged, rising through dark water to painful clarity.
I've never trusted my body. My body is the thing that gets hurt. The thing that breaks. The thing I have to protect from the world.
In Winterfell, his body had been the vessel that carried strangeness—the white hair that marked him as other, the reflexes too quick for a child his age, and the knowledge that surfaced unbidden from Marcus Chen's memories. He had learned early to distrust the flesh that made him different.
In Yunkai, his body had been a target. Something to be beaten, branded, and broken. He had survived by treating it as separate from himself—this is happening to the body, not to me—a dissociation that had kept his mind intact while his skeleton shattered.
Even now, even after Bone Washing and Marrow Refinement, some part of him still treated his bones as foreign territory. It was something he felt he could command from a distance. Something that might betray him at any moment.
How do you become Jade, Jon wondered, when you're at war with your skeleton?
Jon
The summons came after evening meditation—a monk appearing at Jon's door with a simple message: Master Feng wished to speak with him.
Jon followed through the monastery's silent corridors, expecting criticism. Another lesson about patience. Another instruction he'd failed to understand or apply correctly. His arms ached beneath his sleeves, the bruises throbbing with each heartbeat.
Feng's private chamber was smaller than Jon had imagined. A single candle burned on a low table, casting wavering shadows across bare stone walls. No scrolls decorated the space, and no weapons hung in honored positions. Only emptiness remained, with the old master sitting in a meditation posture, his eyes closed and breathing so slowly that he seemed carved from the same stone as the mountain.
"Sit."
Jon sat cross-legged on the rush mat opposite Feng, the table between them. The candle flame danced in some draft Jon couldn't feel, making the shadows shift and crawl.
Silence stretched between them. One minute. Two. Five. Jon's legs began to ache, cramp, then settle into the numb acceptance of long stillness. He had learned this much, at least—the ability to wait without fidgeting, to exist in silence without needing to fill it with words.
"When you reach for your bones," Feng said at last, his eyes still closed, "what do you feel?"
Jon considered the question. "I feel the structure. The shape. I know where everything is—every bone, every joint, every connection."
"That is not what I asked." Feng's eyes opened, catching the candlelight like dark mirrors. "What do you feel?"
Although the question appeared to be the same, Jon sensed that it was different. He struggled to articulate something he'd never examined, reaching for words to describe an experience that existed beneath language.
"I feel... like there is something I have to control." Something I have to do to make do with what I want."
"And there is your problem."
Feng leaned forward, his presence filling the small room despite his stillness.
"You treat your body as an instrument. A tool you wield. Something separate from yourself that must be commanded."
"Isn't it?"
"No." The word was absolute, admitting no argument. "Your bones are not your servants. They are not soldiers awaiting orders. They are you. They hold the same significance as your thoughts. They are as much a part of you as your memories. As much as your fears."
Jon frowned, trying to understand. "But I can think about my bones. I can examine them. If they were me, how could I—"
"You can think about your anger. You can examine your grief. Are these things not you?"
The question cut deeper than Jon expected. He thought of the rage that had sustained him in the slave pits and the sorrow that still surfaced when he thought of Winterfell, of Robb, and of the family he might never see again. Those emotions were undeniably his—part of him in ways he couldn't separate.
"You cannot command yourself to feel differently," Feng continued. "You cannot order yourself to be happy, forget, or heal." But you can become those things—if you stop fighting yourself."
"I don't know how to stop fighting."
The admission came out before Jon could catch it, raw and honest in the candlelit dark.
Feng nodded slowly, as if this confession was what he'd been waiting for.
"You have spent your life surviving. Surviving requires vigilance—treating the body as something to be protected, guarded, and defended from a hostile world. This mindset served you well. It kept you alive through circumstances that would have killed others."
He rose in a single fluid motion, moving to the small window that looked out over the moonlit valley.
"But survival is not the same as living. And guarding is not the same as inhabiting." He turned back to face Jon. "You guard your bones. You protect them. You watch them from the walls of your consciousness, like a castle guard watching for enemies."
"Because enemies came," Jon said quietly. "They always came."
"Yes. And now you must learn that you are no longer under siege. Your bones are not a fortress to be defended—they are you. When you reach for them and find, not a structure to control, but a part of yourself you have neglected... then Jade Transformation will answer."
Feng returned to his seat, settling into stillness with the ease of long practice.
"Go. Meditate on this. Not with your mind—with your body. Feel what it means to be bone, not to have bone."
Jon
The letter was waiting on his sleeping mat when he returned to his cell, left by some monk during his absence. The paper was worn soft at the edges from its long journey, sealed with the green wax of House Kai that had become as familiar to Jon as the jade wolf against his chest.
He broke the seal carefully, unrolling the scroll in the light of his single candle. Mei Ling's handwriting filled the page—bolder than it had been a year ago, more controlled, but still carrying the impatient energy he remembered from their first conversations in the garden.
Jon,
Winter has come to Tianlei, and I wish you were here to see it. The cherry trees in our garden are bare, their branches etched against the gray sky. Do you remember the first time you saw them in winter? You said they looked like delicate frost sculptures, and I laughed because I'd never thought of them that way. Now I can't see them any other way. Every snowflake that falls is a silent whisper that never touches the ground.
Sun Cao has been training the younger soldiers. Something has changed in him since you left—he's less frustrated and more patient. He still scowls when your name comes up, but it's a different kind of scowling now. It seems like he is annoyed with himself rather than with you. I think watching you in the training yard showed him something. He's hungry now, not bitter. It's a better look for him.
Master Zhi...
Here her writing changed, the characters smaller and more careful. Jon could almost see her hesitating, choosing each word with deliberation.
Master Zhi tires more easily now. He says it's nothing, that old men need more rest, but I see how he pauses between lessons. How he has to catch his breath after climbing stairs. He's been teaching me everything he can, as if he's afraid of running out of time. I don't like thinking about what that means.
He asked me to tell you that he's proud of your progress. The integration he hoped for—the merging of internal and external arts into one instead of two—is finally starting to manifest in you. He says you'll understand what that means.
Father has announced the tournament delegation. Your name isn't officially on the list, but everyone knows. The servants whisper about the Stone Tiger's student. They call you a "ghost child," "lightning boy," and other names I won't repeat. I tell them you're just Jon, but they look at me like I'm describing a story they don't believe.
The swords are still wrapped in silk. I check on them every night—it's become a ritual, something I do to feel close to you when the distance feels too far. I touch the wolf pommels and imagine what it will look like when you finally wield them. I dream about it occasionally. You will be wielding both blades, moving as you did in the training yard, but with even more skill. Complete.
The garden isn't the same without you. I still go there. I still sit on our bench. But the silence is too loud now, if that makes sense. It's waiting for something. For someone.
For you.
Write back. Tell me you're still you, even up on that mountain.
—Mei Ling
P.S. Ghost caught three mice this week. He's getting fat and lazy and very pleased with himself. I think he believes he's earned the garden.
Jon read the letter twice, then a third time. Each word was warmth in the cold stone cell, a connection across the miles of mountain and sea that separated them. He could hear her voice in the careful brushstrokes and see her face in the spaces between characters.
"I'm not alone," he thought, pressing the paper against his chest. I'm never alone. Not while she remembers me.
He pulled his inkstone closer and began to write.
Mei Ling,
The training is harder than I expected. Not painful like bone washing—different. It's about control, but not the kind of control I thought. Feng says I have to stop fighting myself. That my bones are me, not something I own. I'm trying to understand what that means.
I spent sixteen days failing. Every morning, Feng tests my forearms, and every morning, I bruise. I know what I'm supposed to feel—I touched it once, just for a moment—but I can't find my way back to it. It's like trying to remember a dream that fades the harder you chase it.
Your words about Zhi worry me. Tell him to rest. Tell him about the integration he taught me about and the scroll he gave me—I study it every night. He's given me more than he knows. More than I can repay.
Tell Sun Cao to keep training. I want a real fight when I return, not a demonstration.
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 them until I earn them. Keep them until I'm whole.
The jade wolf never leaves my chest. When the training is hardest, when I can't find what I'm reaching for, I touch it. I remember who I'm becoming strong for.
The mountain is cold and the days are long, and sometimes I forget what your voice sounds like. Then a letter arrives, and I remember everything.
Keep writing. Keep waiting. I'm coming back.
—Jon
He signed it simply: Jon. Not Snow. Not from Winterfell. Just the name she used when they sat together in the garden, when she reached for his hand, when she looked at him and saw not a bastard or a curiosity but a friend.
Jon
The breakthrough came on the twenty-third day, and it came not through effort but through surrender.
Jon rose before dawn, while the monastery still slept beneath its blanket of mountain mist. The training courtyard was empty—even the monks hadn't begun their morning duties. He sat on the worn stone where generations of students had struggled and failed and sometimes succeeded, the cold seeping through his clothes, his breath fogging in the dark.
He didn't reach for his bones. Didn't try to feel them from outside, like examining a map of foreign territory. Instead, he closed his eyes and let his awareness sink inward, spreading through his skeleton like water through channels in stone.
Not visiting, he thought, remembering Feng's words. Being.
He thought about what Feng had said. About guarding versus inhabiting. About the difference between commanding and becoming.
His whole life, he had treated his body as something separate. Something that happened to him. The vessel that carried his consciousness through a hostile world was always under threat and required protection. Even after Bone Washing rebuilt his skeleton, even after Marrow Refinement strengthened it, some part of him still stood guard on the walls, watching his own bones for signs of betrayal.
But what if the war is over?
The thought was strange. Uncomfortable. His body had been a battlefield for so long that peace felt like a foreign country, a language he'd never learned to speak.
What if I don't have to defend anymore? What if I can just... be here?
He let his awareness settle deeper. Past the skin. Past the muscle. Into the bones themselves—not observing them, but inhabiting them. Feeling from the inside what it meant to be calcium and marrow and mineral structure.
His ribs curved around his lungs, patient as architecture. His spine stacked vertebra upon vertebra, a column of stability that had been rebuilt from nothing. His arms extended from shoulders that had once been damaged beyond repair, now dense and strong and waiting.
Waiting for what?
For me to stop fighting. For me to come home.
Something shifted.
It wasn't dramatic. No flash of light, no surge of power. Just a subtle change in his awareness—a sense that the boundary between himself and his bones had thinned. That he wasn't looking at them anymore but being them.
And in his left forearm, something responded.
Not his will commanding—his body recognizing. Like a muscle remembering a movement it had forgotten. Like a hand recalling how to hold a sword after years away from training.
Yes, his bones seemed to say. This is what we are. This is what we can become.
Feng found him an hour later, still sitting in meditation, the dawn light painting the courtyard in shades of rose and gold.
Jon opened his eyes. The master stood at the edge of the training space, watching with the patient attention of someone who has seen this moment before—in other students, in other years, repeated across generations of struggle and discovery.
"I think I understand now."
"Show me."
Jon extended his left forearm. Closed his eyes. Sank into the bone—not commanding, but becoming. Feeling the structure as self, not as servant. The boundary between consciousness and skeleton dissolved until there was no difference between the one who reached and the one who responded.
Be Jade, he thought. Not an order. An invitation. A becoming.
Feng's testing strike landed.
For two seconds—perhaps three—Jon's bones held.
It wasn't the diamond-hard transformation that masters achieved, the legendary jade body that could deflect blades without breaking. But it was harder than flesh should be. Denser. Resistant in ways that ordinary bone could never be.
The strike that should have bruised left only a faint mark, already fading.
Jon opened his eyes. Feng stood before him, expression unreadable as always—but something in the old master's posture had shifted. Something that might have been satisfaction, or recognition, or the quiet pleasure of a teacher seeing a student finally grasp what he had been trying to teach.
"Good."
One word. But it was the first time Feng had said it since Jon's arrival.
Jon
That evening, Feng summoned him to the private chamber again.
The candle burned as before, casting the same wavering shadows on the bare stone walls. But something in the room felt different—not warmer, exactly, but less austere. As if Jon had earned the right to be here in a way he hadn't before.
Feng examined Jon's forearm where the testing strike had landed, pressing various points, testing the flesh and bone beneath with fingers that could sense things ordinary hands could not.
"Two seconds of partial hardening," he said at last. "After twenty-three days of focused training."
"Is that good?"
"It is adequate. For a first true success." Feng's voice held no warmth, but no criticism either—the neutral assessment of a master who had seen countless students pass through these stages. "Most require three months to achieve what you did today. Some never achieve it at all."
Jon absorbed this. Progress was progress, even when it felt small.
"The spring tournament," Feng continued, "is five months distant. House Kai wishes you to compete."
"I know." Jon had known since before he left Tianlei. General Kai had made no secret of his intentions. "Can I be ready?"
"That depends on what you mean by 'ready.'" Feng sat back, considering the question with the gravity it deserved. "Full Jade Transformation—the ability to harden your entire skeleton at will, maintaining it through combat—takes years. A decade, for most. Some never achieve full mastery regardless of how long they train. You will not reach this level by spring."
The words landed heavily, but Jon had expected them. He had learned to measure his progress in realistic increments, not in the dreams of immediate mastery that had once consumed him.
"But partial transformation?" Feng continued. "Targeted hardening? The ability to jolt a single bone at a crucial moment, for one or two seconds?"
His eyes caught the candlelight, glittering with something that might have been anticipation.
"That, you might achieve. If you train without ceasing. If you integrate what you've learned—the Bone Washing's resilience, the Marrow Refinement's golden light, and now the Jade Transformation's control. If you learn to call upon jade hardening not in meditation but in combat, when your body is in motion and your mind is divided."
"And if I can do that?"
"Then you will be unexpected." Feng's voice dropped, taking on a quality Jon had never heard before—something almost like hunger. "In a tournament where the noble sons of great houses come to display their polished techniques, you will be something they haven't prepared for. A foundation they don't recognize. A body that breaks their strikes."
Jon thought of the tournament. Of the champions who would face him—men trained from childhood in the martial traditions of Yi Ti, backed by the wealth and resources of ancient houses. He was a foreign foundling with white hair and grey eyes, a bastard from a land these men had never seen.
"They'll underestimate me."
"At first. Perhaps fatally." Feng's expression hardened. "But understand this: you will not be a jade warrior by spring. You will be a boy with jade moments. One or two seconds when your bones harden beyond what should be possible. That is all."
"Is that enough?"
"That depends entirely on when those moments come." Feng leaned forward, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "A jade moment occurs when a blade descends toward your skull." It's a jade moment when a strike should shatter your ribs. A jade moment is when everyone expects you to break, and you do not."
He sat back, the intensity fading.
"Time your moments correctly, and you will seem invincible. Time them incorrectly, and you will be carried from the arena in pieces."
The question hung between them in the candlelit dark: was it enough?
Jon thought of Mei Ling, waiting in the garden with swords wrapped in wolf-embroidered silk. Of Master Zhi, teaching faster because he knew his time was running out. Of General Kai, who had looked at him and seen not a boy but a weapon to be wielded.
He thought of the slave pits of Yunkai, where he had been nothing. Of the storm that had nearly drowned him. Of the training yard at Tianlei, where he had collapsed in front of everyone who doubted him.
He had been nothing. He had been broken. He had been a boy chasing a dead man's legend.
Now he was something else. Something that was still becoming.
"I'll be ready," he said.
Feng studied him for a long moment—the white hair, the grey eyes, the face that had hardened over months of training into something that was no longer entirely a child's.
"We shall see," the master said. "Return to Tianlei. Practice what you've learned—not just the jade hardening, but the integration. Bone Washing, Marrow Refinement, and now this. Three stages working as one."
"And the tournament?"
"Return here one month before. We will refine what you've built. We will prepare you as well as time allows." Feng's voice carried no promises, no false comfort. Only truth. "The rest will be up to you."
Jon
The morning of his departure dawned clear and cold, the sky a pale blue that seemed to stretch forever above the mountain peaks.
Jon gathered his belongings—the meditation stone, the jade wolf pendant, his worn clothes, and the scroll Zhi had given him. Everything fit into a single pack. He had arrived with little and he would leave with little. The real weight he carried couldn't be measured in pounds or stored in leather.
At the monastery gate, a small group had assembled. Not many—five monks, perhaps six—but more than Jon had expected. Brother Chen was there, and Brother Wei, who had corrected his stance without speaking, and others whose names Jon had never learned but whose faces had become familiar over months of silent acknowledgment.
They bowed as he approached. Not deeply, not the prostration reserved for masters, but genuinely. The bow of equals recognizing one of their own.
They're acknowledging me, Jon realized. Not as a curiosity. Not as a foreigner. As a student of this mountain.
He bowed back, matching their depth, honoring the gesture.
Feng stood at the gate itself, hands clasped behind his back, gazing out at the valley below. He didn't turn as Jon approached—he never needed to turn, always aware of everything that moved within his domain.
"You have the foundation now," Feng said. "Three stages begun—Bone Washing complete, Marrow Refinement advanced, Jade Transformation initiated."
"But not mastered."
"Nothing worth mastering is mastered quickly." Feng turned at last, his weathered face unreadable but his eyes holding something that might have been approval. "You carry the beginnings of what could become formidable. Do not waste them."
"I won't."
"See that you don't." Feng's voice hardened. "The tournament is not a game. The men you face will be trying to defeat you—some will be trying to kill you, if they can do so without consequences. House Kai has enemies. You will inherit them the moment you step into that arena."
"I understand."
"Do you?" Feng's eyes bored into him. "You fight not just for yourself now. You fight for the girl who waits for you, and the old man who is dying, and the general who has made you his weapon. You fight for everyone who has invested in your survival."
The weight of it settled on Jon's shoulders—not crushing, but present. Real. The people who believed in him. The people he couldn't afford to fail.
"I won't let them down."
"Then go. Train. Return when I summon you." Feng stepped aside, clearing the path. "And remember what I taught you: you cannot command yourself to become anything." You can only allow it."
Jon walked down the mountain.
The path felt different than it had climbing up—not easier, exactly, but more familiar. His body moved with a certainty it hadn't possessed before, each step rooted, each breath drawing strength from the thin air that no longer challenged him.
He had changed in these twenty-three days. Not dramatically, not in ways visible to the eye, but in the deep architecture of how he related to his skeleton. He had stopped fighting himself. Had stopped treating his bones as a fortress to be defended and started inhabiting them as the self they had always been.
It wasn't mastery. It was barely the beginning of mastery. But it was something real, something he could build on.
The mountain's cold gave way to warmer air as he descended. The sparse pines of the upper slopes yielded to denser forest, then to the cultivated terraces of the foothills. The world expanded around him—no longer just the monastery's austere silence but the full breadth of Yi Ti spreading toward horizons he couldn't see.
Below, the road to Tianlei waited.
Below, Mei Ling waited, with swords wrapped in silk and letters that made the distance bearable.
Below, Master Zhi waited, teaching faster because time was running out.
Below, the tournament waited—five months away and closing.
Jon touched the jade wolf at his chest, feeling its familiar weight. The pendant had been with him through everything—through Bone Washing and Marrow Refinement, through the darkest nights and the brightest breakthroughs. It was Mei Ling's gift, her promise made physical, carried against his heart.
"I'm coming home," he thought.
And for the first time, the word didn't ache.
Home wasn't Winterfell anymore—that place of snow and loss and family he might never see again. Home was a fortress by the sea, a garden where cherry blossoms fell like pink snow, and a girl who saw through his strangeness to the person beneath.
Home was something he had earned. Something he was returning to.
The road descended before him, winding through valleys painted green with spring. Jon followed it, his steps steady, his bones humming with potential yet to be realized.
The tournament was coming. The test of everything he had built.
But first: home. First: Mei Ling.
First: becoming whoever he was meant to be.