Four hundred and eighteen marks on the dormitory wall.
Ling Tian Jue ran his thumb across the last one. Each carved with a stolen nail into white lotus stone, each line representing a day of preparation. Breathing exercises before dawn. Meridian stretching at noon. Herbal supplements traded for with chore credits. Four hundred and eighteen days of work that assumed he had something worth working on.
Today was the Awakening Ceremony. Today he'd find out if any of it mattered.
He dressed in the standard disciple candidate robes. Gray with black lotus trim. The fabric was cheap, already fraying at the cuffs. The Ebon Lotus Sanctuary spent its money on jade halls and formation arrays, not on clothing for children who might never amount to anything.
Four hundred and nineteen, he thought, scratching one more mark into the stone.
---
The Awakening Plaza could hold a thousand. Today it held three hundred and twelve candidates, their families, and every elder with nothing better to do on a spring morning.
Tian Jue stood near the back, wearing the traditional mono-gray robes given to those unawakened. The noble families claimed the front rows, their children wrapped in spirit-silk and confidence. The commoners filled in behind, quiet and hopeful and trying not to look too hopeful.
He watched the crowd instead of the stage. An instinct of his. You learned more from watching people than listening to ceremonies. Then his eyes found what everyone else was staring at. One white robe among countless black robes with red accents on them. An Ebon Lotus Sanctuary tradition.
The boy three rows ahead kept touching his stomach. Pill residue, probably. Some families fed their children qi-enhancement pills before the ceremony, hoping to nudge a borderline result into something respectable. It never worked. The awakening crystal read what was there, not what you'd swallowed an hour ago.
The girl to his left was crying before her name was called. She'd already decided she was going to fail. Tian Jue thought that was wasteful. Save the crying for after. At least get the data first.
"Yue Lian."
The name cut through the crowd noise. People straightened. Even the noble families turned.
She walked to the stage with the kind of composure that came from either total confidence or total control. Tian Jue couldn't tell which. Tall for seventeen. Black hair pulled back. She moved without glancing at the crowd. Eyes forward. Steps measured.
The awakening elder placed his hand on the crystal. It turned white. Then blue. Then a shade so deep it looked like frozen night sky.
Frost bloomed in the air around her. Real frost, crystallizing on the stage, on the elder's robes, on the faces of the candidates close enough to feel it. The temperature dropped ten degrees in a heartbeat.
"Phoenix Frost Root," the elder said. His voice cracked on the last word. "S-rank."
The plaza erupted. S-rank. One per generation if a sect was lucky. The kind of talent that made a sect's reputation for the next century. Elders were standing. Someone was already sending a message talisman to the Sect Master.
Yue Lian stood in the center of it all. The frost faded. She looked out over the crowd and for one moment her eyes found Tian Jue.
Something in her expression. Not pride. Not excitement. Something soft and sad, like she already knew what was coming next.
He didn't understand it then.
Yue Lian was given her new sect robes before leaving the stage.
---
"Ling Tian Jue."
He walked to the stage. The crowd barely noticed. After S-rank Phoenix Frost Root, everything else was an afterthought. That was fine. He preferred it.
The awakening elder placed a hand on his forehead. Standard procedure. The crystal would read his spiritual root, determine his cultivation affinity, and assign him to the appropriate training path.
The crystal didn't light up.
The elder frowned. Adjusted his hand. Pressed harder, which wasn't supposed to matter but always seemed to make elders feel better. Nothing.
"Bring the secondary array," he said.
Two more elders joined. Three sets of hands, three diagnostic formations at once. Tian Jue stood still and counted heartbeats. Sixty-four. Sixty-five. Sixty-six.
At heartbeat seventy-three, the head elder stepped back.
"Stillborn Core." The words fell into the plaza like stones into water. "No meridians. No dantian. No qi pathways."
Silence. Then murmuring.
"His body has no cultivation infrastructure," the elder continued. He wasn't looking at Tian Jue anymore. He was looking at the other elders, already categorizing the problem. "Not damaged. Not blocked. Absent. As if it was never meant to exist."
Tian Jue's mother made a sound. Small, involuntary, like something inside her had snapped. She folded and his father caught her. The look on his father's face wasn't surprise. It was resignation. The look of a man who'd been waiting for bad news and had finally received it.
Four hundred and eighteen days of preparation. Breathing exercises. Meridian stretching. Herbal supplements.
For a body that never had meridians to stretch.
The crowd's murmuring grew. Tian Jue heard fragments. *Poor boy. What a waste. At least the Yue girl made up for it. Stillborn, can you imagine?*
He cataloged each reaction the way he'd cataloged the pill-taking boy and the crying girl. Data. Just data.
"The Ebon Lotus Sanctuary," the head elder announced, "in accordance with ancient covenant, will commit the candidate to the Divine Disposal Ground." He paused long enough to look merciful. "It is humane."
The elders gave him the only white robe that would be handed out during the ceremony. No candidates after him would fail as spectacularly as he did, even if they awakened as an F-class. A class was better than no class at all.
One hour. That's what they gave him. One hour to collect belongings and say goodbye to his home.
Tian Jue didn't have belongings worth collecting. The nail he'd used to carve marks belonged to the dormitory. The robes belonged to the sect. Even the four hundred and nineteen marks on the wall belonged to the stone.
He sat on his bed in the empty room and owned nothing.
---
"I'm sorry."
Tian Jue looked up. Yue Lian stood in his doorway. She had changed to her new black disciple robes. Her frost qi was gone and she looked smaller than she had on stage. Not the S-rank prodigy.
Just a sect girl standing in a doorway.
"You don't have to be here," he said.
"I know."
She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a jade pendant. Small, warm, threaded on a red cord.
Tian Jue could feel the heat from a foot away. Fire qi, stored and gentle. The kind of thing cultivators gave to children to ward off nightmares.
"It won't help," she said. "Not where you're going. But..."
She held it out for Tian Jue to take.
"Why?"
"Because no one else is coming." She set the pendant on the bed beside him. "And I remember that you shared your lunch with Wei Tan last winter. When he was sick and no one would sit with him."
He'd forgotten that. Apparently she hadn't.
Tian Jue picked up the pendant. Warm against his palm. Useless warmth. He couldn't cultivate fire qi. Couldn't cultivate anything. But it was warm and felt nice to hold.
"I'll remember that you were kind," he said.
Yue Lian's mouth tightened. She nodded once, turned, and left. Her footsteps were silent on the lotus stone. Cultivator's grace, already manifesting.
The door closed behind her. The room was cold again.
---
The guards came at the hour mark. Two of them, outer disciples with swords they didn't need. Tian Jue walked between them through the Sanctuary's main corridor. Dark jade walls. White lotus carvings everywhere, petals arranged in protective circles. Beautiful and indifferent.
Other candidates watched him pass. Some looked away. A few wore expressions of relief. Not me. Thank the heavens, not me.
A sanctuary. That's what they called this place. A refuge for cultivators seeking the path. The jade was dark because the Ebon Lotus embraced all aspects of cultivation, even the shadowed ones.
Balanced. Accepting. Wise.
Unless you had nothing to cultivate. Then it embraced you right off a cliff.
They walked for ten minutes through corridors that grew older and less maintained. Past training halls and meditation chambers, past gardens and formations, until the architecture gave way to raw mountain stone. The Sanctuary's beauty stopped where its usefulness ended.
The Divine Disposal Ground opened at the mountain's northeastern edge. The rock stopped and darkness began, vertical and absolute, swallowing light at the rim like something was drinking it.
Tian Jue looked down. Nothing looked back. The absence of looking back. He could feel the cold rising from below, but it wasn't temperature. It was something else. Something that made the jade pendant against his chest feel like the only warm thing left in the world.
"I'm sorry, kid," the guard on his left said. He meant it. That almost made it worse.
The push was gentle. Professional. The guard's hand found his back, a moment of firm pressure, and then the ground was gone and there was nothing beneath his feet.
Tian Jue fell.
The darkness swallowed him whole. Wind screamed past. His stomach lurched. The jade pendant bounced against his chest, a point of warmth in a void of nothing.
And falling, he counted. Old habits. The only thing left that was his.
One. Two. Three.
Four hundred and nineteen.