—————
The evening light came through the window in a thin wedge, cutting across the back room's floor like a blade laid flat. Ron sat against the wall with his legs extended, feeling the pleasant heaviness that settled into his muscles after dinner—the body's quiet insistence on rest before he denied it again. His meditation would come later. Then the alley. Then sleep, brief and dreamless, before the cycle renewed.
Two months had reshaped him in ways that the mirror on his mother's wall confirmed each morning but couldn't fully capture. The gangliness was gone. Not replaced by bulk—he was still lean, still narrow through the shoulders—but reorganized, the way a pile of lumber became a structure when someone with a plan arranged it. His movements had acquired an economy that he hadn't consciously developed but couldn't now abandon. He didn't fidget. He didn't shift his weight unnecessarily. When he stood, he stood from somewhere, rooted, his center of gravity settled low in his hips the way the kendo stances had taught him.
Level nineteen. The number sat in his spirit core like a stone at the bottom of a well—solid, undeniable, radiating a quiet pressure that he felt with each breath. Two months ago he'd been at level sixteen. The acceleration was absurd by any standard metric the academy used, and Ron had taken deliberate steps to obscure it.
The scrutiny would come eventually. He knew this. But eventually and now were different problems, and he preferred to solve them in sequence.
Footsteps in the main room. Light ones—not his mother's purposeful stride or his father's heavy tread. The flour-sack curtain shifted.
Lian stood in the gap.
She'd changed in two months as well, though less visibly. The same dark braid, the same precise posture, the same analytical gaze that tracked and measured everything it landed on. But there was something new beneath the composure—a tightness in the way she held her shoulders, a compression around her mouth that Ron recognized because he'd worn it himself before the pen had opened its doors.
Frustration. The particular kind that came from working hard at something and watching the distance between effort and result refuse to close.
"Is it true?"
She didn't specify what. She didn't need to. Freya City Academy was a building full of children, and children were information networks of terrifying efficiency. Ron's cultivation level had leaked—probably through the quarterly spirit assessment that Master Wen administered to all students, the results of which were technically confidential and practically public knowledge within forty-eight hours.
Ron looked at his sister. Nine years old. Level nine. The same level she'd been two months ago, when he'd first offered to examine her meditation cycle and she'd told the wall that she didn't need help from a pen-spirit.
"Yes."
Lian's jaw worked. A small motion, barely visible—the masseter muscle clenching and releasing as she processed the confirmation against whatever she'd hoped or feared it would be. Level nineteen. Her brother, the pen-wielder, the boy whose awakening examiner had struggled to find polite words, was now ten full levels above her. The gap was no longer a difference in talent. It was a chasm, and it was widening with each day she spent on the standard academy meditation cycle while he—
"How?"
One word. It cost her something to produce it. Ron could see the price in the rigid line of her spine, the way her fingers gripped the curtain's edge hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Lian had inherited their mother's pride the way some children inherited eye color—completely, invisibly, woven into the structure of her personality so deeply that removing it would require dismantling everything else first.
Asking her older brother for help was not something Lian did. Asking her older brother with the pen-spirit for help was something Lian would rather swallow glass than do.
And yet here she stood.
Ron didn't make her wait. Didn't savor the moment or angle for acknowledgment. Whatever satisfaction existed in being right—and it existed, he wasn't selfless enough to pretend otherwise—it was smaller than the thing that mattered, which was that his sister was standing in the doorway with her pride cracking at the seams and he had something that could help.
He reached beneath the loose floorboard.
The papers were organized—he'd developed a filing system over the past month, each sheet labeled and dated, arranged in sequence from earliest to most recent. The meditation diagrams occupied their own section, a progression of golden-lined schematics that documented his cultivation cycle's evolution from the standard academy method through six major revisions to its current form. The current version was twice as efficient as the original. Not through secret techniques or forbidden knowledge—through optimization. The pen's analytical inscription had found every leak, every turbulence, every fractional waste in the system and eliminated them, one by one, the way a jeweler removed flaws from a gemstone.
He selected a sheet from the middle of the sequence—not his current diagram, which was calibrated specifically to his pen-spirit's resonance frequency and wouldn't translate directly to a plant-type cultivator, but an earlier revision that addressed the universal inefficiencies. The solar plexus compression. The skull-base timing. The descending channel clearance protocol. These were structural improvements that applied regardless of spirit type—the equivalent of teaching someone to breathe properly before teaching them to run.
"This is a revised meditation cycle," Ron said, holding out the paper. "It fixes three major problems with the standard academy method."
Lian stared at the sheet. Golden lines glowed faintly against the rice paper—spiraling pathways, annotated junction points, timing marks that indicated the rhythm of energy circulation. Her eyes moved across the diagram with the quick, systematic scan of someone accustomed to absorbing technical information.
"The pen helped. When I inscribe something, I understand it more deeply. I applied that to the meditation cycle and found better points."
Lian's gaze lifted from the paper to his face. The struggle behind her eyes was naked and brief—pride warring with pragmatism, the desire to dismiss this as beneath her colliding with the reality that level nine after three years of diligent practice was a trajectory that led to mediocrity.
She took the paper.
Her fingers closed on it with a care that contradicted her expression, which remained composed. She studied the diagram for a long moment, lips moving slightly as she traced the circulation pathways.
"Don't show this to anyone," Ron said. "Keep it between us."
Lian looked up. The instruction had landed differently than he'd expected—not as a command, but as a confidence shared. Something private, passed between siblings in the back room of a rented apartment. Her expression shifted by a degree that most people wouldn't have noticed.
"Fine."
She turned to leave. Stopped.
"Thank you." Said to the curtain. Quiet enough that he could have pretended not to hear it if either of them had needed that pretense.
"Go study it. And come find me if anything in the diagram doesn't make sense."
The curtain fell closed behind her. Ron listened to her footsteps cross the main room—quicker than they'd been on the way in, lighter, carrying the particular energy of someone who had just been handed a door they hadn't known existed.
He sat in the fading light and allowed himself a small, private satisfaction that lasted exactly as long as it took to remember that satisfaction was a luxury and practice was a necessity.
The alley was waiting.
—————
The world outside the apartment building was cooling into autumn. Freya City's trees—mostly elms and ash, with a few ornamental plums along the wealthier streets—had begun their annual surrender, dropping leaves that collected in doorways and gutters in drifts of rust and gold. The air carried a sharpness that hadn't been there a month ago, a mineral clarity that made distances seem shorter and sounds seem louder.
Ron walked to the alley with the ash stick across his shoulders and a awareness in his chest that had nothing to do with the weather.
In this world, nothing was as stable as it seemed.
The thought had been growing for weeks, fertilized by the dream-memories' fading remnants and watered by daily observation. Freya City felt safe—a mid-sized trading hub with moderate spirit beast activity in the surrounding forests and a military garrison that handled incursions with professional efficiency. The Star Luo Empire was stable. The border with Heaven Dou was quiet. Spirit Hall's local office continued to process loan applications beside its potted fern.
But the dream-memories, fragmentary as they were, suggested that this stability was seasonal. A calm that preceded something. Which meant that strength wasn't optional. It was urgent.
Ron entered the alley and began.
—————
Morning. The academy. Third-period assessment.
Master Wen's office smelled of herbal liniment and old wood, same as always. The combat instructor sat behind his desk with Ron's assessment file open before him—a thin folder containing quarterly evaluation forms, attendance records, and spirit power measurements recorded in the instructor's precise, angular handwriting.
"Nineteen," Master Wen said.
Ron stood before the desk. Hands at his sides. The assessment crystal on the desk's corner still glowed faintly from the measurement it had just performed—a pale yellow luminescence that would deepen toward orange as it faded.
"A few months ago you were sixteen."
"Yes, sir."
Master Wen closed the folder. Opened it again. Closed it. The repetition was uncharacteristic—the combat instructor was not a man given to fidgeting, and the gesture betrayed a recalculation happening behind those careful, measuring eyes.
"Three levels in two months." He leaned back. The chair protested in its familiar way. "For a level-six innate with a tool-type spirit, that's not progression. That's a growth spurt."
The term was generous. Growth spurt implied a natural phenomenon—a biological acceleration that some young soul masters experienced during puberty, when the body's development and the spirit's maturation occasionally synchronized in ways that produced temporary leaps in cultivation speed. It was documented, understood, and—critically—unremarkable. A growth spurt attracted interest. It did not attract investigation.
Ron recognized the interpretation for what it was: a gift. Master Wen was offering him a box to put his advancement in, a category that explained it without requiring further explanation. Whether the instructor believed it was a different question, and one that his expression made no effort to answer.
"I've been training hard, sir."
"I can see that." Master Wen's gaze dropped briefly to Ron's hands—the calluses visible even at desk distance—then back to his face. "Your academic performance has improved as well. Master Huo mentioned it."
Ron said nothing. He hadn't realized the teachers had noticed. The inscriptive study sessions in the library had been primarily for his own benefit—consolidating lesson material through the pen's skill, building the comprehensive knowledge base that his martial arts practice required as context. The academic improvement was a side effect, not a goal.
But apparently it had been significant enough to generate commentary in the faculty room.
"Level twenty is the ring threshold," Master Wen said, shifting forward. His tone changed—still measured, but with a directional weight that hadn't been there before. "When you reach it, you'll need to acquire a spirit ring within a reasonable timeframe. Delaying too long after threshold creates cultivation instability."
"I understand."
"The academy provides supervised ring hunts for qualifying students. Group expeditions to controlled hunting grounds with instructor oversight." Master Wen paused. "Given your progress and your… unconventional combat capabilities, I'm prepared to recommend you for the next expedition."
The words landed with a weight that Ron felt in his sternum. Supervised ring hunt. Instructor oversight. The difference between venturing into spirit beast territory alone—an eleven-year-old with a pen and a stick—and going with experienced protection was the difference between calculated risk and suicide.
"The Emerald Ridge forests, east of the city," Master Wen continued. "Controlled hunting ground, beasts predominantly below thousand-year age. The next expedition is scheduled in"—he consulted a calendar pinned to the wall behind his desk—"five weeks. That gives you time to reach threshold and prepare."
Five weeks. Ron's internal calculation adjusted—level twenty in three weeks at his current rate, leaving two weeks for preparation and research. Tight but feasible.
"Thank you, sir." The words were inadequate for what he felt, but Master Wen was not a man who required emotional displays as proof of gratitude. The instructor nodded—a single, definitive motion that closed the topic.
"One more thing." Master Wen opened a desk drawer and produced a small, worn book with a cloth cover. "Pre-spirit era combat manual. Northern plains grappling tradition. I thought it might interest you, given your… self-study."
Ron took the book. The cover was soft with age, the pages inside dense with hand-drawn figures demonstrating joint locks and throws.
"Return it when you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
He left the office with the book against his chest and the hunt timeline settling into his planning like a new weight on a scale, shifting everything else to accommodate it.
—————
The library. The familiar corner. The pen.
Ron spread three books across the desk—two from the academy's natural history section and one from the restricted shelf that the librarian had grudgingly unlocked after Ron demonstrated that his inscription work for the stonecutter constituted a "professional research need." The restricted book was a bestiary: Spirit Beasts of the Eastern Star Luo Forests, compiled forty years ago by a survey team from the imperial academy in the capital.
He wasn't looking for power. Not yet—power would come with cultivation, with time, with the compound machinery of his inscriptive practice. What he needed was compatibility. A spirit ring had to match the soul master's spirit in nature and function, or the absorption process would fail—or worse, succeed imperfectly, producing a skill that conflicted with the spirit's fundamental character.
His spirit was a pen. Its skill was Substrate Inscription—the ability to carve permanent, luminous marks into any surface. The skill's deeper function, as he'd discovered, was analytical consolidation: the transformation of raw knowledge into structured understanding through the act of inscription. The pen didn't fight. It recorded. It clarified. It made permanent.
What kind of spirit beast aligned with that?
Ron worked through the bestiary systematically, inscribing relevant entries onto rice paper as he went. The pen's analytical skill cross-referenced each beast's characteristics against his spirit's nature, evaluating compatibility the way a jeweler evaluated the fit of a stone in a setting.
Combat-type beasts were wrong. Their rings would push his spirit toward direct offensive capability, which contradicted its fundamental character. Support-type beasts were closer but too broad—his spirit wasn't a general support tool but a specific one, oriented around inscription and knowledge consolidation.
He turned pages. Read entries. Inscribed. Discarded.
Ironbark Beetle. Plant-parasite hybrid. Produced a resinous secretion that hardened into permanent markings on tree bark, used to establish territorial boundaries and communicate with colony members. The markings were chemically complex—each one encoded information about the beetle's identity, health, and territorial claims. A language, essentially, written in biological ink on living wood.
Ron's pen stopped moving.
He read the entry again. Then a third time, inscribing each detail with deliberate care, feeling the pen's analytical fire dissect the information into its component elements.
The Ironbark Beetle's secretion was permanent. It encoded information. It was applied to substrates. It communicated meaning through structured marks on surfaces.
The alignment wasn't approximate. It was precise.
He cross-referenced. The bestiary listed the Ironbark Beetle's habitat as mixed hardwood forests below two thousand meters elevation—consistent with the Emerald Ridge region east of Freya City. Colony sizes ranged from fifty to several hundred individuals. Individual beetles reached hundred-year cultivation at maturity, with rare specimens surviving to the thousand-year threshold. Their combat capability was minimal—the beetles relied on numbers and chemical defense rather than individual fighting power.
A hundred-year Ironbark Beetle ring would be optimal for a first absorption. he needed one around 700 years of age.
Ron's mind raced ahead, the pen's analytical framework projecting possibilities with architectural clarity. An Ironbark Beetle ring could enhance his inscription in multiple ways. Greater permanence. Wider substrate compatibility. Perhaps even the ability to encode more complex information into his marks—not just text and images but structured data, analytical frameworks, the kind of deep-pattern inscription that his current skill approached but couldn't fully achieve.
Or it could do something else entirely. Spirit ring absorption was not fully predictable—the beast's nature influenced the resulting skill, but the soul master's spirit interpreted that influence through its own lens. The pen might take the beetle's territorial marking ability and transform it into something Ron couldn't anticipate.
That was the risk. But it was a calculated one, and the alignment was too strong to ignore.
Ron inscribed a final summary—beast identification, habitat parameters, behavioral patterns, estimated combat difficulty—and added it to his growing file beneath the loose floorboard. The hunt was five weeks away. He had time to research further, to refine his understanding of the Ironbark Beetle's nature, to prepare.
But first, level twenty.
—————
Three weeks compressed into a rhythm so consistent it felt geological. Wake. School. Library. Chores. Alley. Meditate. Sleep. Each day identical in structure, each day fractionally different in result—the compound gains accumulating like sediment, invisible in the moment, transformative in aggregate.
His martial arts practice had crossed a threshold that he couldn't quantify but recognized by feel. The individual techniques—kendo cuts, taekwondo kicks, the palm strikes and joint manipulations from Master Wen's borrowed grappling manual—were no longer separate skills stored in separate compartments of his training. They were integrating. The kendo footwork informed his kick positioning. The taekwondo chamber mechanics improved his hip rotation on sword strikes. The grappling manual's emphasis on leverage and body structure refined everything, providing a mechanical foundation that connected the striking arts to each other through shared principles.
He was becoming a fighter. Not a soul master who could fight—a fighter who happened to be a soul master. The distinction was important. Soul masters fought with spirits and spirit skills, their bodies serving as platforms for supernatural abilities. A fighter used the body itself as the weapon, and everything else—spirit, skills, rings—as force multipliers applied to a foundation that was already lethal.
Ron didn't know any other soul masters who thought this way. The academy's curriculum certainly didn't encourage it. But the dream-memories, fading though they were, carried a residual conviction that the body's potential was vast, underexplored, and available to anyone willing to pay the price in sweat and calluses.
He was willing.
The breakthrough came on a Tuesday.
Not during meditation—during practice. He was in the alley, working combinations, the ash stick flowing through a diagonal cut that transitioned into a thrust that transitioned into a retreating side kick. The sequence was fast, fluid, the individual elements merging into a continuous expression of controlled violence that would have been unrecognizable to the boy who'd picked up a stick three months ago.
Mid-kick, his spirit core pulsed.
Not the gentle hum of normal cultivation. A pulse—a single, resonant beat that radiated from his sternum through every meridian simultaneously, like a bell struck once and left to ring. His side kick completed on autopilot, his body maintaining form while his internal awareness plunged inward, following the pulse to its source.
Level twenty.
The threshold gave way without drama. No pillar of light. No trembling earth. Just the quiet, definitive sensation of a container reaching capacity and restructuring itself to hold more—his spirit core compressing one final fraction, then expanding into a new configuration that was denser, more stable, more hungry than anything he'd felt before.
The hunger was the ring threshold. His spirit had reached the point where further growth required external input—a spirit ring, absorbed from a defeated spirit beast, integrated into the soul master's cultivation as a permanent augmentation. Without it, his progress would stall. The core would destabilize. The hunger would become pain, and the pain would become damage.
He had time. The destabilization process took weeks, sometimes months, to reach critical levels. But the clock was running.
Ron lowered the ash stick. Stood in the alley's darkness, breathing, feeling the new architecture of his spirit core settle into place. Level twenty at eleven years old. Four levels gained in three months, starting from a base that most instructors would have described as unremarkable.
The grin came. He let it stay.
—————
The smithy was closed when he arrived, but Duan Ke answered the back door in a leather apron stained with quenching oil, holding a pair of tongs in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. The retired officer's eyebrows rose marginally at the sight of an eleven-year-old on his doorstep at this hour.
"I need to borrow a sword."
Duan Ke looked at him.
Ron looked back.
The silence lasted four seconds—long enough to be meaningful, short enough to avoid becoming confrontational. Ron understood what was being assessed. An eleven-year-old asking to borrow a weapon was either foolish or serious, and Duan Ke was a man who had spent enough years in the military to distinguish between the two at a glance.
"What kind?"
"Straight blade. Single-handed. Light enough for extended use but heavy enough to cut."
"Cut what?"
"Spirit beast chitin. Ironbark Beetle, seven hundred-year range."
Duan Ke's eyebrows completed their upward journey. He set down the tea.
"Ring hunt?"
"Academy-supervised. Emerald Ridge, two weeks from now."
Another silence. Duan Ke's gaze dropped to Ron's hands—the calluses, the forearm development, the way his fingers rested at his sides in the relaxed curl of someone who gripped things regularly and with purpose.
"You've been training."
"Yes."
"With what?"
"Ash stick. And some open-hand work."
"Show me your grip."
Ron held out his right hand, fingers positioned as though holding a sword handle—thumb and forefinger controlling direction, the remaining three fingers providing secure but flexible support. Not the full-fist death grip that untrained users defaulted to. The martial grip, distributed and adaptive.
Duan Ke studied the hand for a long moment.
"I have a jian that might suit you. Military surplus, nothing fancy, but the balance is good. Three inscriptions in exchange for the loan—and if you damage it, you buy it."
"Agreed."
The weapon Duan Ke produced from the back room was plain, functional, and perfectly suited to its purpose. A straight-bladed jian, thirty inches from guard to tip, the steel clean but unpolished. The handle was wrapped in cord that had darkened with age but still provided secure purchase. The guard was a simple brass disc. No ornamentation. No pretense.
Ron took it. The weight settled into his hand with the rightness of a key entering a lock—not because the sword was special, but because three months of stick work had prepared his grip, his wrist, his forearm for exactly this moment. The jian was lighter than the ash stick but denser, the weight concentrated differently, and his body adjusted in real time, the accumulated training translating from wood to steel without conscious effort.
He performed a single overhead cut in the smithy's back room. The blade whispered through the air and stopped at waist height, motionless, precise.
Duan Ke watched this with the particular stillness of a man revising an assumption.
"Two weeks?"
"Two weeks."
"Try not to die. I want those inscriptions."
Ron slid the jian into the simple leather scabbard Duan Ke provided and left the smithy with the weapon at his hip and the forest already taking shape in his mind—not as a place he'd been, but as a problem he intended to solve.
—————
Master Wen was in his office. The morning light fell across his desk in clean, angular shapes. The iron-ringed staff leaned in its corner. The herbal liniment scented the air.
Ron stood before the desk with the jian at his hip and the assessment crystal's fading glow confirming what they both already knew.
"Twenty," Master Wen said.
"Yes, sir."
The instructor looked at the sword. Looked at the boy. Made no comment about the weapon's presence, which was itself a comment—an acknowledgment that Ron had already begun preparing, that the hunt was not an abstraction but an operational plan in progress.
"The expedition leaves in twelve days. Seven students, two instructors. I'll be one of them." Master Wen opened a drawer and produced a folded map. "Emerald Ridge. Study the terrain. Know your extraction routes."
Ron took the map.
"Your target?"
"Ironbark Beetle. Hundred-year range."
Master Wen considered this. "Specific choice. Low combat threat, high compatibility for a tool-type spirit. You've done your research."
"Yes, sir."
A nod. "Good. Don't stop doing your research. The forest doesn't care how prepared you think you are—it only cares how prepared you actually are."
"Understood."
"Dismissed."
Ron left the office. The map was crisp in his hands, the jian was solid at his hip, and twelve days stretched before him like a road he could already see the end of.
The pen hummed in his chest, resonant and waiting.
It was time for a hunt.