Mo Xuan continued slowly along the length of the central yard. He saw the recruit who'd thanked him, already back among his own squadmates near the barracks, laughing now at something too far away to hear. Gratitude was cheap here, easily given because it cost nothing beyond breath. Merit was the opposite — expensive precisely because it could only be paid in the currency of risk, sweat, and blood, and nothing the fortress offered came without that price attached somewhere in its ledger.
Mo Xuan closed his hand slowly around the token still resting in his pocket, and turned toward the Alchemy Quarter, already calculating exactly how far his points might carry him toward whatever he needed next.
The alchemy building stood out against the cold stone of Northwatch. White walls gave off gentle warmth, and thin curls of steam drifted from high windows. The air smelled of crushed spirit herbs and simmering cauldrons. Practitioners in red-trimmed robes moved with quick, practised steps, their hands stained by powders and tinctures.
At the main counter, an attendant glanced up, expression neutral.
"What do you need?"
Mo Xuan set down his identity plate. Then he placed a small bronze emblem beside it.
The attendant's eyes paused on the bronze emblem. Her expression shifted almost imperceptibly before she looked up again.
"Grade 1… Alchemy Badge?"
Her posture changed at once. She bowed with clear respect.
"Welcome. A recognised alchemist is always valued in Northwatch."
The registration process was smooth. Efficient. No nonsense. She moved through the formalities with brisk thoroughness, pulling a fresh ledger sheet, stamping it twice, sliding it across the counter for his mark without once making him wait on a question.
He learned the rules laid out for military alchemists: refining pills for the army, delivering processed herbs, and completing posted alchemy tasks all granted merit and contribution points. Higher quality work increased one's rank and privileges, and rank, she explained almost as an afterthought, came with its own quiet currency — priority access to rarer ingredients, first pick of open alchemy rooms during peak hours, occasional requests routed directly instead of posted to the general board where every apprentice in the stronghold could see and compete for them.
The attendant handed him a thin manual containing a directory of alchemy rooms and a list of high-demand military pills. Frost-resistance draughts sat near the top of the list, underlined twice. Beneath it, recovery pills for winter raids, marked in red ink as perpetually short of supply.
"You may use any open alchemy room during off-days. Submit your finished products for evaluation. All results will be recorded."
Mo Xuan gave a small nod before heading out.
He stepped out of the hall, the cold outside sharpening after the alchemy building's borrowed warmth. There was one more place he wanted to see before the day ended.
He headed to the library he'd heard mentioned twice already that morning. The Border Library sat in a black-stone hall past the second barracks row. New arrivals got one free opportunity — the chance to take a manual out at no cost, a rare occurrence anywhere in the stronghold. After that, everything past the entrance cost the same as anything else here.
The library, when he found it, looked less like a hall of knowledge and more like a fortress within the fortress — squat, windowless, built from the same black stone as the outer walls. Fire gemstones lined the interior, their light pale and shadowless, and the air inside smelled different from anywhere else he'd been that day: dust and old parchment layered over something faintly mineral, as if the stone itself had absorbed centuries of ink.
The archivist looked up from his desk with a specific weariness. He was old, ink-stained to the second knuckle on both hands, and his mouth seemed permanently set into a downward line. Looking at the token Mo Xuan presented, the old man grunted. "Each new member has the opportunity to pick one manual. Don't waste it."
Mo Xuan nodded and wandered the open shelves for a long while, running his fingers along spines gone brittle with age and cold. Most of what he found was competent but unremarkable — footwork manuals among others. Fortresses like this one, he was coming to understand, didn't waste their best knowledge on common shelves. The valuable things stayed locked away, traded for at a price steep enough to keep them scarce.
It was in a shadowed gap between two overstuffed shelves, wedged sideways where it had clearly been shoved and forgotten, that he found it — a slim, battered manual, its cover so scuffed and dust-caked that the title was barely legible even when he angled it toward the lantern light.
Frost-Forged Body-Refining Scripture.
He nearly set it back. Body cultivation manuals were common enough in places like this — texts abandoned in corners while soldiers chased soul paths and spirit techniques that promised faster, flashier returns. But something about the manual in his hands made him open it anyway.
The first page told him immediately why it had been left to rot: an extremely difficult and demanding manual, one that devoured resources. He read on, and the deeper he went, the more the manual's tone shifted from instruction into warning. It described four stages, each one laid out.
Stage One — Frostforged Bones. Cold qi penetrates flesh and bone, forcing impurities out. The skin toughens, healing faster than normal and granting early resistance to frostbite and blunt bruising. Tendons contract and tighten in the cold, making movements stiffer at first but more forceful on recoil, like a bowstring drawn tauter. Marrow thins and purifies, flushing out heat-born toxins and stagnant qi, allowing blood to recover faster after injury. Bone grows denser, withstanding impacts that would once have fractured it.
Stage Two — Froststeel Bones. The tempering deepens; the body begins to resemble something forged rather than merely hardened. Skin takes on a faint metallic sheen, and cold no longer causes numbness, only a dull awareness. Tendons develop a springy, wire-like tension, giving strikes more snap while joints resist being wrenched or dislocated. Marrow circulates cold qi on its own, cooling the blood during exertion so the body doesn't overheat or fatigue as quickly. Bone forms a faint crystalline structure just beneath the surface, ringing faintly when struck.
Stage Three — Ice-Jade Bones. Repeated tempering fuses the tissues into a single resilient structure. Skin takes on a faint translucence and becomes tough. Tendons gain a jade-like flexibility, bending without tearing under extreme force, storing and releasing power like a coiled spring. Marrow crystallises at the core, becoming a reserve of stored cold qi the body can draw on suddenly, fueling short bursts of overwhelming force. Bone becomes fully crystalline, extremely fracture-resistant, able to take blows that would shatter ordinary bone without breaking.
Stage Four — Permafrost Sovereign Bone: the final stage, in which the body becomes nearly indestructible. Skin becomes near-unbreakable, resembling frosted jade. Tendons move like living permafrost — soft in stillness, unyielding under force, capable of withstanding pressures that would tear muscle from bone elsewhere. Marrow becomes a true reservoir, comparable to a high-grade spiritual treasure, dense enough to sustain the body's regeneration even at the edge of death. Bone gains a property the scripture calls Sovereign Stability, making the body extremely hard to break by any conventional means.
One thing tugged at his mind the entire time he read. The Revolution Connecting Mantra he uses at the core demanded a strong body to continue functioning, and he noticed, buried in the margins, a warning that the method could not be paused or abandoned once begun. He had no way of knowing, not yet, that no one had ever succeeded in cultivating the Revolution Connecting Mantra manual method — that he might be the first person, and possibly the last, to manage it.
He didn't know the manual's author had died attempting it himself, undone by conditions his own body couldn't meet. He only knew that whatever conditions the manual demanded, something about his own circumstances — the trials that had shaped him, the strange, unfinished nature of his Cosmic Soul — seemed to align with the manual's requirements.
Looking at the manual in his hands, he decided it was worth keeping, as he could not give up on the Revolution Connecting Mantra. Nothing else on these shelves was anywhere near as valuable to him.
Flipping toward the manual's final pages, he saw the scripture ended abruptly — the later stages missing entirely, torn free or never set to paper. He closed the cover slowly.
He decided on the manual and went to register it. When the archivist saw which one he'd chosen, he raised his brows. "Body cultivation." The old man clicked his tongue. "Every few years someone chooses that one," he said, the words coming out flat with old distaste, before adding, almost as a courtesy, that though the method would eventually make the body formidable, it remained incomplete, extremely demanding, and that others who had chosen it in years past had ended up regretting the choice bitterly.
Mo Xuan nodded, thanked the man, and told him plainly that he wasn't changing his choice — this was what he wanted. Seeing that nothing would shift Mo Xuan's mind, the old archivist scoffed, muttering that he shouldn't come crawling back regretting it later, because any manual he needed from this point forward would cost him merit points the same as everyone else.
Mo Xuan said nothing to that. After registering the manual, he tucked it under his arm, thanked the archivist with a nod the old man didn't bother returning, and walked back out into the cold.