A month passed the way the Pavilion wanted months to pass: without ceremony, without witnesses, and without anyone being able to point at a day and say, this is when it changed.
The forge stayed the forge.
Heat. Smoke. Metal. Rules.
Li Shen learned the rhythm well enough that his body began to spend less energy on surprise. The double-layer cloth became part of his morning, the knots tied by muscle memory instead of thought. His hands stayed cracked, but the cracks became familiar—mapped, managed, no longer a shock each time they opened.
And still, the smoke kept getting inside him.
Not dramatically. Not enough to collapse.
Enough to be expensive.
His cough never disappeared. It just found a routine: shallow in the morning, harsh at midday, deep at night when the dormitory went quiet and there was no reason left to pretend it didn't exist.
He didn't complain about it.
He tracked it.
He stopped calling the book a ledger.
A ledger was for profit. A ledger was for someone else's eyes. A ledger wanted neat columns and proof.
What he was keeping now wasn't proof.
It was survival.
So on the first page he rewrote the title line, slow, careful, as if naming a thing correctly made it easier to control.
Journal.
Nothing more. Just the word.
He kept it wrapped in cloth and tucked where hands wouldn't casually reach. Not because he thought someone would steal it for value—paper wasn't worth much—but because someone might steal it for leverage.
The board outside Forge intake changed once every few days.
Names. Numbers. Marks.
Some days it was only points. Some days it was a notice—new penalties, new quotas, new "temporary measures" that lasted longer than truth.
On the first week of the second month, a new notice appeared beside the points board.
It was smaller than the forge assignment notice had been. Less dramatic. More dangerous.
Because it wasn't calling for volunteers.
It was calling for choices.
The heading was stamped in clean black ink:
TECHNIQUE REDEMPTION — CULTIVATING SERVANTS
VALID IN: FORGE / ALCHEMY AUXILIARY / TOXIC TASKS
REQUIRES: POINTS + SIGNATURE
Under it was a list, each line ending in a number.
Li Shen didn't read it like a curious boy.
He read it like a man reading a price tag on his own lungs.
Fumeguard Breathing Method — 10 points
Grey Step (Basic) — 12 points
Iron Grip (Basic) — 15 points
Palm Shock (First Form) — 18 points
Body Tempering Basics — 20 points
Someone had scratched a private note in the margin with the tip of a nail:
Buy smoke first or cough forever.
Another scratch below it:
Smoke is for the weak. Points are for pills.
Different handwriting. Different priorities. Same poverty.
Li Shen stood there long enough that the guard at the gate glanced at him twice, then looked away.
A few other marked cultivators drifted near the board, pretending they weren't watching each other's eyes.
The scarred volunteer—the one who'd once asked him his stage with too much hunger—snorted when he read the first line.
"Ten points," he muttered, like the number tasted wrong. He rubbed his jaw, then spat to the side. "That's a week of sleep. Not a week of work. A week of sleep. You give that up and they still look at you like you're asking for charity."
His friend shrugged, but it wasn't casual. It was the kind of shrug people did when they'd already lost the argument with reality.
"Sure," he said. "Or it's… what, a sliver of a stone? If you can even move points around. If they let you. If the clerk doesn't decide your face looks 'suspicious' today."
Allowed.
That word carried the weight of a door.
Li Shen turned slightly and saw another board, smaller, half-hidden under a beam—easy to miss if you didn't know what to look for.
EXCHANGE WINDOW — INTENDANCE
POINTS → SPIRIT STONES
SCHEDULED DAYS ONLY
FEES APPLY
QUOTA SUBJECT TO ROLE
No conversion rate. No promise.
Just process.
A system designed to make you ask, then make you wait, then make you accept less than you wanted because refusing meant you got nothing.
Li Shen walked away before anyone could decide his hesitation was interesting.
In the dormitory that night, the air was heavier than usual.
Not because of smoke.
Because everyone who could read had read the board, and everyone who couldn't was being told about it by someone who wanted something.
A man two mats down coughed with a wet rattle and laughed anyway, like laughter could bully his lungs into behaving.
"Ten points," he said, voice rough. "Ten points and suddenly you're breathing like you've got a disciple's bed and a disciple's doctor. That's what they're selling, isn't it? Not the technique. The fantasy."
A younger cultivator answered, eager and stupid, sitting forward like he was watching a play.
"It's not just a fantasy," he insisted. "It trains your Qi too. My cousin—he did auxiliary near alchemy for a bit—he swears his control got smoother. Like the breath doesn't fight you as much. If you ever get moved to something… worse, you'll want that."
Someone else spat into a rag, slow and contemptuous.
"Everything helps," he said. "Everything costs. You don't buy what you want. You buy what keeps you from dying the fastest."
The man who'd coughed laughed again, softer this time, and it sounded like it hurt.
"So what," he said, "we're bidding on our own organs now? Ten points for lungs, fifteen for hands, twenty for bones. Next they'll put a number on your spine and call it 'optional'."
No one laughed with him.
Yun Xue sat near the edge of the lamplight, mending a tear in someone's sleeve. She wasn't part of the forge crowd, not really. Her life ran on different lines now—pulled by Elder Yan's attention in quiet ways that didn't show on boards.
But she heard things. The dormitory was a marketplace of whispers.
When Li Shen sat down, she glanced up, then immediately looked down again, as if meeting his eyes too long might create a misunderstanding.
"Did you see the notice?" she asked softly.
Li Shen nodded.
Yun Xue worried a thread between her fingers, pulling it through cloth with careful, practiced patience.
"People are… loud about it," she said. "Like they think if they argue hard enough, the number will change."
"They argue about anything with numbers," Li Shen said. "If there's a column, someone will pretend it's a negotiation."
She hesitated. The needle hovered a heartbeat too long, then dipped again.
"I heard them talking about the exchange window," she said, barely above the dormitory's murmur. "Some of them sound like they already spent stones they don't have."
Li Shen's mouth twitched, not quite a smile.
"Debt is easy," he said. "Breathing isn't."
Yun Xue's fingers tightened on the thread. She took a small breath like she was stepping onto thin ice.
"Your breathing," she whispered. "At night, I mean. It's… it's still loud."
It wasn't accusation. It wasn't pity, either. Just the blunt honesty of someone who hadn't learned all the ways truth could be weaponized.
Li Shen didn't flinch.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
Yun Xue nodded too quickly, then looked down hard at her stitches, as if she could sew her way out of the moment.
"I'm sorry," she murmured automatically, the reflex of someone trained to apologize before anyone decided she'd offended them.
Li Shen didn't answer the apology. He opened his Journal instead.
He wrote while the dormitory noise tried to become background.
Month 2: technique board posted.
Fumeguard Breathing — 10 points.
Exchange window exists. Fees + quota. Rate hidden.
Smoke debt accumulating. Productivity stable but sleep heavier.
Choice: buy breath vs buy growth.
He stopped.
Across the room, someone laughed again, and it sounded forced.
Li Shen looked at the numbers he'd already earned.
Sixty points on the board had looked big for one day.
Now it looked like nothing.
Ten points wasn't a fortune.
Ten points was a decision the Pavilion wanted you to feel in your ribs.
He closed the Journal and leaned back against the wall, letting the stale air fill his lungs.
He didn't make the decision that night.
That wasn't indecision.
That was discipline.
He would not buy because fear pushed him. He would buy because the return was measurable.
Three days later, the forge gave him the measurement.
No explosion. No screaming.
Just a bad batch of charcoal.
Impure. Damp. Cut with something that burned wrong.
The smoke rolling off Furnace Two that morning had a greenish edge to it, subtle enough that only people who'd been breathing it for weeks noticed the difference.
Within an hour, the cough in the lane multiplied.
Men's eyes watered harder. Hands shook sooner. One boy dropped a tray and got slapped for it—not because the slap fixed anything, but because someone needed a target.
Li Shen's cloth mask went wet with his own breath and still the smoke slid through.
His chest tightened.
Not panic. Not collapse.
A clamp.
He worked through it until bell two, then found himself standing with both hands on the edge of a bin, breathing shallow, trying not to show he was buying air in small payments.
The foreman walked past, glanced once, and said nothing.
Saying nothing was procedure.
Li Shen finished the shift anyway.
He went back to the dormitory with soot in his hair and a sour ache behind his sternum, and he wrote one more line in the Journal before sleep took him.
Furnace Two batch: "bad smoke." Qi Condensation Stage 1 cannot hold. Technique becomes priority.
On the next scheduled day, he went to Intendance.
Not the high halls. Not the disciples' exchange.
A narrow corridor with a service window, iron bars, and a clerk seated behind them like a spider behind a web.
A wooden sign hung above the slit in the bars:
EXCHANGE / REDEMPTION — CULTIVATING SERVANTS
Li Shen waited in line.
The line moved slowly because every transaction was designed to remind you that your life was paperwork.
When he reached the window, the clerk didn't greet him.
"Name."
"Li Shen."
The brush scratched.
"Role."
"Forge. Circle One."
The clerk's eyes lifted a fraction. Not interest. A sorting mechanism sliding into place.
"And you want," the clerk said, tone flat, "technique redemption."
"Yes."
"Which one." Not a question, really. More like: don't waste my ink.
Li Shen kept his voice level.
"Fumeguard Breathing Method."
The clerk paused just long enough to make the pause feel intentional.
"Ten points," he said, as if reciting a sentence handed down from a higher room. Then he slid a form through the slit. "Read. Sign. Don't pretend you didn't read. The Pavilion hates pretending."
Li Shen read it. Liability. Restrictions. No refunds. Transfer prohibited. Unauthorized teaching punished.
He signed.
The clerk stamped it twice, the sound hard and final.
"Ten points deducted," the clerk said.
Li Shen felt nothing physically. No Qi flowing. No heat changing.
That was another Pavilion truth: payment happened immediately, benefits happened later—if they happened at all.
The clerk reached beneath the desk and produced a thin booklet wrapped in oiled cloth. Cheap paper. Plain cover. A single stamped title.
FUMEGUARD BREATHING — BASIC
He slid it through the bars.
Li Shen took it with both hands.
Not reverence.
Habit. Because things passed through bars had a way of being watched.
The clerk's gaze flicked to his hands, then to his face.
"You'll report if you fail," the clerk said. The words were routine, but his mouth shaped them like he enjoyed the idea of people returning to beg.
Li Shen didn't rise to it.
"I won't," he said.
The clerk looked up, and for the first time there was something faintly human in his eyes.
Not warmth.
Curiosity. The tiny interest of a man watching someone place a bet and wondering how the odds will punish him.
Then it vanished.
"Next," the clerk said, already reaching for the next form.
Li Shen stepped away from the window with the booklet under his shirt, pressed against his ribs like a second jeton.
Outside, the air was cold and clean enough to feel expensive.
He didn't open the booklet there.
He waited until night, until the dormitory settled, until bodies turned and coughs quieted.
Then he unwrapped it and read by lamplight.
It wasn't poetry. It wasn't a miracle.
It was written like a tool manual:
inhale pattern
Qi thread placement
exhale timing
circulation loop
warning signs: dizziness, heat-sting, throat burn
do not force beyond capacity at Qi Condensation Stage 1–2
Li Shen read it twice.
Then he closed it and sat upright on his mat.
Two fingers on his lower abdomen.
He breathed in.
Not deep.
Measured.
He guided a thin thread of Qi—not to strengthen himself, not to impress anyone, but to create a sheath between his lungs and the world.
He exhaled slowly.
The Qi moved with the breath.
It was harder than swinging a hammer.
Because the hammer fought metal.
This fought his own impatience.
His chest tightened once, then eased.
He tried again.
Again.
By the time the lamp guttered, he was sweating—not from heat, but from control.
His Qi reserves felt lower than usual, like he'd worked a shift without moving.
Good.
That meant it was real.
He wrote in his Journal before sleeping.
Bought: Fumeguard Breathing (10 points).
Reason: "bad smoke" proved threshold.
Effect: drains Qi at Stage 1. Not sustainable all day yet.
ROI: breath + control. Useful for forge + future combat + alchemy proximity.
Plan: train nightly. Use in short blocks during worst smoke.
He closed the Journal.
The booklet went back into oiled cloth.
The cloth went under his mat.
And when he lay down, his cough didn't disappear.
But it sounded… less angry.
Outside, the Pavilion continued being a machine.
Inside, Li Shen had purchased a small, private upgrade: not power, but permission to last longer.