The forge didn't care that the Seal Circle had tightened its rules.
It absorbed the change, like it absorbed everything: by turning it into one more layer of friction and then demanding the same thing as always—output.
What changed was how men moved around that output.
Tags got waxed at the table now. Twine knots were checked twice. Trays were carried like they contained someone's rent, not metal. Not because anyone had discovered pride—because nobody wanted to be the next station to lose points over a defect that "appeared."
Li Shen didn't lecture about it. The bottom didn't get paid to educate.
He adapted.
Quietly. Early. With the kind of small engineering that prevented a problem from becoming a story.
Before his tray ever left his station, he sealed his tag knot himself: a tiny wax dot from the station kit, pressed hard and stamped with the Circle's tool mark—not the official Seal Circle stamp, not the kind that made clerks feel important, but enough to say this knot hasn't been touched since my hands tied it.
It wouldn't stop a determined man.
It would stop the lazy ones.
And most sabotage was laziness dressed as hunger.
Over the next two months, the system settled into a new normal.
Forge lane: tighter, cleaner, more expensive to fail.
Ash-Bite rivets stayed steady work. Greyfang hooks showed up in short runs—hauling hooks, rigging hooks, anything meant to hold under strain and not slip when rope got wet and hands got tired.
Hooks weren't harder because they needed artistry.
They were harder because the margin for error had teeth.
A rivet that failed ruined a brace. A hook that failed ruined a man.
Foremen started favoring stations that produced predictable rings, predictable curves, predictable quenches. Predictable meant fewer disputes at verification. Fewer disputes meant fewer clerks hovering like flies over sweat.
Li Shen became predictable in the only way that mattered: yield.
His lungs didn't transform. They stayed in the same category—managed. Some batches still paid him in coughs when metal ran dirty or coal bit sour.
But he could now choose his windows with sharper precision.
Smoke-Sealing stopped feeling like a stunt he performed.
It became a valve.
He could hold the seal through a delicate stretch and release without his breath collapsing afterward. The navel-fatigue still came—the wet sand weight of Qi thinning—but it came later, and it cleared faster.
That wasn't power.
That was capacity.
Capacity was what Stage 2 was built on.
Salvage lane: buffer, not obsession.
He took salvage once in the first month.
Not because he didn't want bonus points.
Because he didn't want his name to belong to that board.
A smaller clearance job paid +3, clean and verified. The chit went straight into powder and salve. No drama. No bragging. No story.
He let the second posting pass.
Other men chased it harder. They returned with rope burns and loud voices and numbers that didn't match their effort. Assessment wasn't a negotiation. The Pavilion didn't pay for how afraid you were, or how brave you wanted to sound afterward.
Li Shen watched, learned, and stayed inside his budget.
Salvage was useful when it stayed boring.
Boring was survivable.
Greyhaven lane: one quiet pickup.
An exchange errand took him out once, and he used the trip the way he'd decided to use Greyhaven from now on: one action, clean, forgettable.
No Stone Lantern.
No meeting.
No public familiarity.
He walked the seam, bought the listed goods first—stamps hard, ink dry, receipts clean. Then he took a short detour past a cloth stall that sold nothing special to anyone who wasn't looking for a specific corner of nothing special.
The vendor didn't look at him twice.
That was the whole point.
A plain bundle sat tucked behind a stack of twine, tied with a cheap knot that screamed mortal goods and nothing else.
Li Shen paid copper for twine he didn't need.
He left with the twine and the bundle in the same hand, weight unchanged to anyone not paying attention.
Inside the bundle: two tea brick portions, a jar of paste, and a packet of dried herb that carried the River-Jade smell even through cloth.
Consignment.
No tunnel. No gate drama. No clerks dragged into questions.
Just a supply chain that reduced how often he had to burn points on maintenance.
He returned before sun-lower, signed in, handed over receipts in a wax sleeve, and let procedure swallow him back into the wall.
No smudge. No hook.
That was success in this world: nothing worth remembering happened.
The real work happened at night.
Not nightly. Not like a ritual.
Enough that the body remembered, but not enough that neighbors could count it by sound.
He ate his grain ration in measured portions—never until full. Fullness made sleep heavy and Qi sluggish. Hunger made Qi frantic. He stayed between.
Powder only when it would pay back: after smoke-heavy days, after salvage, after hook runs that left his forearms vibrating and his ribs tight.
He learned to sort need from want.
Want was impatience pretending to be ambition.
Need was the tightness behind the ribs that refused to loosen on its own.
He sat in the dark with his back against the wall and ran his Qi.
Stage 1 Qi was mist in cold air: it gathered if you forced stillness, scattered if you breathed wrong. He didn't chase volume. He chased cohesion.
The loop rose toward the familiar snag near his ribs.
It was still there—a thin resistance, not a wall. A bruise that hated pressure.
He warmed the edges and waited. Smoke-Sealing helped—not against smoke now, but against his own reflex to go shallow when discomfort rose. A light seal at the throat kept breath steady, kept the loop from collapsing into panic.
Then he threaded Qi through the gap.
It passed as a thin line.
One full circuit.
Then two.
The first time he held it twice, his heart jumped—a stupid reflex trying to turn progress into celebration.
Celebration wasted control.
He released, breathed, started again slower.
Thread. Hold. Maintain.
After ten cycles, fatigue rose behind his navel like wet sand. He stopped before control went sloppy. Sloppy was how you injured channels you couldn't afford to injure.
He lay down and slept.
In the morning, the change showed up where changes always showed up at the bottom:
not in aura, not in light, not in thunder—
in function.
His breath stayed steadier when smoke thickened. His hands shook less when heat forced a longer hold. His recovery after a sealing window was faster. His appetite sharpened—the body asking for fuel like it had finally learned fuel could turn into structure.
His Qi wasn't bigger.
It was denser.
Density mattered because it changed how his body reacted to strain.
A month into the stretch, he felt the early edge of Stage 2 not as a "breakthrough," but as a new stiffness in circulation—Qi that resisted being pulled apart.
It clung.
It stayed gathered.
That was the start.
One evening, Bai Ren came back late from yard work, shoulders dusted with dry grain chaff, and sat down harder than usual.
Li Shen didn't ask why. He waited.
Bai Ren poured water over his hands and said, "They're moving people."
"Where?" Li Shen asked.
"Beast Yard," Bai Ren replied. "Two men pulled from kitchen. Swapped in. No explanation."
Shortage or theft.
Sometimes both.
Bai Ren added, "Yun Xue didn't come back."
"She won't," Li Shen said.
Bai Ren's eyes flicked to him. "You're sure."
Li Shen didn't feed the room details. "It's what happens when someone gets claimed."
Bai Ren nodded once, like he'd already known and only wanted confirmation that the world remained predictable in its cruelty.
Then, quieter: "People noticed your tray got verified."
Li Shen didn't play dumb. "They notice what they can count."
"And they can't count your breathing," Bai Ren said.
That was the real hazard.
Improvement demanded explanation. Explanation grew into rumor. Rumor grew teeth.
Li Shen answered with an operational decision, not a feeling.
"I'll let them think it's tea," he said.
Bai Ren blinked. "Tea."
"Everyone buys tea," Li Shen said.
Bai Ren's mouth twitched like he almost laughed, then refused the sound. "Not everyone."
"Enough," Li Shen replied. "And it's cheaper for them to believe than the truth."
Bai Ren looked at him a moment, then nodded slowly. "That's… clean."
Clean was the word that mattered.
Near the end of the second month, the shift in cultivation arrived the way structural change always arrived:
as an absence.
The snag near his ribs still existed, but it no longer caught every loop.
Sometimes Qi threaded through without resistance at all.
Sometimes it caught lightly and let go.
That inconsistency wasn't failure.
It was proof the channel wasn't locked into one state anymore.
It was shifting.
That was the edge between stages.
One night, after a hook run that left his hands sore and his chest faintly stung, he took half a powder dose and sat down.
He gathered Qi.
He ran the loop.
He reached the snag—
and it didn't catch.
Qi flowed through thicker than before—not a thread now, but a cord.
He held it for three cycles.
Four.
Five.
The navel-fatigue rose slower than it used to.
When he stopped, he didn't exhale like a man saved.
He sat still and felt the density settle into the lower abdomen instead of scattering into nothing.
Stage 2 wasn't here yet—not officially, not in a way that would survive scrutiny from anyone higher.
But the structure was forming.
And that meant the next months would change first in the only place the Pavilion truly noticed change:
less waste, longer windows, tighter control.
He lay down and slept.
In the morning, he woke before the bell, took one steady breath, and felt his chest expand without the scrape that made him wince.
A small gain.
But real.
And in the Pavilion, real was enough to keep building.