The forge didn't care that Li Shen had turned seventeen.
It didn't care that the year had flipped on paper, or that the wind had gone from knife-sharp to merely cruel. It cared about the board nailed beside the Hall's side gate—names in charcoal under headings that looked almost polite:
GREYFANG — HOOKS (WEEKLY)
BONUS: +2 / WEEK (PASS)
LIABILITY: 2 DEFECTS / 100 = DEDUCT + REVIEW
Li Shen read the last line until it stopped being words and became a budget.
Two defects weren't two mistakes. They were tolerance—permission for the Pavilion to pretend it was fair while measuring how close it could push a servant to failure.
At Qi Condensation Stage One, he didn't have power.
He had control.
Control wasn't talent. It was a schedule enforced by consequences.
So he built a weekly skeleton and forced his body to live inside it, the way yard boys built fences: ugly at first, then tight.
The journal in his repurposed ledger wasn't for dreams. It was for inputs and outputs.
Early week: prep—cuts, heat cycles, scale removal, anything that reduced randomness later.
Midweek: shaping—jigs, bends, repeats, the part where hands got confident and metal got petty.
Day five: harden and temper—where defects were born if you got greedy.
Day six: finish—file, check, tag, check again.
Day seven: delivery and sampling—where someone else decided what your week was worth.
Greyfang didn't change the work.
It changed what the work meant.
Every small cost became trackable. Every adjustment became a profile.
Smoke-Sealing was still just a valve at this tier.
It wasn't a shield. It didn't make smoke harmless. It only let him choose when to let smoke touch him.
He stopped treating it like something to "hold."
He ran it like a regulator.
Seal for a short burst. Work through the delicate stretch. Release deliberately—before his chest turned dry and tight and his breath started fighting itself.
When he pushed too long, the smoke stopped biting his throat, sure.
But the fatigue didn't disappear.
It relocated.
It settled behind the navel like a stone—heavy, dull—and then it seeped into his fingers as a fine tremor.
A tremor in a forge wasn't dramatic.
It was a file slipping on a curve that should've stayed clean. A bend overshooting by a hair. An eye opening just enough to fail under load.
It was liability made physical.
Iron Grip made the rhythm more dangerous, not less.
Because it worked.
It wasn't strength. It was alignment—wrist locked, shoulder sunk, fingers steady, tools held at the exact angle the jig demanded. Used properly, it took randomness out of the bend.
Used wrong—held too long, held too often—it turned heat in the forearm into tendon tension, tendon tension into tremor, and tremor into a crack you didn't see until a clerk tapped it and the ring came back dead.
So he treated Iron Grip the way he treated Smoke-Sealing:
Lock → execute → relax.
Only on the bend. Only on the eye. Only on extraction. Immediate release.
It slowed him down at first because releasing felt like wasting advantage.
The forge punished men who tried to win a sprint inside a marathon.
End of Week One, the Seal Circle pulled eight samples.
Eight.
Not three. Not the usual casual courtesy. Eight meant somebody upstream wanted metrics, not reassurance.
Li Shen stood still while they tested.
Stillness wasn't a performance. It was damage control. Any twitch gave people a reason to stare longer.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The clerk's brush moved.
PASS.
The bonus posted: +2.
Relief wasn't the right word.
It wasn't relief. It was the temporary removal of a blade from his throat.
And it made him more visible.
Visibility had layers.
Some were physical: the clean geometry of a rack, the absence of scrap, the way his station didn't smell like panic.
Others were administrative.
Smoke-Sealing stamps. Technique redemption lines. Vendor stamps. Contract tokens. Different ink, same logic: everything that helped a servant survive also made him easier to map.
A clerk's brush didn't judge.
It remembered.
Week Two, his samples were pulled earlier than usual.
Week Three, they pulled from two batches instead of one.
Nobody explained.
Explanation was luxury. Procedure was language.
Li Shen responded in the only dialect the forge respected: process.
He tightened his jig tolerance. He started doing a micro-test every ten hooks—sacrificing one piece of labor to prevent nine pieces from becoming debt.
It wasn't efficient.
It was controlled.
Controlled output was how you survived a system that wanted you measurable.
Bai Ren saw the numbers before Li Shen heard the rumors.
He met him at the points board at the end of Week Three, where the air moved and the smoke didn't sit on your tongue.
Bai Ren stared at the postings like they were scripture.
"Look at you," he said without turning his head. "You're officially a product."
Li Shen's eyes went straight to the bonus line.
GREYFANG — PASS — +2
He exhaled once—release by habit, not technique. "Don't say it like that."
"I'm not insulting you," Bai Ren said. "Products get protected. Sometimes. People get used."
He tapped lower on the board, where another name had been crossed out—not erased. Crossed out—like the Pavilion wanted the absence to remain visible.
DEDUCT — REVIEW
Bai Ren's voice stayed casual, but his words slid sharp. "Different contract. Different yard. Same math."
Li Shen's jaw tightened. "Someone get hurt?"
Bai Ren shrugged. "Not that anyone admits. But somebody's short on points now. Short people get loud."
"Loud how?"
"Loud like blaming," Bai Ren said. "Loud like 'why did testers pull me twice' and 'how come Cai Shun's favorites never get held.'"
He leaned in just slightly, like a man sharing gossip.
It wasn't gossip.
It was a warning.
"Don't make enemies you can't afford," Bai Ren murmured. "And don't assume you don't have any."
Then he leaned back, casual again—as if he hadn't just slid a knife under Li Shen's ribs.
Week Four, the forge tried to break his line through small interference.
It started with the quench.
Li Shen didn't use the communal barrel anymore. Too many hands. Too many variables. He drew his own water from the side spigot, kept his bucket covered, treated it like equipment.
But the communal barrel still mattered.
Because if it became unreliable, everyone's output became unstable—noise, waste, panic. Panic created sabotage.
On Day Five, he caught the slickness again.
Oil. Not enough to see. Enough to change cooling. Enough to make metal brittle.
He didn't shout.
Shouting was for men who wanted witnesses and didn't care what witnesses cost.
He adjusted and kept moving.
He staggered his windows—Smoke-Sealing in bursts, then release; Iron Grip only on critical bends, then relax—because stacking both while rushing quota was how you manufactured tremor.
That night, he wrote one clean line in the ledger-journal and nothing else.
Week 4 — Communal quench contaminated again. Avoided. No report.
No names.
No accusations.
Accusations required rank. He had process.
By Week Six, the pipeline had turned him into something he didn't enjoy admitting: reliable.
Reliable meant useful.
Useful meant owned.
His points climbed in a predictable slope: base output, contract bonus, minor deductions for consumables. Nothing cinematic. Just momentum.
He converted momentum into stability, not vanity.
Lung powder—bitter, dull, real. Better cloth wrap treated to catch soot. Not magic, not talismans, not "miracles." Just risk management.
The kind of purchases that looked boring on the board.
And looked interesting in a clerk's ledger.
At the end of Week Six, the board updated again.
His name was still there.
Still under PASS.
But next to it—smaller writing, almost like an afterthought—sat a new line:
CONSISTENT — GREEN TAG ELIGIBLE
Li Shen stared.
Green tag wasn't promotion. It was procedural privilege: better furnace windows when rotation allowed, less hovering at stock draw, fewer petty delays, fewer hands in your workflow.
Access.
Access was power at the bottom.
It was also a spotlight.
He turned away from the board and walked back toward the dorm lanes, lungs burning, hands steady, feeling the heaviness behind the navel fade one notch with each measured breath.
Qi was still Stage One.
Not official Stage Two. Not yet.
But he could hold shape under pressure in short bursts.
That was enough.
For now.