The inn had the standard layout of roadside houses: the ground floor was for eating and drinking, the upper floor for sleeping. The counter faced the main door, allowing the owner to see who was coming in. Heavy wooden tables filled the hall.
"TWELVE! IT'S TWELVE! YOU CAN PAY!"
Shinjimaru shouted. He jumped out of his chair, knocking his cup of liquor onto the table. The liquid spilled as he pulled the copper coins toward him with both hands.
"Here! Shinjimaru Enshō wins again!" he said, slapping his chest with his palm.
One of the men at the table, an armed mercenary, grabbed Shinjimaru's wrist.
"Enshō?" The man spat on the floor, his eyes fixed on the boy's stained tunic. "This place is full of adventurers waiting for the Festival, boy. We know the smell of a warrior of fire. And you... you smell of vinegar and defeat. If you are an Enshō, the sun has decided to rise in the sewer today."
The table fell silent. In Murim, using the name of an elite warrior to gain morale at a gambling table is seen as the greatest cowardice. It is an act that dishonors not only the speaker, but the entire lineage.
The mercenary dropped Shinjimaru's wrist as if he were touching garbage. "You use the name of the Northern Fire to protect your bets?" The man spat to the side. "You say you are his brother, but you act like a parasite. An Enshō would rather cut his own throat than be seen at this table, with that breath, counting copper coins."
Shinjimaru did not lower his head, but his smile became stiff. In the code of honor of the clans, what he was doing was the lowest level of existence.
"Honor does not pay for liquor," Shinjimaru replied, his voice now without the joy of before. "I spoke the truth. I am his brother. I am the bearer of his swords. If that offends you, that is your problem. The money is mine."
He pulled the coins into his robe pocket, but the tension in the inn changed. The adventurers at nearby tables began to murmur. Using the name of an heir in a public place like that was a direct insult to the clan.
"If Enshō finds out you're dragging his name through these tables," said the mercenary, standing up and putting his hand on his sword hilt, "he'll kill you himself before the sun rises. Get out of here, worm. You smell like a corpse."
Shinjimaru rose slowly. He did not look sad, but rather busy adjusting his robe around his waist. He took two steps away from the table, stopped, and turned back. He grabbed the jug of liquor tightly.
"I paid for this," he muttered to the gamblers.
As he turned to leave, bad luck manifested itself physically: two dice fell from his pockets and rolled across the wooden floor. They were loaded dice. The table erupted in insults.
The mercenary didn't wait for explanations. He grabbed Shinjimaru by the collar and dragged him to the side door. Shinjimaru's body was thrown outside, landing with a thud in the muddy alley. During the fall, he did not try to protect his face or hands; he used his own body as a shield to prevent the liquor jar from breaking.
The mercenary spat on the floor and went back inside, slamming the door.
Shinjimaru lay there in the cold mud. He struggled to his feet, cursing. He pulled off the top of his kimono, which was soaked in mud, to try to clean the jar and his chest.
A drunkard, sitting on a wooden bench on the inn's porch, watched the scene in silence. When Shinjimaru turned his back to shake off his clothes, the dim light from one of the inn's lanterns hit the phoenix tattoo on his back.
The pigment in the tattoo was unusual; it contained traces of ground obsidian and heat-conducting ore, designed to react to the Dao. Under the lantern light, the black lines did not absorb the light, but reflected it with a sharp, glassy glow. The bird's feathers, drawn from the neck to the base of the spine, reflected the light as if they were made of smoked glass. It was a tattoo of a phoenix spreading its wings.
"Enshō!..." exclaimed the drunkard, his voice choked with amazement.
Shinjimaru stopped what he was doing. He looked over his shoulder and let out a dry, ironic smile.
"That's right. Even mud knows how to recognize nobility, doesn't it?"
He walked over to the bench, which looked like one of those old park chairs, and sat down next to the stranger. The cold of the night hit his bare skin, but he took a long sip of the liquor.
"Don't look at the bird on my back like that," said Shinjimaru, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "It hasn't flown in a long time. Do you want to know how an heir to fire ends up sleeping with the pigs? I'll tell you. But first, let me drink to warm what's left of this glass Dantian."
"I am Shinjimaru Enshō... everyone knows about the Enshō Clan, one of the ten great clans, as they call us there... The Eternal Flames. Our clan specializes in the element of fire, with techniques made official by the Empire. We've been playing with fire for a long time... ever since my ancestor was blessed with the phoenix. Since then, it's been fire until we became what we are today.
It turns out that, over the centuries, our bodies have learned to develop to withstand this hell. It's not just technique; it's biology. Our Dao channels have become wider, like exhaust fans in a furnace, and our skin has become dense, made not to melt when the internal temperature rises to the point of melting metal, and so on...
In the Enshō Clan, you are either the fire that consumes everything, or you are the fuel. There is no middle ground. Our Dantian is like a continuous ignition engine: it generates heat from the oxygen and energy that circulates, and that heat is what keeps us alive and powerful. A healthy Enshō is never cold; our presence warms an entire room.
But there is one detail that no one mentions: to keep that flame burning, your core, your Dantian, must be flawless. One crack, one tiny flaw in the containment of internal pressure, and the fire turns against its owner. That's what happened to me. While my brother, the prodigy, was born with an engine that shines like the sun, mine... my engine decided to seize up at the crucial moment.
Shinjimaru took a long swig from the jug, feeling the liquid burn his throat, "the only fire I have left," he thought, handing the jug to the drunk, who drank with the same thirst. In return, the old man gave him a cigarette. Shinjimaru took a deep drag, the ember of the cigarette lighting up his tired face for a second, before returning it and releasing the gray smoke.
"My brother and I... before he was the 'Fire of the North,' his name was Yuki. Can you believe it? We grew up competing for the place of heir. Different mothers, but the same fiery blood of our father. We were prodigies, each in our own way, and we were even friends... in our own way. Until my thirteenth birthday."
He spat to the side, the mud mixing with the smoke.
"They introduced us to the clan's secret: the technique to ignite the Dantian once and for all. The warning was clear: if you fail in the circulation, it's spontaneous combustion. You burn from the inside out before you can scream. I was a kid, I thought I was invincible. I wasn't afraid. Until that day."
Shinjimaru closed his eyes, as if he were seeing the temple courtyard again.
The whole village was there. It's a party, you understand? People love to watch the show, even if the show is a kid turning to ash. I sat in a meditative pose. I began the Enshō circulation technique. I heard the screams... they weren't screams of joy, they were screams from people watching other candidates become human torches. The heat began to rise. It was a heat that didn't come from the sun, it came from my own marrow."
He squeezed the liquor jar tightly, his knuckles white.
"The number one rule of the Dao is detachment. You can't express intense feelings, or the energy gets out of control. But me? I've always been attached to pleasures. I liked to eat, to play, to be alive. The survival instinct screamed louder than discipline. At the moment when the fire should have stabilized in my core, I thought, 'I don't want to die. I don't want to be charred.
My body panicked. Instead of letting the heat flow, I tried to 'close' the Dao channels to protect myself. It was a fatal mistake. Imagine a boiling boiler where someone welds the escape valves shut. The pressure had nowhere to go. The heat didn't explode outward... it imploded, and with that, my Dantian didn't just crack; it exploded outward. It was an uncontrolled release of thermal energy. I was the epicenter of a shockwave of fire that swept through the front rows of the courtyard. There were deaths. Servants, guards... people who were there to celebrate and ended up charred by my cowardice. I was not a silent failure. I was a tragedy."
He clenched his fist.
I was hospitalized for seven days, with flesh falling off my bones. While I was fighting not to die in the hospital, Yuki took his test the following days. The courtyard still had black marks from my explosion when he sat down to wake up. He was perfect. Clean. Cold where I was chaos.
When I was discharged, the mansion was no longer the same. The silence was worse than the screams of the explosion. My mother couldn't look me in the eye; her disappointment was a physical weight. My father... my father simply stopped seeing me. I became a ghost in my own home. He forbade Yuki from approaching me. He didn't want 'Sentimentality,' the disease that destroyed me, to contaminate the new prodigy. We were separated as if I were an infection."
Shinjimaru looked at his own hands, which were still trembling slightly.
"Yuki became distant. His brilliance grew while I rotted in the corners of the mansion. No attention, no training, no purpose. All that remained were the stares. The servants who survived looked at me with fear and disgust. The nobles with scorn. I was the Enshō who killed his own and lived to tell the tale."
He stood up abruptly, the wooden chair scraping with a shrill sound.
"So, if you ask me why I drink... it's because alcohol is the only fire I can control without killing anyone. Now, I'm going to get out of here before the 'Fire of the North' wakes up and remembers that we still share the same surname."
Shinjimaru descended the steps of the veranda and let himself be swallowed up by the streets, walking aimlessly until his legs gave way.
When he opened his eyes, the world was a blur of gray and nausea. It was morning. The sun beat down on his face, but it brought no warmth. He was lying on his side, his face inches from a puddle of vomit and an empty liquor jar. His body ached as if he had been trampled by a horse.
He tried to get up when a pair of sandals stopped in front of his eyes.
"Sir?..."
Shinjimaru froze. The sound of her voice was like a needle piercing his sensitive ears. He forced his neck to rise.
It was a girl (Himari). She stood there, watching what was left of the man with a mixture of dread and desperate hope.
"Sir... are you awake?" She knelt down, not caring about the dirt. "Please... my father... he can't take it anymore. Could you help me carry him? I'll pay you... I have these coins..."