Shen Ruoxi stood at the east window of the meditation chamber, watching snow fall into the darkness. Spring had begun, but the Dragon Spine Mountains were still cold. Cloud hid the peaks beyond the sanctuary walls.
She knew little of these mountains. Her brother had been raising this place since they came to Redstone; she had spent most of those months in the city and climbed here only rarely. Even with the window clear, she would have known few of the ridges by sight.
Behind her, channels surrounded the meditation platform, empty and waiting for the Wang Clan's array. The stone walls were reinforced with formations. An incense burner stood unlit against one of them. Wuyan had given her a simple room in which to attempt the thing she had avoided for decades.
She laid her palm against the glass.
Her hand still looked young. So did the rest of her, despite the centuries since she had first touched qi in a village that no longer existed. She had killed mortal-shedding cultivators with these hands. Against nascent-soul opponents, speed and cunning had kept her alive when strength could not.
She had remained at peak late-stage mortal shedding for decades. Her body answered her as readily as ever. It was difficult to imagine leaving it behind, with all the things it knew how to do, and trusting herself to a place where none of that might help.
Ruoxi took her hand from the window and crossed to the platform. She stopped outside the channels.
Far more cultivators failed this crossing than survived it. She had watched three attempt it. None had returned.
Ji Wanqiu had been the first. Ruoxi had barely reached core formation then, and her teacher's teacher had seemed too old and too powerful to die. When Ji Wanqiu entered the protection array, Ruoxi had expected to witness an advancement. She had wanted to remember it properly.
She remembered three days of waiting. Ji Wanqiu's body had floated at the center, her face peaceful, her aura unchanged. The array around her would have looked crude to Ruoxi now. At the time, she had trusted it.
Then Ji Wanqiu had screamed.
Ruoxi had heard people in pain before. This had frightened her more. There had been terror in it, and something like recognition. Before Ruoxi's master could reach the array, Ji Wanqiu was burning from within. Her meridians ruptured; her cultivation collapsed, and the spiritual energy she had spent a lifetime gathering turned poisonous, destroying the body that held it. By the time her master reached her, only ash remained.
For decades afterward, Ruoxi had heard that scream in her sleep.
The elders had blamed inner demons. Ji Wanqiu must have carried some fear, some shame, some concealed fault that had overcome her when her soul left her body. Ruoxi had believed them. For the next two hundred years, she had examined her own mind with a care she had never given her wounds. Doubt was dangerous. Guilt might kill her. She had tried to find everything that could turn against her during the crossing.
The second failure, and then the third, had made that explanation harder to accept. Those cultivators had faced themselves honestly. Elsewhere, people burdened with guilt and regret had survived. A clear conscience seemed to offer no reliable protection.
And there had been that presence, just before Ji Wanqiu screamed.
Ruoxi had felt hunger in it. An awareness turning toward the woman suspended in the array. Whatever it had been, she could not believe it had come from Ji Wanqiu's doubts.
She looked down at the empty channels. Wang Ben had spoken cautiously about the protection he was helping to prepare. He had left room in his explanations for uncertainty. Yet the work itself answered a danger Ruoxi had spent centuries trying to understand.
Hunters outside the body. She was sure that was what he meant to keep away.
He was sixteen.
Ruoxi had lived long enough to meet remarkable children. Talent could explain a great deal. It did not explain how a boy from a minor frontier clan seemed to know how to build against the kind of danger she believed had killed her teacher's teacher.
She had tried asking him once, without putting the question too plainly. He had deflected it. She had let him, partly because his secrets amused her and partly because she needed his work more urgently than his answer.
Wuyan had been less willing to leave the matter alone. He had watched Ben through the winter, arranging months of work beneath his own eye. Ruoxi knew that interest. Her brother had made the favor into an experiment, with opportunities to observe the boy at every difficulty.
"His knowledge has gaps," he had told her. "As though the source itself were incomplete. I cannot predict a man I do not understand, sister. And I do not leave the things I cannot predict alone."
She had not asked him to stop. His desire to learn what Ben was did not make his wish to save her false. It did make her reluctant to take his judgment of the boy as her own.
She had watched Ben for herself.
He and the clan's formation masters had spent the winter on the work that would fill this room. Her brother had asked it of them as a favor owed. Ruoxi knew the obligation existed, but she had seen enough of Ben to think he cared whether she survived it. His guarded answers did not trouble her as much as they troubled Wuyan.
When she could no longer defend herself, the little formation master would be here. She found that she wanted him here. Whatever else she might learn about him, she was willing to owe him that.
One corner of her mouth lifted. He would probably find her gratitude almost as troublesome as her visits.
Ruoxi walked slowly around the platform. It was easier to think of the people who wanted her dead. The Azure Silk Sect had wanted it for three hundred years, ever since she crippled their young master. The remnants of the Iron Fang Sect still sent assassins every few decades over an elder she had humiliated a hundred years ago. There were families besides, and factions whose plans she had spoiled. Some would be pleased to hear she had died here.
Those were enemies she knew how to face. Their grudges had motives she understood, and bodies she could reach. Remembering them did little to prepare her for what waited beyond her own flesh.
Familiar footsteps sounded in the corridor. She turned before Wuyan reached the doorway.
"You're brooding," he said.
"Contemplating." She rested a hand on the platform's edge. "You should try it without watching someone else work."
His half-smile deepened. He wore plain traveling robes, his cultivation drawn so close that there was barely a trace of it about him. He looked at the unlit burner, then at her.
"The Mountain Guardian Array is finished. Even a Beast Emperor would take time getting through it now. The lesser Beast Kings won't get through."
"And the work for this room?"
"It will be ready tomorrow."
Ruoxi glanced toward the channels. Tomorrow the Wang work could be brought here and set into place. Another night, then the dawn she had been imagining.
Wuyan came around the platform to her. He was the only family she had left, the only person who had known her before cultivation. She could usually turn his attention aside with a joke. Tonight she watched him approach without trying.
"You're afraid," he said.
"Terrified."
He stopped beside her. She had meant to make the admission sound lighter. It had come out plainly, and she was glad she had not managed it.
"I could count on one hand the times you've admitted that in five centuries," Wuyan said.
"I haven't spent those centuries trying this."
"You could wait."
Ruoxi looked at him. "How long?"
He did not answer at once. She took her hand from the platform and walked back toward the window. He followed.
"I know," she said. "Another year would do no harm. Nor would ten. I have been telling myself that for decades."
"There is no shame in wanting to live."
"I want to live." She turned from the glass to face him. "I also want to find out whether I can go further. I have watched people stop wanting that. They still cultivated. They still spoke of what they would do when the time was right. Eventually they stopped speaking of it."
Wuyan's smile had faded.
"You're not one of them," he said.
"I could become one. That is what frightens me about waiting."
He stood close enough that she could have reached out and caught his sleeve. She kept her hands at her sides.
"The protection the Wangs are making is better than anything I have seen used for this," she said. "I know there is more to your interest in it. There always is."
His eyes remained on her.
"You have had that cracked slip for more than a thousand years and still cannot read all of it," Ruoxi said. "Then you found the same grain in Blackwood, in that great array you set me to guard. Now it is in the Wang formations, and you have the boy to puzzle over as well."
She glanced back at the platform. "I don't understand how it all fits. I don't need to understand it tonight. I need the protection to work, and for once I have reason to think it might."
"That does not make the crossing safe," Wuyan said.
"No. But it gives me more than I had before."
Ruoxi faced him again. She had wanted certainty for so long that she had almost made its absence a reason to do nothing. Ji Wanqiu had seemed certain. Ruoxi could still remember her peaceful face.
"Let them install the array tomorrow," she said. "At the following dawn, I'll begin."
Wuyan watched her without speaking.
"If I survive, I'll be nascent soul," she continued. "If I die, at least it will have been my choice to try."
"Or worse," he said.
She held his gaze. "Yes. I haven't forgotten."
His hand came to rest on her shoulder. The gesture was so unexpected that she looked down at it before looking back at him.
"I'll be watching," Wuyan said. "Every moment. If something goes wrong..."
"You cannot follow me across."
"I know."
He left his hand where it was. There was no trace of the tea-house smile now.
"I'll be watching anyway," he said.
Ruoxi covered his hand with hers. For a breath neither moved. Then she let go, and he lowered his arm.
"Get some rest," he said.
"You first."
He gave her a small smile and turned toward the doorway. She watched him leave, then turned back to the window.
Snow continued to fall beyond the glass. She stood with her hand on the sill and listened to his footsteps recede through the sanctuary.
When she stepped onto the platform, her brother would be watching.