The first day passed without success.
That fact, by itself, would not have meant much to Kael if he had still been the boy who lived in Smoke City. Hunger had taught him that days could be endured without improvement. Pain had taught him that effort did not guarantee reward. Failure, to him, had once been a static condition rather than an outcome.
But this was different.
Here, failure was measured.
The axe remained on the ground where Old Master Ren had left it, its broad head resting against the grass as though gravity had already claimed ownership. It did not glow. It did not hum. It did not display any hint of will. It simply existed, patiently and without urgency, while Kael stood in front of it hour after hour, extending an arm that the world insisted was incomplete.
Kael did not rage.
He did not shout.
He did not beg.
He treated the problem the way he had been taught to treat impossible structures in another life—by breaking it down into assumptions and then questioning each one in turn. The axe had weight. Weight implied mass. Mass implied interaction with force. Force required contact. If contact could be achieved, then leverage could be applied. If leverage could be applied, then movement was inevitable.
That logic had never failed him before.
It failed him here.
On the second day, Kael changed methods.
He ate first.
That alone was a luxury he still had not fully learned to trust. The food Old Master Ren left for him was warm, filling, and consistent, and it appeared each morning without ceremony. Kael ate slowly, carefully, as though afraid the act of eating too much might offend the forest or alert the world to his presence. Only after his stomach was no longer hollow did he return to the axe, because he remembered something important from the life that was not his: malnourished bodies produced unreliable data.
If he was going to test reality, he would do it properly.
He adjusted stance. He adjusted breathing. He counted heartbeats. He extended the stump first, then the forearm, then the shoulder, imagining vectors rather than fingers. He tried to feel the axe not as an object, but as a point of resistance in space. When that failed, he reversed the thought and treated the axe as fixed, imagining instead that his missing hand was the variable that needed to be solved.
The grass bent once.
That was all.
On the third day, Kael stopped reaching entirely.
He sat in front of the axe instead, legs crossed, posture straight, eyes closed. He did not meditate in the way cultivators did, because he could not circulate Qi and did not pretend otherwise. Instead, he reviewed models. He replayed memory after memory of failures that came not from lack of strength, but from incorrect premises. Temporary supports failing because someone assumed concrete had set. Load paths ignored because someone trusted symmetry too much.
He asked himself a single question over and over:
What if the hand does not need to be felt to exist?
When he extended his arm again that evening, the axe slid half an inch.
Kael did not smile.
He marked the distance in his mind and repeated the motion until his shoulder shook and his vision blurred. When he finally collapsed onto the ground, breath rasping, he did not look at the axe with frustration.
He looked at it with respect.
On the fourth day, the Tenth Senior Brother arrived.
He did not announce himself. He never did. Kael only noticed because the forest's air shifted slightly, the way it always did when someone powerful decided to exist somewhere nearby. The Tenth stood with arms crossed, staring openly at the scene in front of him: an eight-year-old boy repeatedly reaching at empty air while an axe stubbornly refused to acknowledge the effort.
He scratched his head.
"…Master?" he asked, glancing sideways at Old Master Ren, who stood beneath the tree as calmly as ever.
Ren did not look away from Kael.
"You will see," Ren replied.
The Tenth frowned, then watched in silence for a while longer. He saw Kael fail. He saw him succeed only enough to make failure more painful. He saw no tricks, no formations, no obvious guidance. Finally, he snorted quietly and shook his head.
"…Kids these days," he muttered, and left.
Kael never noticed.
By the fifth day, Kael had stopped thinking in terms of success and failure.
He thought in terms of tolerance.
How long could he maintain awareness before his concentration fractured? How many repetitions before the phantom sensation degraded instead of strengthened? How far could the axe move before his confidence interfered with precision? He began to record these answers not with ink or marks, but with breath and muscle memory, embedding the data directly into his body because he had learned, long ago, that notes could be lost.
On the sixth day, the axe lifted for a full breath.
It did not rise cleanly. It did not come free of resistance. It hovered just above the grass, trembling, its weight still present but no longer absolute. Kael felt sweat drip into his eyes and ignored it. His arm shook violently. His stump burned as though nerves were being rewired by force.
He held it.
Then he released.
The axe fell.
Kael collapsed.
He laughed quietly into the dirt, not because it was funny, but because the problem had finally admitted it was solvable.
On the seventh day, Old Master Ren spoke again.
"You may continue," he said, gently.
That was all.
Kael nodded, already extending his arm, already breathing the way his father had taught him, already applying leverage to a hand that only existed because he refused to let it disappear again.
The axe rose.
Not high.
Not cleanly.
But it rose.
And this time, when it did, Kael understood something deeper than technique:
This task was not teaching him how to lift a weapon.
It was teaching him how to force the world to acknowledge what it preferred to ignore.
That lesson, Kael knew, would be far heavier than any axe he would ever carry.
He tightened his stance and began again.
Not because he was told to.
But because now he knew the cost of stopping.
And he was finally in a place where effort mattered.