The punishment came before the sun had even cleared the horizon.
Long Chen stood in the center of the servant's hall, the air smelling of stale sweat and old wood. Steward Meng, a man whose face looked like a piece of cracked leather left too long in the sun, paced around him. Meng held a heavy bamboo switch in one hand, tapping it rhythmically against his palm.
"Liu says you tripped him," Meng rasped, his eyes narrowing into slits of yellowed malice. "He says you used some... trickery. A peasant like you, touching an Inner Disciple?"
"I only caught him so he wouldn't fall, Steward," Long Chen said. He kept his voice flat, his gaze fixed on the floor. He could feel the small, rusted key in his pocket humming—a tiny vibration that felt like a warning.
"Caught him?" Meng laughed, a sound like dry leaves skittering on stone. "You are Dust, Long Chen. If a Disciple wants to fall, you let them. If they want to step on you, you become the ground."
Meng leaned in, his breath smelling of fermented tea. "Since you have so much energy to spare, you will spend the next three nights at the Black-Cold Spring. The kitchens need sixty tubs of water for the Elder's banquet. If a single tub is empty by dawn, I will personally flay the skin from your shoulders."
A collective gasp went up from the other servants. The Black-Cold Spring sat at the very base of the mountain, a jagged, three-mile trek down a path that was more ice than stone. The water was so cold it could freeze a man's blood in minutes. For a servant with no Qi, it was a death sentence disguised as a chore.
Long Chen didn't argue. Argument was for those with power. "Yes, Steward."
The trek down the mountain was a test of survival.
By the third trip, Long Chen's thin straw sandals had shredded, leaving his feet bare against the biting frost. The iron buckets, heavy and rusted, dragged at his shoulders until he felt his joints might pop.
Koda, the ferret, was tucked deep inside Long Chen's tattered tunic, only his pink nose peeking out. The little creature shivered, his whiskers frosted white.
"Stay warm, Koda," Long Chen whispered, his breath a thick plume of white mist. "We're almost there."
The Black-Cold Spring was a dark, swirling pool tucked into a natural stone basin where the sun never reached. The water didn't ripple; it moved like heavy oil, dark and forbidding. Jagged shards of blue ice floated on the surface, clinking together with a sound like breaking glass.
Long Chen knelt at the edge. The air here was so cold it felt like knives in his lungs.
He dipped the first bucket. The moment the water splashed his hands, a scream died in his throat. It wasn't just cold; it was a physical weight, a pressure that tried to crush his bones.
Thump.
His heart gave that strange, heavy kick again.
Suddenly, the rusted key in his pocket grew scorching hot—a violent contrast to the freezing spray. Long Chen didn't pull his hands away. Instead, he forced himself to be still. He remembered what he had felt earlier with Liu.
Everything has an origin, he thought, his teeth chattering. The cold isn't an enemy. It's just a vibration. A slow, heavy rhythm.
He closed his eyes. In the darkness of his mind, he stopped "feeling" the pain and started "listening" to the water. Deep beneath the pool, he sensed a thin vein of blue energy—Earth-Frost Qi—leaking from a crack in the mountain. That was the Origin.
Thump.
His heart pulsed in time with that blue vein.
The transition was agonizingly slow. The freezing sensation didn't disappear, but it changed. The "Cold" began to flow into his fingers, moving like slow-moving ink up his veins. It traveled past his elbow, up his shoulder, and spiraled down into his empty Dantian.
It wasn't the "begging" style of meditation the Sect taught. He wasn't asking the world for energy. He was forging himself using the environment as the hammer.
By the time he finished the tenth trip, a thin layer of frost had formed over his skin, but his eyes were unnaturally bright. His movements, once sluggish with exhaustion, were becoming precise—almost mechanical.
He was no longer just hauling water. He was "devouring" the frost of the mountain to bridge the gap in his broken meridians.
"Twenty more to go," he muttered, his voice sounding deeper, vibrating with a resonance that wasn't there before.
He picked up the buckets. They were still heavy, but for the first time in his life, the weight didn't feel like a burden. It felt like a foundation.