—————
The morning came grey and cold.
Ron woke before the bell—a habit now, the body's internal clock calibrated by three months of predawn meditation sessions. The back room was dark, the window a rectangle of charcoal smudge against the wall's deeper black. Beside him, Tao slept in a tight curl, knees drawn to chest, breath whistling faintly through the gap where his new tooth was still growing in. Mei had migrated during the night and lay perpendicular across the foot of the mat, one arm flung over Lian's ankles in a gesture of unconscious possession.
Lian's mat was empty.
Ron registered this, rose without sound. The floorboards were ice against his bare feet. He dressed in the dark—the new clothes, the grey linen and brown cotton that his inscription work had purchased. Over them, a quilted jacket his mother had produced from somewhere two days ago, the stitching tight and even, the padding thick enough to matter. She hadn't said it was for the hunt. She hadn't needed to.
The main room. His father was already gone—warehouse shifts started before dawn in winter, when the river barges arrived with the tide and the loading crews worked by lantern light. His mother stood at the stove, her back to him, stirring congee in the iron pot. The familiar economy of motion—wrist rotating, shoulders level, no wasted movement.
Lian sat at the table.
She held a cup of tea in both hands, fingers wrapped around the ceramic for warmth. Her pack—a canvas bag that their mother had reinforced with leather patches at the stress points—sat on the floor beside her chair, already loaded. She wore a padded jacket that matched Ron's, though hers was a size too large, the sleeves rolled back twice to free her hands. Her dark braid hung over one shoulder, the tail secured with a strip of cloth torn from something their mother hadn't thought anyone would miss.
Ron sat across from her. His mother placed a bowl of congee before him without turning—she'd heard him enter, tracked his position by sound, placed the bowl where he would be. A small domestic magic more reliable than any spirit skill.
"When did you break through?" Ron asked.
Lian's cup paused halfway to her mouth. Steam curled between them.
"A few days ago." She drank. Set the cup down with a deliberate precision that didn't quite conceal the tremor of excitement beneath it. "The manual helped. I'm cycling almost twice as fast as before."
Almost twice. Ron noted the qualifier. Lian was precise with language the way their mother was precise with motion—nothing wasted, nothing inflated. If she said almost twice, she meant between 2.1 and 1.9 times her previous rate. The revised meditation cycle was performing within expected parameters for a plant-type spirit with different resonance characteristics than his pen.
"Level ten?"
"Eleven."
Ron's spoon stopped in his congee. Eleven. She'd been nine two months ago. The revised cycle hadn't just doubled her speed—it had compounded, the same way his had, the efficiency gains building on each other with each iteration. Two levels in two months, and accelerating.
Lian watched his reaction with the careful attention of a younger sibling who had recently discovered that her older brother's opinion carried more weight than she'd previously allocated to it.
"That's good, Lian."
"I know." Said without arrogance. A factual assessment, delivered the way she delivered everything—precisely, with the edges trimmed clean. But beneath it, visible only because Ron had spent eleven years learning to read the subtle typography of his sister's composure, something glowed. Not pride exactly. Vindication. The quiet fire of someone who had been told—by circumstances, by innate soul power levels, by the silent calculus of a world that measured worth in spirit rings—that she would be adequate, and who had decided that adequate was not acceptable.
Their mother set a second bowl of congee on the table. For a moment her hand rested on Lian's shoulder—a touch so brief it might have been accidental if Lin Shu had ever done anything accidentally in her life.
"Both of you eat. The group meets at the east gate in an hour."
—————
The east gate of Freya City was a stone archway set into the outer wall, flanked by guard posts that were manned with varying degrees of attention depending on the hour and the season. This morning, the guards stood straight and alert, their breath making white plumes in the cold air. The presence of Master Wen—Spirit King, five rings, combat instructor at the academy—had a clarifying effect on military posture.
Wen Dahai stood at the gate's center, dressed for fieldwork. Gone was the barrel-shaped man who sat behind a desk smelling of liniment. In his place was something harder, more angular—a veteran wearing layered leather armor that had been maintained with religious care, his iron-ringed staff held in one hand with the casual authority of a limb he'd been born with. His five spirit rings—two yellow, two purple, one black—weren't summoned, but their presence saturated the air around him like heat from a banked furnace. Ron felt them as pressure against his spirit core, a gravitational awareness that said this person is dangerous in a language older than words.
The second instructor was a woman Ron recognized but had never spoken to—Master Luo, an auxiliary-track teacher who specialized in plant-type and healing-type spirit cultivation. Thin, mid-forties, with a weathered face and steady hands. Her spirit was something botanical that Ron didn't know the details of, and her cultivation level was Spirit Elder—three rings. Lower than Master Wen, but sufficient for a supervised expedition to a controlled hunting ground.
Ron counted them as they arrived, cataloging faces and threat assessments with the automatic efficiency that three months of combat training had wired into his observation patterns.
Seven first-ring hunters, all level ten or eleven. Lian was among them—the youngest, the smallest, standing with her pack straps cinched tight and her chin at an angle that dared anyone to comment. The other two were boys Ron knew by sight: a heavyset kid named Zhou with a stone-type spirit, and a quiet, nervous boy called Fan whose spirit Ron had never seen demonstrated.
Three second-ring hunters. Ron, level twenty, the jian at his hip and the ash stick strapped across his pack because he'd grown attached to it and saw no reason to leave it behind. Beside him, a girl named Shen Yi—tall, athletic, with a wolf-type beast spirit that made her the group's most conventional combat asset. Two others: a boy with a shield spirit and another with some kind of tool-type that Ron hadn't bothered to identify.
Snow had come to Freya City days ago. Not the dramatic, blanketing snowfall of the deep northern provinces, but a persistent, granular accumulation that covered the ground in a crust of white and turned every surface treacherous. The road east from the gate had been cleared by foot traffic, but beyond the city's immediate outskirts, the landscape wore its winter coat undisturbed—fields of white broken by the dark verticals of bare trees and fence posts, stretching toward the forested ridgeline that marked the beginning of the Emerald Ridge hunting grounds.
"Bright colors, visible against snow," Master Wen said, addressing the group without preamble. His voice carried the flat authority of someone who expected compliance and saw no reason to request it. "Stay where I can see you. That means no wandering off the trail, no investigating interesting noises, and no heroics. We hunt in order—first-ring students first, second-ring after. Questions?"
Silence.
"Good. Move."
—————
The forest closed around them like a jaw.
Not suddenly—the transition from open ground to woodland was gradual, the bare-branched elms at the forest's edge giving way to denser growth as the group followed the marked trail into the Emerald Ridge's interior. But at some point—Ron couldn't identify exactly when—the sky narrowed from a wide grey ceiling to a fragmented mosaic visible only through gaps in the canopy, and the quality of the silence changed. City silence was the absence of noise. Forest silence was the presence of listening—a watchful, breathing quiet that made Ron's hand drift toward the jian's handle at his hip without conscious instruction.
The snow here was thinner, caught by the canopy above and reaching the ground only in patches. The trail was a path of compressed earth and leaf litter, flanked by undergrowth that winter had reduced to skeletal tangles of brown and grey. Ron's boots crunched softly with each step. Ahead of him, Shen Yi moved with the fluid economy of someone whose wolf spirit influenced her physicality even unsummoned. Behind him, Lian walked with careful, measured steps, her pack riding high on her narrow shoulders.
Master Wen led. Master Luo brought up the rear. The seven students occupied the middle in a loose column that the Spirit King's occasional glances kept from spreading too wide.
"Hundred-year beasts in this section," Master Wen said, pausing at a fork in the trail. He pointed left with his staff. "Meadow clearing, half a mile. Common habitat for low-cultivation herbivores. First-ring hunters—you're up."
—————
The first hunts were efficient.
Master Wen selected targets with the practiced eye of a man who had supervised dozens of these expeditions—identifying spirit beasts whose cultivation matched the students' absorption capacity, isolating them from groups, creating controlled engagement windows that minimized risk without eliminating it entirely. There was an art to it that Ron observed with analytical attention, inscribing the tactical patterns into his memory the way his pen inscribed marks on steel.
Zhou went first. His stone-type spirit manifested as a pair of granite gauntlets, and his target was a hundred-and-twenty-year Forest Boar that Master Wen herded into a narrow ravine where the beast's superior mobility was negated. Zhou's fighting was crude—haymakers and body blocks, no technique beyond the application of force to surface—but his spirit's defensive properties absorbed the boar's charges, and after six minutes of grinding attrition, the beast fell. The spirit ring—a pale yellow band—rose from the body like smoke given form, and Zhou sat in the snow to absorb it with his gauntlets glowing against the white ground.
Fan's hunt was quieter. His spirit was a shadow-type—a dark mist that clung to his hands and forearms, allowing limited concealment. Master Wen found him a Dusk Rabbit, a hundred-year prey animal whose primary defense was speed. Fan's shadow mist let him get close enough for a decisive strike, and the rabbit fell without understanding it was being hunted. The absorption took forty minutes.
Lian was last among the first-ring hunters.
Master Luo took the lead for this one—the auxiliary instructor's botanical expertise made her better suited to advising a plant-type cultivator on ring compatibility. The target was a Thornbriar Mouse, a small rodent-class spirit beast that lived in symbiosis with the thorned undergrowth, its hundred-year cultivation granting it minor control over nearby plant growth.
Ron watched from thirty feet away, close enough to intervene if something went catastrophically wrong, far enough to avoid interfering with his sister's hunt.
Lian summoned her spirit. The moss vine manifested along her forearms—a living growth of deep green that wrapped from wrist to elbow, tiny leaves unfurling against her skin. Her single yellow ring appeared at her feet, rotating slowly.
The Thornbriar Mouse was the size of a house cat, grey-furred, with quills along its spine that glistened with a resinous coating. It crouched in the center of a bramble patch, surrounded by thorned branches that twitched and curled in response to its presence.
Lian extended her hands. The moss vine pulsed.
The brambles around the mouse stiffened. Not dramatically—a subtle rigidity that crept through the thorned branches like frost spreading across glass. The mouse felt it. Its quills rose. It bolted—
Into a wall of its own thorns, now locked in place by Lian's spirit skill, forming a cage of organic spikes that the mouse had relied on for defense and that now served as its prison. The animal thrashed, squealed, threw itself against the barrier. Thorns scratched its hide but couldn't penetrate its own resin-coated quills.
Lian stepped forward. The moss vine on her right arm extended—not a strike but an embrace, the green growth reaching out and wrapping around the trapped mouse with a gentleness that belied its purpose. The vine constricted. The mouse struggled, weakened, and went still.
Clean. Controlled. No wasted motion.
Ron breathed out slowly as the yellow spirit ring rose from the mouse's body and Lian sat in the snow to absorb it. Master Luo knelt beside her, monitoring the process with professional attention. The ring descended, settling around Lian's small frame, and the moss vine on her arms pulsed once—brighter, denser, the leaves darkening from pale green to emerald.
Twenty-five minutes. The absorption completed without complication.
Lian stood. Brushed snow from her knees. Looked at Ron.
He gave her nothing. No nod, no smile, no visible acknowledgment that might be interpreted as an older brother's approval rather than a peer's respect. She didn't need his validation. She needed to know that what she'd just done was hers—earned, executed, owned.
Lian looked away first, but not before something passed across her expression that Ron filed away without analysis. Some things didn't need to be dissected. They just needed to exist.
—————
The first-ring hunts completed by midafternoon. The first-ring students each absorbed a ring that Master Wen and Master Luo deemed appropriate for their spirit types and cultivation levels. No injuries beyond scratches. No complications. The efficiency of the operation spoke to Master Wen's experience and to the controlled nature of the Emerald Ridge hunting grounds—this was not wilderness. It was a managed resource, the spirit beast population monitored and maintained by the Star Luo Empire's forestry division.
Master Luo took the first-ring students and began the return journey to Freya City. Lian left with them, her new ring glowing faintly around her waist, her pack riding lighter on her shoulders than it had that morning.
The second-ring hunters remained, with Master Wen as sole escort.
The Spirit King led them deeper into the forest.
The character of the woodland changed as they moved east. The managed undergrowth gave way to older, denser growth—oaks and ironwoods whose canopies blocked the sky entirely, their trunks thick enough that two people couldn't span them with linked arms. The snow disappeared beneath the canopy's shadow, replaced by a carpet of dead leaves that muffled footsteps to near-silence. The air was colder here, damper, carrying the mineral smell of deep earth and old wood.
"Second-ring territory," Master Wen said. "Beasts range from four hundred to two thousand years in this section. Stay alert."
Ron's hand found the jian's handle. The leather wrapping was cold against his calluses.
Shen Yi went first—her wolf spirit demanded a predator-class ring, and Master Wen located a six-hundred-year Grey Timber Wolf in a rocky dell. The fight was fast and brutal, Shen Yi's wolf-enhanced speed and reflexes matching the beast's, her spirit claws opening wounds that accumulated until the wolf faltered. Her second ring rose against the grey sky.
The shield-type boy hunted next—a Stoneshell Tortoise, five hundred years, whose defensive nature matched his spirit. Then his turn.
"The Ironbark Beetle colony is northeast," Master Wen said, studying the forest ahead with the evaluative stillness of a hawk. "Quarter mile. The seven-hundred-year specimens will be on the colony's perimeter—sentinels. Largest of the group, territorial, but not aggressive unless provoked."
"I'll need to provoke one."
"You'll need to isolate one. The colony defends collectively. If you engage a sentinel within the swarm's response range, you'll have fifty beetles on you in seconds. Their individual combat power is low, but fifty of anything is fifty of anything."
Ron nodded. He'd anticipated this—the bestiary had described the colony defense behavior in detail, and his inscribed notes included three isolation strategies he'd developed during the preparation period.
"I have a lure."
He produced a small ceramic vial from his pack. Inside was a compound he'd assembled from the bestiary's description of Ironbark Beetle pheromone chemistry—tree resin mixed with crushed beetle-wing fragments purchased from an apothecary in Freya City's market district. Not a perfect replication of the beetles' territorial challenge scent, but close enough to provoke a response from a sentinel whose instinct was to investigate boundary violations.
Master Wen examined the vial without opening it. His expression performed the complicated operation of being simultaneously impressed and unwilling to show it.
"How far from the colony do you need to place it?"
"Two hundred yards minimum. The bestiary says sentinel patrol range extends to one-fifty. I want a buffer."
"You've done your research."
The corner of Master Wen's mouth performed a fractional adjustment. Not a smile. The preliminary infrastructure for one.
—————
The Ironbark Beetle colony occupied a stand of ancient oaks in a depression where the forest floor dipped into a natural bowl. Ron heard them before he saw them—a low, continuous drone that vibrated in his chest cavity, the collective sound of several hundred insects moving across bark and through undergrowth. The smell hit next: resin and something sharper, a chemical tang that stung the back of his throat.
Master Wen circled the colony at a distance of three hundred yards, identifying the sentinel positions with the ease of long experience. Seven sentinels, each the size of a large dog, their chitinous shells dark and ridged with the distinctive ironbark pattern that gave the species its name. They patrolled the colony's perimeter in overlapping circuits, antennae sweeping the air.
Ron selected his ground—a small clearing two hundred and thirty yards northeast of the colony's edge, where a fallen oak had created a gap in the canopy. Snow dusted the clearing's floor. The fallen trunk provided cover on one side.
He uncorked the vial. Applied the pheromone compound to a stone at the clearing's center—the resin glistened in the weak light, already beginning to release its chemical signal into the cold air. Then he retreated behind the fallen oak and crouched.
The jian whispered free of its scabbard.
Waiting. The forest's silence deepened around him. His breathing slowed—in through the nose, four counts; hold, two counts; out through the mouth, four counts. The kendo rhythm. The pre-strike cadence that synchronized his body's systems into a single, focused instrument.
Seven minutes.
The drone changed. A separation in the collective sound—one voice distinguishing itself from the chorus, growing louder, closer. Ron's grip tightened on the jian. Through a gap in the fallen oak's root structure, he saw movement between the trees.
The sentinel was larger than the bestiary's illustrations had suggested. Nearly three feet long, its segmented body armored in overlapping plates of dark chitin that caught what little light penetrated the canopy and threw it back in dull, oily gleams. Six legs carried it over the forest floor with a mechanical precision that was insectile and somehow purposeful—this wasn't a mindless creature responding to chemical stimulus. This was a seven-hundred-year spirit beast with enough cultivation to possess rudimentary intelligence, investigating a territorial breach with the methodical caution of a sentry checking a perimeter alarm.
It reached the stone. Antennae descended, touching the pheromone compound. The beetle's mandibles opened and closed—a tasting motion, evaluating the signal.
Ron moved.
Three months of kendo practice compressed into two seconds. He cleared the fallen oak in a low vault, jian rising into the overhead guard position—jodan, the word surfacing from dream-memory one final time before dissolving forever. His feet found the snow-dusted ground. His rear leg loaded. His hips dropped.
The cut descended along the central line.
The jian's edge met chitin at the junction between the beetle's head segment and thorax—the weakest point in the armored shell, identified through three separate bestiary entries and confirmed by Master Wen's briefing. Steel bit through the gap between plates with a resistance that Ron felt in his wrists, his forearms, the rotation of his shoulders. Not like cutting wood or air. Like cutting intent—the beetle's seven hundred years of accumulated vitality concentrated in the armor that his blade was now defeating.
The sentinel shrieked. A sound that wasn't sound—a vibration that traveled through the ground and the air simultaneously, a chemical and acoustic alarm that would reach the colony in seconds.
Ron didn't have seconds.
He withdrew the blade. Reset. The beetle twisted, mandibles gaping, legs scrabbling for purchase. Its shell was cracked but not breached—the chitin's layered structure had absorbed part of the cut's force, preventing a clean kill.
The second strike was a thrust. Master Wen's voice—fix the elbow alignment—echoed in his muscle memory. The jian drove forward along a straight line, point finding the crack his first cut had opened, penetrating through the compromised chitin into the soft tissue beneath.
The beetle convulsed. Its legs spasmed, scoring the frozen earth. Its mandibles clenched once, twice, and stopped.
Stillness.
Ron withdrew the blade. Wiped it on the snow. Straightened.
The spirit ring emerged from the beetle's body like a second sunrise—a band of yellow light, brighter than his first ring, richer, carrying the weight of seven centuries of cultivation in its slow rotation. It hung in the cold air above the insect's remains, pulsing gently.
Ron sat in the snow. Cross-legged. The cold soaked through his trousers immediately, a sharp discomfort that faded as his spirit activated. His pen materialized in his right hand. His first ring—the hundred-year yellow band—appeared at his waist.
He reached for the beetle's ring.
The absorption was not gentle.
The ring descended over him and the world compressed. Foreign energy flooded his meridians—dense, alien, carrying the chemical complexity of seven hundred years of Ironbark Beetle existence. His spirit core seized, contracted, then expanded violently as it attempted to integrate the new input. Pain radiated from his sternum through his chest, his arms, the base of his skull.
Ron gritted his teeth. The pen hummed in his hand—not the comfortable resonance of normal use, but a high, strained vibration that matched the conflict between his spirit and the incoming energy. His cultivation cycle engaged automatically, the refined rotation pulling the foreign energy into the established pathways, compressing it, translating it from beetle-nature into pen-nature through the filter of his spirit core.
The pain peaked. Held. Began to recede.
The ring settled. Two yellow bands now orbited his waist—the first pale and familiar, the second richer, deeper, carrying a warmth that he could feel against his skin through his clothes.
Fifty-three minutes. Ron opened his eyes.
Master Wen stood ten feet away, arms crossed, staff planted in the earth beside him. His expression was unreadable, but his posture—relaxed, weight evenly distributed, no tension in the shoulders—communicated that nothing had occurred during the absorption that required his intervention.
"Clean kill," Master Wen said.
"Thank you, sir."
"Two strikes. I would have preferred one."
Ron accepted this without argument. The instructor was right—a single decisive cut would have been cleaner, faster, less risky. The beetle's alarm shriek had been a failure of execution. In a less controlled environment, that shriek could have brought the colony.
"Your swordsmanship." Master Wen's tone shifted. The flat instructional register softened into something more conversational, almost curious. "That overhead cut. That's not from any pre-spirit manual I've read."
Ron said nothing.
"Wherever it's from, it works. Refine the entry angle—you're cutting slightly left of center, which cost you penetration on the first strike. Center-line discipline."
"Yes, sir."
Master Wen nodded. Uncrossed his arms. Turned toward the forest, where the remaining hunts awaited.
—————
The other hunts proceeded without incident—except once.
They'd moved further east, tracking a Stoneback Lizard for the shield-type boy, when the forest's quality of silence changed. Not the watchful quiet of ambient awareness. Something sharper. A vacancy, as though the smaller creatures that populated the undergrowth had collectively decided to be elsewhere.
Master Wen stopped. His staff rose fractionally—an inch, no more—and his five spirit rings manifested.
Ron had never seen them materialized. Two yellow, two purple, one black. They orbited the Spirit King's body in concentric bands, each one rotating at a different speed, the combined luminescence casting the surrounding trees in shifting layers of colored light. The black ring—ten thousand years, at minimum—radiated a pressure that Ron felt as a physical weight against his chest, compressing his breathing, making his spirit core flinch inward like a small animal in the presence of something vast.
The leopard emerged from the shadows between two ironwood trunks.
Three thousand years of cultivation had made it something beyond animal. It was six feet at the shoulder, its coat a deep charcoal grey that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. Its eyes—amber, vertical-pupiled, luminous with the cold intelligence of a predator that had spent thirty centuries refining the art of killing—fixed on the group with an attention that was not curiosity. It was assessment. The leopard was deciding whether these intruders were prey, threat, or irrelevance.
Ron's hand was on the jian. His spirit rings—both yellow, pulsed at his waist. Beside him, Shen Yi had dropped into a crouch, her wolf spirit manifesting along her arms and shoulders, hackles raised. The shield-type boy had summoned his spirit and stood frozen behind it.
Master Wen stepped forward.
He didn't attack. Didn't posture or shout or make any of the aggressive displays that lesser cultivators relied on to assert dominance. He simply existed—more fully, more densely, with a concentrated presence that made the air around him thicken and the snow at his feet sublimate into steam. His black ring pulsed once, and the pulse carried through the clearing like a shockwave felt rather than heard.
The leopard's ears flattened. Its lips peeled back from teeth that were longer than Ron's fingers, and a sound emerged from its chest—not a growl but a vibration, a subsonic declaration that this territory was occupied and the declaration was not negotiable.
Master Wen's staff touched the ground. The sound it made was small—wood against frozen earth, barely audible. But the spiritual pressure that accompanied it was enormous, a focused emission that struck the leopard's position like an invisible fist.
The beast flinched. Not dramatically—a tightening of the muscles along its flanks, a fractional lowering of its massive head. But for a three-thousand-year spirit beast, any flinch was a concession. The amber eyes held Master Wen's for three seconds that lasted years.
Then the leopard turned. Flowed between the ironwood trunks like smoke reversing its path. Vanished.
The forest exhaled.
Master Wen dismissed his rings. The colored light faded. The ordinary grey of winter woodland reasserted itself.
"Above our absorption limit," he said, addressing no one in particular and everyone simultaneously. "Three thousand years. Purple-ring class. Would have killed any of you." He glanced at the group. "This is why we don't wander off the trail."
No one argued.
—————
They reached Freya City's east gate as the last light bled from the sky. The guards straightened when Master Wen passed. The seven students—three returned earlier with Master Luo, four arriving now—would disperse to their families, their new rings settling into their cultivation like seeds planted in fresh soil.
Ron walked home through streets that the evening cold had emptied. The jian hung at his hip, cleaned and scabbarded, ready to return to Duan Ke's shop tomorrow along with the first of three promised inscriptions. His two yellow rings pulsed gently against his awareness—the first familiar, the second new, its energy still integrating, still finding its place in the architecture of his spirit.
The apartment. The stairwell's garlic-and-cabbage smell. The third floor. His mother at the stove, stirring, not looking up.
"Hands."
He showed her. She saw the calluses, the small cuts from forest undergrowth, the bruise across his right palm where the jian's guard had pressed during the killing strikes. Her gaze lingered a fraction longer than usual.
"Lian is in the back room. She hasn't stopped smiling since she got home. It's unsettling."
Ron almost laughed. Almost.
He ate dinner. Did his chores. Helped Mei with her shoes—the new pair he'd bought with Duan Ke's inscription money, replacing the split ones his mother had mentioned weeks ago. Tao demanded a full account of the hunt, which Ron provided in edited form—emphasizing the beetle, omitting the leopard, because some truths served no purpose except to generate nightmares.
Later. The back room. The flour-sack curtain drawn. His siblings asleep—Tao curled, Mei sprawled, Lian on her mat with her new ring's faint glow visible even through closed eyelids, her expression carrying the residual satisfaction of someone whose world had expanded by exactly the amount she'd demanded of it.
Ron summoned his spirit.
Two yellow rings materialized. The pen appeared in his hand. He looked at both, feeling the doubled weight of cultivation energy available to him now—not just more power, but a different quality of power, the beetle ring's contribution adding a chemical complexity to his spirit's output that hadn't been there before.
He needed to understand what his second skill could do.
Rice paper first. The pen touched the surface, and the familiar golden lines appeared—but different. Richer. The marks carried a depth they hadn't possessed before, as though the ink had gained a third dimension, the inscriptions subtly raised from the paper's surface rather than lying flat upon it.
Stone next. He pressed the pen's tip against the wall beside his sleeping spot—a section of exposed brick that he'd used for practice inscriptions before. The marks came easily, golden characters sinking into the morite with a permanence that felt deeper than his previous work. Not just surface adhesion. Integration. The inscription was becoming part of the substrate's structure.
Wood. Metal—the small iron bracket that held the window latch he'd repaired with a chopstick. Each substrate accepted his marks with an eagerness that exceeded his pre-ring capability by a measurable margin.
Then, on instinct—an impulse that rose from the beetle ring's integrated nature rather than from conscious reasoning—Ron pressed the pen's tip against the back of his left hand.
The mark appeared on his skin.
Ron's breathing stopped.
Golden light sank into the flesh below his knuckles—not sitting on the surface the way ink sat on paper, but penetrating, the inscription passing through the epidermis into the tissue beneath. The sensation was peculiar. Not painful. A warmth that spread from the point of contact outward, following the structure of his hand's anatomy—tendons, fascia, the fine network of blood vessels that branched beneath the skin.
The mark itself was a simple line. A test stroke, nothing more. But its presence on his skin—in his skin—resonated with his spirit core in a way that external inscriptions never had. He could feel the line. Not just see it—feel it, the way he felt his meridians during meditation, a structural element of his body's spiritual architecture.
Ron stared at his hand. The golden line glowed faintly, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
His mind—the analytical engine that the pen's inscription skill had been building for three months—engaged.
Skin as substrate.
If he could inscribe on his own body, the applications were—
He forced himself to slow down. To think systematically rather than excitedly. The pen touched the rice paper, and he began to write. Not draw—write. Cataloging possibilities. Evaluating them. Ranking them by feasibility, by risk, by potential return.
Structural reinforcement. If inscriptions became part of the substrate's structure—as the second ring's enhanced integration suggested—then inscriptions on skin could theoretically strengthen the tissue itself. Patterns designed to distribute impact force. Lattice structures that reinforced the dermis against cutting or piercing damage. A form of armor that wasn't worn but grown, written into the body's own frame.
Sensory enhancement. The Ironbark Beetle's original secretions served as communication markers—chemical signals that encoded information about the surrounding environment. Translated through his pen-spirit's lens, this could become inscribed sensory arrays. Patterns on the skin that detected spiritual energy, temperature differentials, air pressure changes. A network of awareness written directly into the body's surface.
Cultivation acceleration. Meditation inscriptions—the circulation diagrams that had already doubled his cultivation speed—applied not to paper but to the meridian pathways themselves. Soul power channels reinforced and optimized at the structural level, the refined rotation pattern carved permanently into the body's spiritual architecture rather than held in mind through concentration.
Ron's hand trembled. Not from cold.
Each possibility branched into sub-possibilities that branched further, a decision tree of such scope that mapping it completely would take weeks. Months. The pen's analytical skill processed the major branches with characteristic efficiency, but the details required testing—careful, methodical experimentation to determine what worked, what didn't, and what might cause irreparable damage to the body it was inscribed upon.
Careful. The word anchored him. He was not going to rush this. The body was not a practice stone or a sheet of rice paper. Mistakes on external substrates could be discarded. Mistakes inscribed into living tissue—
He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to.
Ron dismissed his spirit. The golden line on his hand faded to a faint luminescence that was visible only in complete darkness—and even then, only if he knew where to look. He could still feel it. A thread of warmth woven into the back of his hand, pulsing softly.
He lay down on his mat. The apartment was dark. His siblings breathed in the rhythms of deep sleep. Through the flour-sack curtain, his mother's quiet movements in the main room—the small, purposeful sounds of a woman putting her household in order before surrendering to the night.
Ron stared at the ceiling and thought about tattoos, and armor, and the distance between a pen that wrote on paper and a pen that wrote on the world.
Sleep came eventually.
His hand glowed faintly beneath the blanket until it didn't.