Rooster cry bled through the dark like a line of silver on black silk. Jang slid from his pallet before the others stirred, feet whisper-soft across the dorm planks. Outside, kiln smoke drifted under a paling moon, wreathing the servant compound in a low, grey halo. He followed its smell—soot and faint pine pitch—past stacked wash-tubs, through the silent garden gate, and down the narrow lane that led to the forgotten charcoal shed.
The padlock Ma Gok had once ordered fixed still hung there, but the staple was rotten; a twist, a breath, and the latch surrendered with the sigh of an old lung. Jang eased the door inward. Cold air eddied over heaps of spent coal, carrying a hiss of damp straw, mouse droppings, rust. He shut the world out behind him, and the shed became a dark ribcage around a single ember of purpose.
A reed-lantern waited in his hidden niche. He coaxed its wick alive—one sharp strike, sulphur flare—and orange light crawled over warped beams tattooed by years of forge-smoke. Dust motes shivered, turning the gloom to shifting constellations. He breathed in, tasting carbon on the back of his tongue, and settled barefoot on the blackened floorboards.
Brace. Sink. Draw. Hold.
The first stance of the Iron-Lotus Root Canon flared through muscle memory. Feet shoulder-wide, knees bent until thighs burned. Spine long, but not stiff; arms forming the inverted lotus cradle before his dantian. He counted heartbeats—one, two, three—up to thirty before tremor forced him to rise. Knuckles audibly cracked as he flexed numb fingers; a thin line of soot split under his heel, marking failure.
Next dawn, he returned again. Mist pooled knee-high, and kiln chimneys far across the yard vented red sparks into the greying sky. Inside the shed he found yesterday's heel-mark, widened by settling dust—proof of where he had broken. He drew a fresh boundary with a charred stick, lower, crueler. This time he sank deeper. Thirty breaths, then forty. Shoulders quaked, breath rasped, but he held through fifty-eight before vision blurred and calves locked. When he straightened, sweat steamed in lantern glow like spirits leaving the body.
Day blurred into night, night into day. Lotus-Root Guard for sixty breaths became ritual, then threshold. Boards beneath his feet dented, shallow cups mapping every correction. Soot clung stubbornly to his hairline, a widow's peak of black. On kitchen duty Jisoo wrinkled her nose and asked if the stoves were belching again; he only smiled and lifted another rice cauldron as excuse for trembling arms.
The seventh morning after he first unlocked the shed, he unrolled the copy sheet and read the next four glyphs by flickering light. Branch-Step. Simple curves on parchment, cruel geometry on flesh. He sprinkled cold ash across the floor, traced the footwork arc with the tip of his toe: half-circle, pivot, crescent sweep. Seven points, each the width of his palm apart. He inhaled—coal dust rasp raw in throat—and moved.
Left foot whispered forward, sinking heel to ball. Right foot brushed, drew half-moon. Ash scuffed, rising in lazy spirals. He counted pulses in the side of his neck, keeping heartbeat and movement married. Third repetition: balance slipped; ankle rolled, and he caught himself on a rotted broom-staff with a grunt that shattered the shed's hush. The staff wobbled, spilled iron nails hidden in its bristles. Clink, clink. He froze, listening for patrol bells. Nothing answered but the slow settling of dust.
Candle flame guttered as if scoffing. Jang steadied breath, began again. The circular sentence of his mind looped with each drag of the toe:
Brace, sink, draw, hold—pivot, breathe, return.
Ash painted a crude diagram beneath him, branches of grey light radiating from his stance. By the fifteenth set his robe was two shades darker, and grit rasped beneath calloused soles like grinding gears. Sweat mapped salt rivers down jaw and collarbone. At sixty sets his lungs burned icy, Qi pooling hot behind navel then refusing to flow further. The knot seized, and the world lurched sideways.
He doubled, retching. What came up was tarry, flecked with glittering soot—Qi char, corrupted essence. It hit the planks with a dull splat. His hands shook, nails clawing old timber while he whispered the mantra Ma Gok had once forced him to copy as punishment: "Ash to ink, ink to oath, oath to spine." The words were stone-weight in his mouth, but they anchored him until the spasm passed.
When he straightened, the candle had nearly drowned in its own wax. Lantern walls filmed with his exhaled black. He spat the lingering taste of iron, wiped mouth on sleeve, and made himself retrace the Branch arc one last, perfect time—slow, reverent—before letting the light die.
So the mornings went. Kiln smoke for reveille, charcoal shed for chapel. Twilight found him again among embers, repeating the forms until his shadow fractured into three across the walls. Knuckles split and healed in spider-web scabs; soles blistered, popped, leathered. When he washed laundry in the stream and the cold bit raw flesh, he imagined it tempering steel.
On the tenth dawn the air pressed different—heavy, deliberate. Mid-stance, Jang felt every hair lift. He froze, pivot half-finished, breath halved. Over his shoulder, light seeped beneath the warped door: no torch-glow, but grey predawn haze. Yet the weight remained, as though a stone balanced on the back of his skull. Through a crack in the boards he saw the shadow of a cane—a simple thing, bamboo shaft bound in iron rings—paused just outside. Heartbeat thundered in ears. The cane tapped once, twice, thrice against the sill, a measured rhythm that matched the pulse of his stance. Then the shadow withdrew, and footsteps padded away into drizzle.
He exhaled, slow as cooling steel. When he opened the door hours later, a wrapped bundle waited on the threshold: two broad leaves stitched with linen thread, still beaded from rain. Inside lay a smear of translucent salve the color of faint moonlight. He knew the scent—star-vine balm, rare, reserved for disciples who shredded micro-meridians during lightning-arts practice. Its price could feed a servant quarter for weeks.
He said nothing, even to himself. But that night, after laundry shift stretched bones and kitchen steam scalded fresh scabs, he unwrapped the leaves and smeared the cool resin across his palms. Heat fled his joints; raw tendons sighed. Faint frost tracks ghosted skin where salve touched, as though winter's fingertip pressed blessing.
"Rot is fertiliser," Ma Gok had once muttered while surveying a punishment line. Jang flexed fingers and watched frost fade. Then let me rot, and bloom.
Day by day, Branch-Step answered him—first with stumbling compliance, then with fluid silence. He learned to lift heel like drawing silk, to settle weight as though roots reached from soles into black loam of ash. Ash remembered every slip, every triumph; it drafted grey petals around his path until the shed floor resembled a lotus viewed from above.
Not all eyes missed the metamorphosis. Mid-afternoon, hauling wash-baskets, Jang crossed paths with Jisoo outside the dye vats. Steam painted her cheeks crimson; she pushed damp hair behind ear and paused, nostrils flaring. "Burner must be choking again," she said lightly, but gaze hooked his posture—spine straighter, shoulder roll restrained from practice habit. Her eyes narrowed, pupils following the faint black smudge at his collar seam where charcoal dust had seeped. She said nothing more, yet that night, as he passed the scribe alcove, he glimpsed her shading a lotus-root glyph in her margin notes, finger idly flicking a speck of soot from page to lantern plate.
The countdown scratched into the beam above the training space dwindled: first four slashes, then three. Each dawn he added a new mark with the tip of an iron nail, the scoring harsh against wood, the sound like sparking flint in the hush.
On the night of the third mark he hung a length of rust-pitted chain—salvaged from the coal pulley—across a ceiling hook. Below it he embedded an iron-headed nail at rib height. The crude obstacle mimicked a blade path he had watched Core disciples drill weeks ago. He bowed to the improvised opponent, saluted with battered broom-staff, and began.
Lotus-Root Guard anchored breath. Branch-Step slid him sideways as the staff thrust upward, point aligned with nail. At the last instant wrists twisted, elbows hollowed, and the staff met the hanging chain with a sharp clap—then rolled, deflecting invisible steel.
The chain swung. For a heartbeat nothing happened. Then the broom-head exploded: iron nails disgorged, shaft splintering in his grip with a report like crackling pine. Shards clattered on planks. Lantern-flame jumped blue.
Jang stood trembling, half of the staff in each hand, the fresh break smelling of sap long since dried. A laugh, startled and raw, escaped him; triumph streaked through veins like hot liquor. He had moved something that mattered. He closed his eyes—and at once another image overlaid the shed: Won-Il kneeling under falling embers, Ma Gok's lash singing, Sun and Daehwan's blood on alley stones. Power was a weapon, yes, but also a lash. In Ironshadow the lash almost always swung downward.
The laugh died, strangled to a rasp. He let the staff halves fall. Soot puffed. His heartbeat slowed until only the drip of last night's rain through the eaves remained.
He climbed the rickety beam ladder and carved the next tally: a single, deliberate stroke beside its brothers. Two dawns remained. Ash drifted from the cut, petals of grey settling on his upturned palm like a blessing—or a warning.
Outside, a crow voiced its ragged caw. From the far training field the bell for senior morning drills tolled soft bronze. Jang wiped sweat and soot from brow, smearing both into a dark streak across cheekbone. He glanced once more at the beam—at the two empty spaces that waited—and whispered to the empty room, "Two more embers, then the mountain."
He banked the lantern, pocketed the longest shard of broken staff, and slipped into cobalt dawn.