The dawn was not yet light; it was a bruise of purple and charcoal smeared across the eastern horizon, promising nothing but cold. The training yard of Tianlei Fortress was a box of shadows, the high walls trapping the freezing air that rolled down from the mountains.
In the center of the yard, breath plumed from three mouths, rising in white, ghostly columns that vanished instantly in the wind.
Jon Snow circled to his left, his boots crunching softly on the frost-hardened earth. His hands were empty. Across from him, Liang Mei held her spear—a practice weapon of white ash with a blunted iron tip—in a low guard. She did not circle. She simply pivoted, the tip of the spear tracking Jon's chest with the unblinking focus of a viper.
"You're breathing too loud," she said. Her voice was flat, stripped of inflection.
"I'm breathing to cycle," Jon gritted out.
"You're breathing to think. Don't think."
She lunged.
It wasn't a grand, sweeping motion. It was a piston-thrust, economical, and terrifyingly fast. Jon saw the shoulder drop a fraction of a second before the wood moved. He twisted, the Stone Tiger stances Feng had drilled into him taking over—feet rooting, hips snapping back to clear the line of attack.
He cleared the tip by an inch. He stepped in, seeking the inside of her guard, his hand chopping toward her wrist to disarm.
He was too slow.
Mei retracted the spear with a snap of her wrists and drove the butt end into Jon's ribs. The impact drove the air from his lungs. He stumbled back, wheezing, the taste of copper flooding his mouth.
"Dead," Sun Cao announced from the bench where he sat bundled in furs, a cup of steaming tea in his hands. "Lung puncture. You drown in your own blood in three minutes."
Jon straightened, rubbing his side. The cold made the pain sharp, a needle of ice twisting in the muscle. "Again."
"You telegraph your advances," Liang Mei said, resetting her stance. She wasn't even winded. "Your weight shifts to your front foot before you move. I can read you like a scroll."
"Then teach me not to telegraph."
"That is what the bruising is for."
They went again. And again. The sun began to bleed over the walls, casting long, distorted shadows across the yard, but the temperature didn't rise.
"Now," Jon whispered to himself.
He saw the opening—a slight elevation in her spear tip. He moved, and as he moved, he reached inward. He sought the sensation he had found on the mountain: the vibration of the earth, the stillness of the stone, and the feeling of his marrow turning to iron. Jade Skin.
He focused on his left forearm, willing it to harden and transform into a shield that would absorb her strike and shatter the wood.
He stepped in. He raised his arm. He braced for the transformation.
Nothing.
His mind grasped at the feeling, but it was like trying to catch smoke with a clenched fist. The chaos of the fight—the sound of boots, the rush of wind, the threat of pain—shattered the stillness he needed.
Liang Mei's spear cracked against his forearm.
There was no ring of stone. Just the dull, wet thud of wood on flesh.
Jon hissed, clutching his arm. The pain was immediate and blinding, radiating up to his shoulder. He looked down to see the skin already mottling, a deep, angry purple blooming against the pale winter flesh.
"You hesitated," Sun Cao observed, setting down his tea. "Right before she struck. Like you were reaching for something in your pocket and couldn't find it."
"I was trying to harden," Jon said through gritted teeth.
"In a fight?" Sun Cao stood, shaking his head. The large youth looked more like a bear than a man in his heavy winter layers. "That takes a level of mastery that—"
"I know what it takes." Jon's voice snapped, sharper than he intended. The frustration was a hot coal in his gut, burning hotter than the pain. He closed his eyes, forcing a breath. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. "That is why I am practicing."
Liang Mei lowered her spear. She walked over to him, her eyes scanning the bruise with clinical detachment.
"The technique you are attempting—the bone hardening. It requires stillness?"
"It requires... becoming," Jon said, struggling to put Feng's abstract lessons into words. "Surrendering to the bone instead of commanding it."
"And you think you can achieve surrender while someone is trying to drive a spear through your liver?"
"Feng said combat is the only real teacher."
"Feng isn't wrong," she said. She stepped back, spinning the spear once before settling back into that maddening, impenetrable low guard. "But the lesson is painful. Again."
They rotated when the sun was fully up.
Now it was Jon's turn to watch. He sat on the bench, pressing a handful of snow against his throbbing forearm, watching Sun Cao descend upon Liang Mei like an avalanche.
Sun Cao fought exactly as his father's reputation suggested: with overwhelming, geometric force. He slashed and battered, his wooden practice sword essentially a club in his hands. He occupied space with aggression, trying to leave his opponent no room to breathe, let alone strike.
Liang Mei weathers it like a cliff weathers waves. She gave ground smoothly, her feet sliding over the frost without breaking contact. She deflected his heavy blows with the shaft of her spear, using his momentum to send his blade wide.
She waited.
Sun Cao roared, a guttural sound of effort, and swung a heavy overhead blow intended to crush her guard. He overextended, his weight pitching forward past his toes.
Liang Mei stepped aside—a movement as simple as a closing door—and tapped him behind the knee with her spear shaft.
Sun Cao crumpled. Before he hit the ground, the spear tip was resting against his throat.
"Dead," Jon said softly.
Sun Cao growled, slapping the frozen ground. He climbed to his feet, his face flushed with exertion and anger.
"You fight like you are angry at something," Liang Mei said, not moving her spear.
"I fight like a soldier," Sun Cao snapped. "Aggression wins battles."
"Discipline wins battles," she corrected. "Aggression gets soldiers killed." She tilted her head, her dark eyes searching his face. "What are you so angry about, Sun Cao?"
"I am not angry."
"You are furious. Every strike is an argument."
Sun Cao didn't answer. He turned away, chest heaving, staring at the fortress wall. But Jon saw it—the flicker in the big man's eyes, the shadow that haunted him. He was fighting a ghost. He was fighting the memory of General Kai's expectations and perhaps the memory of the father he had lost four years ago, whose armor he was desperately trying to fill.
"Enough," Sun Cao muttered. "My turn to defend."
The heat in Master Zhi's study was a physical weight, a thick blanket of air that smelled of dried sage, burning charcoal, and the metallic tang of sickness.
Jon sat on the low stool across from the strategist's desk. He was sweating in his winter tunic, but Zhi, wrapped in layers of wool and fur, shivered as if he sat naked on a glacier.
The old man looked translucent. His skin was parchment stretched too tight over a skull that seemed to be sharpening daily, preparing to reveal the death's head beneath. Only his eyes remained unchanged—black beads of terrifying intelligence that dissected Jon's failures with surgical precision.
"You are trying to use the jade hardening as a technique," Zhi rasped. His voice was a dry rattle, like dead leaves skittering on stone. "A tool you pull out of a belt pouch when needed. Click. On. Click. Off."
"I know," Jon said, rubbing the bruise on his forearm. It had turned a spectacular shade of black-green. "But in combat—"
"In combat, you do not have time to become," Zhi cut him off. "So you must already be."
Jon frowned. "I don't understand."
"You treat the Jade Skin as an action. Now I will harden." Zhi mimicked the thought with a clumsy hand gesture. "But Feng's teaching—the inhabiting rather than guarding—is not a switch. It is a state of existence."
Jon closed his eyes, thinking back to the mountain. Feng stood motionless for hours in the snow, with birds landing on his shoulders.
"He is always jaded," Jon murmured.
"Not always hardened," Zhi corrected, coughing into a handkerchief. The sound was wet and deep. "But always present in his bones. The hardening is just an intensification of what is already there. You need to learn to live in that state, Jon. Not reach for it—rest in it."
Rest in it.
It sounded contradictory. Combat was motion, chaos, and reaction. How could one rest in the middle of a storm?
"I will try," Jon said.
"Do not try. Do." Zhi pushed a stack of papers across the desk. "Now. To the matter of your death, if you fail."
Jon picked up the papers. They were dossiers—lists of names, fighting styles, and observations.
"I have gathered what information I can about the tournament field," Zhi said. "Thirty-two competitors from across the province. Sixteen will advance past the first day. Eight will proceed to the quarterfinals. Four to the semifinals."
"And one winner."
"Chen Wei is favored," Zhi said. "His family has invested heavily. Private tutors from the capital. Sparring partners brought from the Shadow Lands. Equipment forged specifically to counter heavy weaponry."
"He thinks I'm a brute," Jon said. "A northern barbarian."
"He thinks you are slow. Prove him wrong." Zhi tapped the papers. "But Chen Wei is not the only threat. These four."
Jon looked at the names Zhi indicated.
Han Shu. Zhao Min. Wu Feng. Xu Lin.
"Han Shu," Zhi narrated, his voice growing threadbare. "Quiet. Unreadable. She has won every match without revealing her full potential. She fights with fans and needles."
"Needles?"
"Do not underestimate them. They find the gaps in armor. Zhao Min—technical, analytical. He studies opponents obsessively. He will know which foot you favor before you step into the ring. Wu Feng is known for his raw power. Like Sun Cao, but more disciplined. Xu Lin, on the other hand, possesses exceptional speed. Pure speed."
"How do I beat them?" Jon asked, looking at the formidable list. "I have had months of training. They have had lifetimes."
"By being something they have not prepared for," Zhi said. A thin, grim smile stretched his pale lips. "They prepare for the styles they know. The Azure forms. The Iron Schools. You are a bastard from the North, taught by a mad monk who lives on a mountain. You are the unknown, Jon. Use it. Be the anomaly."
The wind on the ramparts was merciless. It screamed off the sea, carrying salt spray that froze instantly on the stone. It was a black night, moonless, the ocean below invisible save for the crashing roar of the waves against the cliff face.
Jon couldn't sleep. His body was a map of aches—his ribs, his forearm, and his thighs burning from the stances—but his mind was a racing engine he couldn't idle.
He found he wasn't alone.
A figure sat on the crenellations, looking out into the void. A spear lay across her knees.
Jon approached slowly, letting his boots scuff the stone so he wouldn't startle her. Liang Mei didn't turn.
"Can't sleep either?" he asked, his voice snatched away by the wind.
"I never sleep well before something important," she said. She didn't look at him. "Sit, if you like. Try not to freeze."
Jon sat beside her, pulling his cloak tighter. For a long time, they just listened to the ocean battering the foundations of the fortress.
"This spear," she said suddenly, running a gloved hand along the shaft. The wood was dark with age and oil, worn smooth in the middle. "It was my father's."
Jon looked at the weapon. It wasn't ornate. It was a soldier's tool, efficient and deadly.
"He carried it for twenty years in General Kai's service," she continued. "First spear of the vanguard. He was a good man. A simple man."
"He taught you well," Jon said.
"He taught me everything. When the arrow took his leg ten years ago, he thought his fighting days were over. He fell into a deep depression and turned to alcohol for a year. Then..." She shrugged. "Then he looked at me. I was six. Scrawny. Loud."
She smiled faintly at the darkness.
"He put the spear in my hands. It was three times my height. He said, 'If I cannot walk, you will run for me.'"
"Where is he now?" Jon asked, though the tone of her voice had already told him.
"He died three months ago," she said. "Just before the tournament announcement. His heart gave out. The physician said it was peaceful. He just... stopped."
Jon watched the white foam of the waves far below. The grief in her voice was a solid thing, heavy and cold as the stone beneath them.
"The tournament was his dream for me," she said. "He wanted to see me compete. She wanted to prove that his teaching hadn't ended with his injury, that he hadn't just faded away into a cripple's chair." Her voice cracked, just once. "He won't be there, but I'll fight like he's watching."
Jon nodded. He reached up and touched the jade wolf beneath his tunic.
"I know about fighting for the dead," he said quietly.
She turned to look at him then, her eyes catching the faint starlight. "Your father?"
"A friend," Jon said. "In Yunkai. The woman was named Alya. She died trying to escape. She died believing we could be free. And my uncle... and my brothers."
He looked at his hands.
"I carry many things," he admitted. "Ghosts. Promises."
"And you carry that," she gestured to his chest. "The wolf."
"Yes."
"I've learned that the dead don't want us to suffer for them," Liang Mei said. "My father... he hated when I cried. He'd say, 'Tears rust the armor, girl.' They want us to live for them. To be the sharpest spear in the rack."
Jon considered this. It felt true. Marcus Chen wouldn't want him mourning; he'd want him drilling. Alya wouldn't want guilt; she'd want him to breathe the air she couldn't.
"Liang Mei," she said.
Jon blinked. "What?"
"My name. Not 'the spear girl' or 'the soldier's daughter' or whatever Sun Cao calls me when he thinks I can't hear. Liang Mei."
She held out a gloved hand.
"Jon," he said, taking it.
"I know." Now she did smile, briefly, a flash of white in the gloom. "The whole fortress knows. The Ghost Child. The Lightning Boy. The Stone Tiger's Cub."
"I prefer Jon."
"Then Jon it is."
Weeks bled into one another. The cold deepened. The bruises yellowed, faded, and were replaced by fresh ones.
Every day, Jon failed.
He failed in the morning sparring. He failed in the afternoon drills. He failed against the spear, against the sword, and against the wooden dummy. Every time he tried to call Jade, he was too slow, distracted, or eager.
Rest in it, Zhi had said. Don't reach.
It was the fourth week. The training yard was a slurry of mud and melting snow.
Jon faced Sun Cao.
They had been sparring for an hour. Sweat steamed from their bodies. Sun Cao was panting, his attacks slowing slightly, but his power was undiminished. He came in with a horizontal slash, a "beheading" stroke.
Jon ducked. Stone Tiger root. He came up, checking the swing with his sword, but Sun Cao anticipated it. The big youth reversed his momentum, spinning—a move surprising for his size—and lashing out with a backfist aimed at Jon's head.
Jon saw it.
Time didn't slow down—that was a poet's lie. Time moved exactly as it always did. But Jon's perception of it expanded. He saw the rotation of Sun Cao's hips. He saw the tension in the shoulder. He saw the wooden gauntlet coming toward his face.
"Don't reach," his mind whispered.
He didn't tense. He didn't try to summon the Qi. He simply acknowledged the presence of the bones in his forearm. He acknowledged that they were stone. He acknowledged that stone does not break against wood.
He raised his arm. He didn't block; he simply placed the stone in the path of the wood.
Thwack.
The sound was wrong.
It wasn't the dull thud of wood on meat. It was a sharp, high clack, like two billiard balls colliding.
Sun Cao yelped and dropped his sword, shaking his hand violently. He staggered back, eyes wide.
"Gods! What was that?"
Jon stood frozen. He lowered his arm. He stared at his forearm.
There was no pain. No throb of impact. The skin was momentarily pale, almost translucent, before the blood rushed back and it turned pink. But underneath... Underneath, he felt the echo of it. He felt the sensation of his radius and ulna vibrating like a struck bell.
"I think..." Jon breathed, flexing his fingers. "I think I did it."
Liang Mei dropped down from the wall where she had been watching. She crossed the yard in three strides, grabbing Jon's arm. Her fingers probed the muscle and bone.
"No break," she muttered. "No bruising. Sun Cao hit you hard enough to crack a rib."
"It felt like hitting a statue," Sun Cao complained, picking up his sword. "My wrist is stinging."
"Again," Liang Mei commanded. She leveled her spear. "Do it again."
They spent the rest of the afternoon trying to replicate it.
He failed the first three times. The fourth time, against a thrust from Liang Mei, he found the stillness again. Clack. The spear bounced off his shin as if he were wearing plate armor.
He failed the next two. Then succeeded.
By sunset, they sat on the bench, exhausted.
"It is not reliable," Liang Mei observed, wiping mud from her cheek. "One in five. Maybe one in four."
"But it is possible," Sun Cao said, grinning. He seemed more excited by Jon's success than Jon was. "In combat, even one in five could be the difference. If you catch a blade on your arm instead of your neck..."
"I need to improve the ratio," Jon said, staring at his hands. "One in four isn't enough against Chen Wei. If I gamble on the hardening and it fails..."
"Then you lose an arm," Liang Mei said simply. "So don't gamble until you have to." She stood up, offering a hand to pull Jon to his feet. "We train more. We have four weeks left."
The dynamic shifted. It wasn't sudden, like the breaking of the bone-lock, but gradual, like the turning of a season.
In the fifth week, Jon began to teach Sun Cao.
"You are a wall," Jon said, standing in the mud. "But a wall that moves only forward can be flanked. You must be a mountain. A mountain does not chase the wind."
Sun Cao resisted. "My father taught me to seize the initiative. This... waiting... it feels like cowardice."
"It feels like winning," Jon said. He took his stance. "Attack me."
Sun Cao attacked. Jon waited, rooted, and when Sun Cao overextended, Jon simply tripped him.
"Your father was a great warrior," Jon said to the sprawling youth. "But the tournament is not a battlefield. It is an arena. The rules are different. The space is confined."
Grudgingly, Sun Cao began to listen. He learned to hold his ground. He learned that not swinging was sometimes more threatening than swinging. His aggression didn't disappear—it was his nature—but it became focused. This was a directed fire, rather than a wildfire.
In the sixth week, Jon's own style began to crystallize.
It was a strange, chimera thing. The foundation was Stone Tiger—low, wide, and immovable. But the transitions were fluid, borrowing from the Water Breathing memories of Marcus Chen's world. And the strikes... the strikes were Thunder. Explosive. Linear. Violent.
And woven through it all—unpredictive and jagged—was the jade.
He couldn't jade his whole body. He couldn't hold it. But he could punctuate a fight with it. A shin that became iron to check a low kick. A forearm that became steel to break a guard.
"You are becoming unpredictable," Liang Mei observed one evening as they stretched. "That is your greatest weapon."
"I thought jade hardening was my greatest weapon," Jon said.
"Jade hardening is a trick," she said. "Unpredictability is a strategy." She looked at him, and her face softened. "You're learning."
By the seventh week, the walls had come down.
They ate together in the mess hall, ignoring the separation of rank. They laughed at Sun Cao's terrible impressions of the drill sergeants. Liang Mei, the stoic spear mistress, began to share food from her plate, dropping a dumpling into Sun Cao's bowl without a word.
"You are different," Jon told her one night as they walked back to the barracks.
"How so?"
"Less... guarded. The spear is down."
She considered this, looking up at the stars. "Maybe I decided I could trust you. Both of you."
"What changed?"
"You haven't tried to be anything you are not," she said. "You train, you fail, you get up. You bleed, and you don't complain. I've known warriors twice your age with half your honesty." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "Don't let it go to your head, Snow."
The summons came in the eighth week.
Zhi's study was darker than usual. The lamps were turned low, casting long, wavering shadows against the shelves of scrolls.
Zhi lay on a chaise lounge, buried under furs. He didn't rise when Jon entered. He looked... finished. The skin was grey, clinging to the bone. His breath was a shallow, desperate thing, a rattle in a dry cage.
"Master Zhi," Jon said, alarm spiking in his chest.
"Sit," Zhi whispered. He lifted a hand, trembling and skeletal, pointing to a letter on the low table. "Read."
Jon picked up the parchment. The seal was broken.
"Intelligence from Jade Harbor," Zhi rasped. "About Chen Wei."
Jon scanned the characters.
Jon read about hired informants, observers at the monastery, detailed accounts of the western boy's sparring, and the integration of internal arts.
Jon lowered the letter. "He knows."
"He knows," Zhi confirmed. "He knows about the hybrid style. He knows you are integrating breathing techniques. He does not know about the jade hardening—that is too new, kept within these walls—but he knows you are doing something different."
"So he will be prepared."
"He will be more than prepared. He has spent the last two months developing counters specifically for you. He is training to fight a hybrid."
Jon felt a cold weight in his stomach. The unknown variable's advantage—the "ghost" Zhi had spoken of—was compromised.
"What do I do?"
"You do what you always do," Zhi said. His eyes burned with a fierce, sudden light, defying the decay of his body. "You become something he has not prepared for. You evolve."
Zhi coughed, a terrible, racking spasm that seemed to tear at his very seams. When it passed, he lay back, eyes closed, panting.
"Jon," he whispered. "I may not be alive when you return."
The words hung in the air, sucking the oxygen from the room.
"Don't say that," Jon said, his voice tight.
"I say it because it is true," Zhi said. He opened his eyes. They were wet. "I need you to understand something important." I have spent my life teaching. Hundreds of students. Generals. Scholars. Princes."
He reached out. Jon took his hand. It was cold, freezing.
"None of them had what you have," Zhi said. "The capacity to synthesize. To adapt. To become. You are not just a student, Jon Snow. You are what I hoped to create my whole life. A bridge between the hard stone and the flowing water."
Zhi squeezed Jon's hand with surprising strength.
"Win the tournament. Not for Kai. It's not about politics. Win it for yourself. Prove that everything we built together means something. Prove that the mind can defeat the sword."
Jon looked at the old man. He was the first person in this vast, strange empire to see Jon not as a barbarian or a curiosity, but as a potential.
"I promise," Jon said.
"Good," Zhi whispered, closing his eyes again. "Now go. Let an old man sleep."
The garden was silent. The cherry trees were bare skeletons against the moon, their branches casting intricate nets of shadow on the frosted path.
Tomorrow, at dawn, they would ride for Jade Harbor. Two weeks of travel. Then, the arena.
Jon found Mei Ling on the stone bench. She was wrapped in her red cloak, looking at the frozen pond.
"Ready?" she asked, not turning.
"No," Jon admitted, sitting beside her. The stone was cold through his trousers. "But I don't think anyone is ever ready for something like this."
"You have been ready for a long time," she said softly. "You just don't see it."
She turned to him. Her face was pale in the moonlight, her eyes large and dark. She looked older than her years. The winter had hardened her too, in its own way.
"The swords," Jon said. "Your father put them on his wall."
"To remind you what you are fighting for."
"They were supposed to wait until I earned them."
"You have earned them ten times over," Mei Ling said, her voice fierce. "You earned them when you got up six times against Sun Cao today. You earned them when you survived the Bone Washing. You earned them every single day on that mountain."
"Then why does he keep them on his wall?"
"Because he wants you to take them," she said. "To prove you know you deserve them."
Jon thought of the twin blades. Wolf's Tooth. Storm's Edge. He hadn't officially named them yet. They were still waiting.
"Not yet," he decided. "I will take them when I return." I will take them when I return, after I have proven my worth to everyone. "Not just myself."
Mei Ling reached out and took his hand. Her fingers were warm, a stark contrast to the biting air. She laced her fingers through his.
"Come back," she said. It wasn't a command; it was a plea. "That is all I ask. Win or lose. Just come back."
"I'll win," Jon said.
"I don't care about winning," she said. "I care about you. Promise me."
Jon looked at her. He thought of the girl who had pulled him from the sand, the girl who had taught him to read, and the girl who had been his anchor in this strange world.
"I promise," he said.
She squeezed his hand once, hard. Then she leaned in and kissed his cheek. It was a chaste, fleeting thing, but it burned against his skin long after she pulled away.
"Goodnight, Jon."
She stood and walked back toward the fortress, her red cloak trailing behind her like a spill of blood on the snow.
Jon sat alone in the garden. He touched the jade wolf beneath his shirt. He felt the phantom weight of the swords he had not yet claimed.
Tomorrow, the road. The world awaits him tomorrow.
He took a breath. Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
The stillness came.