—————
The clock above the blackboard ticked like a metronome counting down to nothing.
Thirty-seven minutes left. No—thirty-six. Ron's gaze drifted from the brass hands back to Master Huo's mouth, which opened and closed with the mechanical regularity of a bellows. Something about spirit beast classification tiers. Third-rank habitats in the southern wetlands. Information that should have mattered to a sixteen-level soul master sitting in a room full of peers who could barely manage twelve.
It didn't.
The bruise along his left temple had faded to a sickly yellow-green, but the pressure beneath it remained—a dull, persistent throb that synced with his heartbeat whenever he forgot to ignore it. Five days since Chen Bao's fist connected with the side of his skull. Five days since the cobblestones behind the academy's eastern wall rushed up to meet him. Three days since he opened his eyes to find his mother's face hovering above, creased with the particular worry she reserved for problems she couldn't cook away.
And one night since the dream.
Dream felt too small a word. Dreams dissolved on waking, sugar in water, gone before you could taste them. This had texture. Density. He'd woken at the third bell with the sheets twisted around his legs and a certainty lodged in his chest like a fishbone—
That this world was a story.
Not a metaphor. Not philosophy. A novel. Popular, serialized, consumed by millions of readers in a place he couldn't name but somehow remembered sitting in. The details were already crumbling at the edges, the way plaster cracks from a wall—the shape held, but the fine brushwork was gone. He remembered scrolling. A glowing rectangle. Characters on a screen that weren't characters at all but people, reduced to trajectories and power levels and dramatic reversals plotted for maximum emotional payoff.
Douluo Dalu.
The name surfaced and sank again, a fish breaking water.
Ron pressed his thumbnail into the pad of his index finger beneath the desk. The small, grounding pain steadied him. He was eleven years old. He lived in Freya City, Star Luo Empire, close enough to the Heaven Dou border that merchant caravans from both nations clogged the northern road every market day. He was real. His bruise was real. The ache in his knees from this miserable wooden bench—
Real.
But so were the discrepancies.
He'd spent two days cataloging them, and the list was growing.
Spirit Hall, for instance. In the fragments of that dissolving dream-knowledge, Spirit Hall loomed as a monolithic theocracy—vast, ancient, shadowed with ambition. The kind of institution that waged wars and toppled empires. And yes, some of that rang true. The Hall's influence stretched across both continents. Its worship centers dotted every city. Bibi Dong had assumed the title of Supreme Pontiff three years ago after the previous Pope's death—he remembered his father mentioning it over dinner, the way one mentioned weather or grain prices, a fact of the landscape.
But.
Spirit Hall in Freya City operated out of a three-story granite building wedged between a textile warehouse and a noodle shop. Ron had been inside twice—once for his spirit awakening at six, and once last year when his mother inquired about the youth stipend program. The clerk behind the counter had been a woman with ink-stained fingers and reading spectacles, and she'd explained the terms with the bored efficiency of someone who'd recited them four hundred times.
The stipend was an investment. Not charity, not patronage—a loan. Spirit Hall identified soul masters with potential, advanced them a modest sum for training and equipment, and expected repayment with interest upon reaching a specified rank. The interest was low. The terms were reasonable. The contracts were printed on standard forms stacked in a wooden tray beside a potted fern.
It was, in every meaningful sense, a bank.
The dream-knowledge offered something different. Something grander. Something that didn't align with the clerk's spectacles or the potted fern.
"—and the distinction between a thousand-year and a ten-thousand-year spirit ring is not merely quantitative but categorical, representing a fundamental shift in—"
Master Huo's voice droned on. Ron's thumbnail pressed harder.
What if the dream was just a dream?
The thought was sensible. Comforting, even. He'd taken a blow to the head. The mind did strange things under trauma—his mother's cousin had fallen from a grain silo and spent two weeks convinced he could speak the language of cats. The brain was meat. Meat bruised. Bruised meat produced odd results.
Except he remembered the plot.
Not all of it. Fragments. A boy with twin spirits. A girl who was a rabbit. Poison. Betrayal. A war that consumed—
The bell rang.
Ron's hands unclenched. Around him, the scrape of benches against stone, the rustle of canvas bags, the low murmur of conversations resuming mid-sentence as though Master Huo's lecture had been nothing more than an intermission. He gathered his materials slowly—a cloth-bound notebook, a charcoal stick worn to a nub, a folded sheet of rice paper he'd been saving for practice.
The academy corridor smelled of dust and lamp oil. Late afternoon light fell through the high windows in amber slats, catching motes that drifted with glacial indifference. Ron walked through them. Past the knots of students who clustered by the entrance. Past Chen Bao and Wei Lin, who stood near the courtyard fountain—Chen Bao glanced his way, something unreadable flickering across his broad face before he turned back to Wei Lin with deliberate casualness.
Ron kept walking.
—————
Freya City at dusk moved to its own rhythm. Cart wheels grinding over cobblestone. The sharp bark of a vendor selling roasted chestnuts from a blackened iron drum. Two women arguing over the price of indigo dye in voices that carried across the market square with operatic projection. Ron threaded through it all on a route so familiar his feet managed it without consultation—left at the stone bridge, right past the chandler's shop with the cracked signboard, straight down the narrow lane where the buildings leaned toward each other overhead like conspirators sharing a secret.
The apartment building was four stories of weathered brick. His family occupied two rooms on the third floor—the larger one serving as kitchen, dining area, and his parents' bedroom; the smaller one split between Ron and his three younger siblings by a curtain that his mother had sewn from flour sacks and optimism.
The stairwell smelled of garlic and boiled cabbage. Someone on the second floor was singing, badly.
His mother stood at the small iron stove, stirring. She didn't look up.
"Hands."
He showed her. She glanced, nodded, returned to the pot. A simple economy of motion and word that defined her. Lin Shu had never been a woman who wasted either.
"Water needs bringing up. And the window latch in the back room is loose again."
"I'll fix it."
The water barrel sat in the courtyard behind the building, and the pump handle required a specific jerk-and-hold technique that Ron had mastered through repetition and blistered palms. Three trips up three flights. The latch took longer—the screw had stripped, and he had to whittle a splint from a chopstick to pack the hole before resetting it. His youngest sister, Mei, followed him around during the repair, asking why wood had grain and whether fish could dream and if he could make her a picture of a horse.
"After dinner."
"A running horse."
"After dinner, Mei."
By the time the chores were finished and the family had eaten—rice, cabbage, a few precious slices of salt pork distributed with precision by his mother—the light outside had thickened to deep indigo. His father sat by the window mending a boot sole by candlelight, squinting at the awl with the concentrated focus of a man for whom new boots were not an option. His brother and two sisters arranged themselves on their shared sleeping mat in the back room, engaged in a complicated dispute over territory that involved elbows and whispered accusations.
Ron waited.
When the candle in the main room guttered and his father's breathing deepened into the slow cadence of sleep, Ron slipped behind the flour-sack curtain. His siblings had resolved their border war and lay tangled together in the boneless sprawl of childhood exhaustion. He stepped over Mei's outflung arm, settled into the narrow space between the wall and the sleeping mat, and closed his eyes.
The spirit came when he called.
It always did. A warmth first, blooming in the center of his chest—not heat exactly, but presence, as though something curled inside his sternum had lifted its head. Then the ring: a single band of pale yellow light that materialized around his body, hovering at waist height, rotating with a slow, lazy drift like a planet in no particular hurry. And finally, the pen.
It appeared in his right hand. No flash of light, no dramatic flourish—one moment his fingers were empty, the next they were curled around a shaft of lacquered wood, slightly warm, no longer than his forearm. An ordinary pen. The kind a clerk might use. The kind the woman at Spirit Hall had probably used to fill out those standard loan forms beside her potted fern.
Ron opened his eyes and looked at it.
His spirit. His weapon, in the loosest possible interpretation. While his classmates had summoned blades and shields and hammers and, in one memorable case, an entire tortoise shell that the boy wore like armor, Ron had produced a writing instrument. The awakening examiner had stared at it for a long time before marking down the innate soul power—six—with the expression of a man trying to find something polite to say about an ugly baby.
Six was low. Functional, not remarkable. Enough to cultivate with effort. Not enough to attract investment from Spirit Hall's stipend program, which his mother had confirmed with a particular tightness in her jaw that Ron had learned to read as disappointment held under pressure.
But the pen had its uses.
He reached for the sheet of rice paper he'd brought home and spread it flat against the floorboards. The pen didn't require ink—another oddity that the awakening examiner had noted with furrowed brows. When the tip touched the paper, it left marks in a faint luminous gold, as though the pen were drawing with diluted sunlight.
His soul skill: Substrate Inscription. The formal name was grander than the application. He could write or draw on nearly any surface—paper, stone, metal, wood—and the marks held with a permanence that ordinary ink couldn't match. Rain didn't smudge them. Time didn't fade them. A merchant in the east quarter paid him two copper coins per sign for storefront lettering that would outlast the buildings themselves. A stonecutter near the river had hired him three times to inscribe memorial tablets. Small work. Steady.
And there was the other thing.
Ron began to write. School material first—Master Huo's lecture on spirit beast classification, which he'd absorbed despite his inattention through the strange mechanism that his pen had gifted him. The act of inscribing with his spirit wasn't merely recording. It was processing. Each stroke carved the information deeper into his mind, organized it, cross-referenced it against everything he already knew. When he finished a passage, he didn't just remember it—he understood it, the way a carpenter understood the wood grain beneath his plane.
The yellow ring pulsed gently as he worked.
He wrote for twenty minutes. Classification tiers. Habitat correlations. Bone age estimation methods for assessing spirit beast cultivation levels. The information arranged itself in his mind like books shelving themselves in a library he hadn't known he was building.
Then he stopped.
The pen hovered above the paper. A fresh section of rice paper gleamed in the faint glow of his spirit ring.
Ron thought about meditation.
The standard cultivation method taught at the academy was straightforward—circulate soul power through the body's meridian pathways in a prescribed pattern, drawing ambient spiritual energy inward, compressing it, layering it into the spirit core like sediment building stone. He'd practiced it nightly for five years. Progress was slow. Sixteen levels of soul power at age eleven placed him above average for the academy but firmly below the threshold of anyone who mattered.
The rotation pattern. He knew it the way he knew the water pump's trick handle—through repetition, through the muscle memory of a thousand sessions sitting cross-legged in this exact spot while his siblings breathed beside him. But knowing and understanding were different countries, and he'd been living in the first one without the second.
The pen touched the paper.
He began to draw the meditation cycle. Not as a diagram copied from a textbook—he'd done that before, and it had helped only marginally. This time he drew it as he felt it. The way soul power moved through his chest cavity, branching at the collarbone, sweeping down through the arms in twin currents before looping back through the wrists. The resistance point at the base of the skull where energy always seemed to eddy and stall. The strange warmth in his right hand where the pen manifested, as though the spirit had worn a groove in his meridian that energy naturally pooled within.
The pen moved faster. Golden lines spread across the rice paper in spiraling patterns that looked less like a technical diagram and more like a weather map—pressure systems and fronts and the invisible pattern of circulation that existed inside his own body but had never been seen before.
And then—
Something shifted.
Not in the room. In him. A click, almost audible, like a latch engaging. The diagram on the paper wasn't just a picture anymore. It was a mirror. He could see, with the analytical clarity that his pen always granted, the exact shape of his own cultivation cycle—and the inefficiencies within it.
There. The rotation at the solar plexus was too wide. Energy dissipated at the edges, spiraling outward instead of compressing inward. He'd been losing nearly a third of each cycle's gathered energy to simple geometric waste, the way water sprayed from a hose with a loose nozzle.
And there—the resistance at the skull base wasn't a natural bottleneck. It was a timing problem. He was pushing energy into the ascending channel before the descending channel had fully cleared, creating a backpressure that his body interpreted as a wall but was actually a traffic jam.
Ron stared at the diagram. The golden lines pulsed faintly, in time with his heartbeat.
He set the pen down. Closed his eyes. And began to meditate.
The rotation started the way it always did—the familiar pull of energy cycling through pathways he'd traveled a thousand times. But now he adjusted. Tightened the solar plexus loop, pulling the orbit inward by a fraction. Waited—one breath, two—before sending energy up the ascending channel, giving the descending pathway time to clear.
The difference was immediate.
Soul power moved through him faster. Not dramatically—no surge, no breakthrough, no cinematic rush of energy that would make a good scene in a novel. But the flow was cleaner. Smoother. Less energy lost to turbulence. More gathered, compressed, layered into his spirit core with each completed cycle.
He meditated for an hour. When he stopped, the improvement was modest but measurable—the kind of fractional gain that, compounded over weeks and months, might amount to something significant.
Or might not.
Ron opened his eyes. The rice paper lay before him, covered in golden spirals. Mei had rolled in her sleep and now lay with one small foot pressed against his knee. Through the flour-sack curtain, his father's snoring rose and fell.
He looked at the pen in his hand. Ordinary. Unremarkable. The kind of spirit that awakening examiners noted with careful politeness and quiet pity.
He looked at the diagram.
The pen vanished. The yellow ring faded. The room dimmed to near-darkness, lit only by the thin thread of moonlight that crept through the window latch he'd repaired with a chopstick splint.
Ron sat in the dark for a long time, thinking about stories, and whether the people inside them ever got to choose which kind of story they were in.
He didn't find an answer.
He folded the rice paper carefully, slid it beneath the loose floorboard where he kept his copper coins and his charcoal sticks, and lay down beside his sister.
Sleep came slowly, and brought no dreams at all.