My dao to eternity

Li Fan looked down at his hands. Both palms were scraped raw, dirt ground into the cuts, and a long tear ran down the sleeve of his jacket where a branch had caught him during the run. His knee throbbed where he'd hit the stone floor back at the dig site, and every muscle in his back ached from crouching low through the ferns.

He had nothing. No phone, no food, no map, no way to signal for help. What he had was a title burning behind his eyes and a set of stances he'd never practiced a day in his life.

If the sutra was real — if it had actually kept him alive back in that clearing — then it was the only asset he had. Everything else could wait. He got to his feet, boots scraping against the dirt floor of the alcove, and squared his shoulders the way the first stance required.

The movement in his mind was clean and exact, every angle mapped down to the degree. His body wasn't.

He tried to plant his feet the way the sutra showed him — weight low, knees bent at a sharp angle that pulled directly against muscles he didn't know he had — and his balance tipped sideways almost immediately. He caught himself against the cave wall, palm scraping against rough stone, and swore under his breath.

He reset. Tried again.

The second attempt went a little further before his front leg buckled and he dropped hard onto one knee, jarring pain up through his kneecap. His arms, meant to sweep wide and then snap forward in one motion, moved in two disconnected pieces instead — a stiff swing followed by a delayed jerk that had nothing to do with the fluid strike the sutra described.

He wasn't built for this. Not yet. His joints were mortal joints, stiff from years of manual labor that had never asked them to bend like this, and his body kept defaulting to what it already knew instead of what the sutra was trying to teach it.

He stood back up anyway.

There wasn't a version of this world where he survived without getting stronger. He'd seen that much already — a tiger the size of a truck, a scorpion big enough to crush a car, both of them completely indifferent to whether a rootless mortal from Blue Star happened to be standing nearby. If the Primordial Stances were the only thing standing between him and becoming something's next meal, then he'd run them until his body stopped fighting him.

He planted his feet again. Reset his stance. Moved.

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The burn started in his thighs first, a deep, dragging soreness that spread with every repetition, then climbed into his shoulders as he forced his arms through the wide, sweeping arcs the sutra demanded. He stumbled. Reset. Stumbled again. Each fall scraped another patch of skin off his palms or knees, and each time, he pushed himself back up without stopping to check the damage.

Sweat ran down the side of his face despite the cold air in the alcove, soaking through the collar of his jacket. His breath came ragged, sawing in and out of his chest, but he kept his eyes shut, letting the golden text guide each motion even as his body lagged a half-second behind it.

The stances shifted in rhythm without warning — long stretches of slow, deliberate movement suddenly breaking into sharp, explosive thrusts that snapped his whole body forward before easing back into the drawn-out sweep of the next form. He adjusted for it clumsily at first, overcorrecting, throwing himself off balance more than once. But each time he ran the sequence again, the transition came a little smoother, his limbs catching the shift a beat sooner than the last time.

He lost track of how many times he cycled through the full sequence. The cave around him blurred into the background — the cold stone smell, the dry dust underfoot, the faint gray light through the alcove entrance — all of it fading beneath the singular effort of forcing his body to match the shape in his mind. His thoughts narrowed down to nothing but the next stance, and the one after that, and the one after that.

His arms shook. His legs burned with every drop into the low stance. Somewhere in the haze of repetition, the sharp edges of exhaustion dulled into something almost automatic, his body running the forms without him consciously steering each motion anymore.

Then his stomach let out a hollow, violent growl that cut straight through the silence of the alcove.

Li Fan froze mid-stance, one arm still extended, and the spell of focus shattered all at once. The full weight of his exhaustion crashed down on him in a single wave — legs trembling, arms leaden, sweat cooling fast against his skin in the cold cave air. He staggered, caught himself against the stone wall, and sank down onto the dirt floor, chest heaving.

He hadn't eaten anything since the dumplings his mother packed, and those had vanished along with everything else he'd been carrying. His stomach growled again, louder this time, and Li Fan let his head fall back against the rock behind him.

Training wouldn't matter if he starved before it did any good.

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