The Soldier's Dao

The Skyreach Sword Sect occupied the upper third of a mountain that took most of a day to climb and had, according to the disciple assigned to walk him up it, killed nine people over the last decade who'd simply misjudged the weather.

"You're lucky Elder Bai carried you the first stretch," the boy said. He introduced himself as Lei Shan, a second-year outer disciple with the specific, slightly exhausted friendliness of someone whose job this month was babysitting new intake. "She doesn't do that for just anyone. Normally new disciples who show up half-dead just... don't show up."

"Noted," Nathan said, and meant it in a way Lei Shan couldn't have understood.

He spent the climb doing what he always did in unfamiliar terrain: cataloguing. Sightlines. Chokepoints. Who moved with confidence and who moved with fear. The mountain path was lined, every few hundred feet, with disciples in the same grey-and-pale-blue robes, some training forms in the open air with a discipline that would've impressed him even six months ago, some simply hauling water, hauling stone, hauling firewood — and every single one of them, without exception, gave Lei Shan's group a wide, unconscious berth.

Hierarchy enforced by fear, not just respect, he noted. Good to know. Every hierarchy like that has fracture lines.

The outer disciple quarters were a long, low compound of shared rooms, thin blankets, and the smell of woodsmoke and boiled grain. Lei Shan showed him a bunk, a training yard, a well, and a shrine to some founder whose statue's face had worn nearly smooth from centuries of rain.

"Tomorrow you start at dawn," Lei Shan said. "Physical conditioning first. Everyone starts there — doesn't matter what your family background is, doesn't matter what talent you tested at. You want qi in your meridians, you earn a body that can hold it first. Some people wash out at conditioning alone. It's brutal."

Nathan thought about eleven years of mornings that started before dawn, about a body pushed past what it thought its limits were on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, about learning — the hard way, more than once — exactly how much a human frame could be asked to do before it broke, and exactly how much further it could go if the mind refused to let it break.

"I can work with brutal," he said.

Lei Shan gave him an odd look — the first time, though not the last, that someone in this world would look at Han Muyang and sense something underneath the surface that didn't match the story. "You're strange, you know that? Everyone else who nearly dies on entry day spends the first week crying into their blanket."

"I already did my crying," Nathan said, which was true, and old, and had nothing to do with the mountain or the sword or any of it. "A while ago. Somewhere else."

He didn't explain. Lei Shan didn't push.

That night, lying on a bunk too short for a body that wasn't originally his, ribs wrapped in cloth by a sect physician who'd sniffed and said he'll live, he's tougher than he looks, half these idiots would've died from that beating, Nathan Cole stared at a ceiling in a world that had no name for the country he'd died defending, and made himself a promise with the same flat, unemotional certainty he'd once made every promise that mattered.

No one here is going to hand me anything. No system, no shortcut, nobody owes me an explanation for how any of this works.

Fine. I've built worse things out of less. I'm still standing. That's the whole job.

Somewhere down the mountain, in a family home he hadn't seen yet and didn't know if he was ready to, a Han Clan servant girl and Han Muyang's mother were kneeling in front of a shrine, praying to ancestors for word from the sect. Nathan didn't know that yet either.

He'd learn. He had, it turned out, a great deal of time to learn everything, one brutal lesson at a time — and unlike the eleven years that came before, this time, for reasons he didn't understand and hadn't asked for, he'd been given a second morning to wake up into.

He intended to make it count.

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