The Soldier's Dao

Somewhere past the four hundredth squat, Han Muyang stopped counting in his own head and started counting in a language he hadn't spoken since the war — a rhythm of numbers meant less for tracking and more for giving the mind somewhere to stand while the body did something it didn't want to do.

The training yard had gone quiet in the specific way exhausted groups go quiet, no more grumbling, no more jokes, just the ragged percussion of sixty people breathing through their teeth. To his left, the heavyset boy who'd flexed his hands before the drill started had stopped moving somewhere around three hundred, folded over his knees, chest heaving, one of the instructors already stalking toward him with the flat, unhurried menace of a man about to make an example.

"Back to one," the instructor said, without malice, which somehow made it worse. "Everyone who stopped when he stopped. Back to one."

A ragged groan went up from perhaps a dozen disciples near the boy, the thin girl with the split lip among them. Han Muyang didn't stop moving. He hadn't stopped when the boy stopped — he'd clocked the exact moment the kid's rhythm had started to break, four or five reps before it actually happened, the same way Nathan Cole used to clock a man's grip loosening on a rope before his hands gave out, and had simply kept his own count running underneath the collapse instead of tangling himself in it.

*Different problem, same math,* he thought. *Don't fail because someone next to you failed. That's how you lose people who didn't have to be lost.*

Five hundred. His thighs had stopped burning somewhere back at three hundred and moved into a deeper, duller ache that his untrained body clearly wasn't built to sustain — a body that had, until yesterday, spent its life holding a writing brush and occasionally a training sword under some tutor's patient, unhurried instruction. It was not a soldier's body. It had never been asked to do this before, not really, not past the point where quitting was still an option.

*It'll learn,* he told it, silently, the way he'd once talked himself and others through the worst stretches of selection in a life and a war that belonged to someone he no longer had any right to call himself, back when quitting had been a door that stayed open the whole time and the only thing keeping it shut was deciding, over and over, not to walk through it. *Bodies learn. That's the whole secret. Nobody tells you the secret because the secret is just suffering long enough that the suffering changes what you're capable of.*

Six hundred. The girl with the split lip went down two rows over, not collapsing so much as simply stopping, folding to her knees in the dirt with the particular defeated stillness of someone who has run out of an argument with her own body. She didn't cry. Han Muyang noted that, distantly, and filed it the way he filed everything — *she's tougher than she looks, she just hit her actual wall* — and kept moving.

Meng Zhao, three rows ahead, near the front, had not broken stride once. His form hadn't degraded by a single visible degree since squat one — the same clean depth, the same controlled tempo, a metronome wearing a human shape. It wasn't talent alone doing that, Han Muyang understood, watching him between his own reps. It was years. Whatever else Meng Zhao was, he hadn't walked onto this mountain a stranger to suffering. He'd been doing this exact drill, or something like it, since he was old enough to stand.

*That's the real gap,* Han Muyang thought. *Not power. Time. He has years of this already banked. I have zero.*

It should have been discouraging. It wasn't, quite. A gap measured in time was a gap you could close, given enough of it. A gap measured in some inborn, unteachable gift would have been a different problem entirely, and a worse one. Somewhere behind his eyes, a career spent surrounded by men with more natural gift than he'd ever have supplied the rest of the thought without being asked: gift without hours behind it lost to hours without much gift more often than anyone wanted to admit.

Seven hundred. The instructor's count had gone hoarse. Behind him, someone finally broke — not from the count, from something quieter, a thin, hitching sound quickly swallowed — and he didn't turn to look, because turning to look cost tempo, and tempo was the only thing standing between him and joining the small crowd already back at zero.

Eight hundred came and went somewhere in a haze he mostly experienced from a distance, the way pain during a bad extraction had sometimes gone distant if you let it, not gone, just relocated somewhere your attention didn't have to live for a while.

Nine hundred, and his vision had gone a little grey at the edges, and some old, stubborn, unkillable part of him found that almost funny — that a body which had once run four miles with a gunshot wound rather than be the reason a team missed extraction was now nearly undone by a thousand squats in a training yard on a mountain in a world with no name he recognized.

One thousand.

The instructor called the count's end into a silence broken only by breathing, and Han Muyang straightened up out of the last rep on legs that no longer felt entirely like his own, ribs screaming their own separate protest, and found that he was, by a wide margin, not the strongest person left standing in that yard — Meng Zhao hadn't so much as broken a genuine sweat — but he was standing, on the first full day of a life he hadn't asked for, in a body that yesterday had been left for dead on this exact mountain.

"Rest," the instructor said, in the tone of a man doling out a mercy he didn't especially believe in. "You have until the sun clears the ridge. Then we do it again with the staff forms."

Around him, disciples dropped where they stood — onto the dirt, against the practice posts, some simply folding sideways into the nearest patch of shade. Han Muyang lowered himself down more carefully, respecting his still-cracked ribs, and found Lei Shan settling beside him, breathing hard but grinning in the particular way of someone who'd survived something together with a stranger and decided, provisionally, that the stranger might be worth knowing.

"You didn't restart once," Lei Shan said. "Not even when half the back row went down around you."

"Didn't see the point," Han Muyang said. "Somebody else's wall isn't mine."

Lei Shan gave him that look again — the odd, assessing one, the one that said *you say things a seventeen-year-old from a fallen clan wouldn't usually say* — and didn't push it, same as before.

Across the yard, still catching his breath in the shade of a practice post, the heavyset boy who'd broken first met Han Muyang's eyes for a moment, and there was something raw and unhappy in his expression that Han Muyang recognized instantly and completely: not anger, not really. Shame. The specific, corrosive shame of having been the reason others suffered.

Han Muyang held his gaze a second longer than necessary and gave him the smallest possible nod — not forgiveness, exactly, because there was nothing to forgive, but acknowledgment, the kind soldiers once gave each other after a bad exercise, the unspoken *it happens, get up, we go again* that cost nothing and sometimes mattered more than anyone expected.

The boy's shoulders came down half an inch. Small thing. Han Muyang filed it away with everything else, because in a world with no system to tell him what mattered, filing things away himself was the only ledger he had — and he intended, one thousand squats and one staff form and one small, unspoken kindness at a time, to make sure it balanced in his favor.

The sun was not far from the ridge now. Somewhere below it, the day's second lesson was waiting, indifferent to how tired anyone already was.

Han Muyang got back to his feet before he was told to.

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