Hollow Spirit

[Durolord]

The deploy was scheduled for three in the morning because that was when the fewest people would notice it breaking.

He had made that argument himself, two weeks ago, in a meeting where everyone else had been too tired to disagree. Now it was 2:41 a.m., the office was dark apart from his corner, and he was the one still awake to watch it.

Two monitors. A cold mug of coffee with a skin on it. A third energy drink he had promised himself he wouldn't open, open. The build pipeline crawled across the left screen in green, green, green, yellow.

Don't you dare.

Yellow became green. He let out a breath and rubbed his chest, where a dull pressure had been sitting since around midnight. Heartburn. Twelve days of crunch, takeaway noodles and caffeine would do that. He made a mental note to buy antacids, the way he had made a mental note to see a doctor about the dizzy spells in March, and to go to the gym in January, and to call his mum back.

His phone lay face up beside the keyboard. One missed call from Mum, 7:12 p.m. One message under it.

Sunday dinner? Your dad's making jollof. Bring a coat, it's cold.

He had read it at 7:13 and thought, After the release. Which was what he had thought about the last three Sundays.

He picked the phone up and typed with one thumb: Yes. Promise. I'll bring the coat.

He didn't press send. The pipeline had stopped.

Red.

"No, no, no. Come on." He leaned in, scrolling. A migration script had timed out against the production database. Not failed, timed out, which meant it might have half-run, which meant—

The pressure in his chest turned into a hand and squeezed.

It was so sudden that for a second he only felt confused. Then the pain went down his left arm like someone had pulled a wire through it, and the room tilted. He tried to stand. His knee hit the desk, the mug went over, and cold coffee ran across the keyboard and dripped onto the carpet.

That's the keyboard gone, he thought, very clearly, and then he was on the floor.

The carpet smelled of dust and old coffee. From down here he could see the underside of the desk, a wad of grey gum someone had stuck there years ago, and the blue glow of the monitor spilling over the edge. His phone had landed a little way from his hand. He could see the draft still sitting there, unsent.

Just press it.

His fingers moved, but not far enough.

The air conditioning hummed. Somewhere in the building a lift chimed for nobody. On the screen above him, the terminal cursor blinked, waiting for an answer he wasn't going to give it.

The last thing he thought was not anything brave. It was: She's going to find out from my manager.

Then the blue light went out, the way a screen goes out when nobody touches it for long enough.

---

Warm.

That was the first thing. Not warm like a heater, but warm everywhere at once, and close, and moving.

The second thing was noise. A muffled thumping, slow and steady, somewhere very near. Voices, low and blurred, as if they were coming through water.

The third thing was that he couldn't move. He tried, and something that might have been an arm twitched the wrong way.

Hospital, he decided. Heart attack. I'm in a hospital, and they've sedated me, and this is what drugs feel like.

It was a reasonable theory. It lasted until the warm place squeezed, hard, and kept squeezing, and then there was light, and cold, and someone held him upside down and he screamed in a voice that was much too high and could not stop.

He spent the next few hours testing other theories.

Coma dream: possible, but the details were too boring. Nobody dreams about being wiped down with a rough cloth that smells of boiled water and woodsmoke.

Simulation: he'd read enough to give it a fair hearing. But the bugs were wrong. A simulation would get the big things right and the small things wrong, and here the small things were relentless. The rasp of straw under a blanket. A draught from somewhere on his left. The ache of a body that had worked very hard to be born.

Afterlife: he had not expected the afterlife to involve this much crying, most of it his own.

The fourth theory was the one he kept circling away from, because it was the one he had read about a few hundred times in the dead hours of the night, on his phone, under covers, scrolling chapter after chapter of people who died and woke up somewhere else.

No, he thought. That's fiction. Those are web novels. That's not a thing that happens to a web developer with a cardiac problem in an office.

A woman's face leaned over him, too close and too blurry to make out. Dark hair, damp with sweat, falling over one shoulder. She said something soft in a language he didn't know. Her voice was tired and smiling at the same time.

Then she lifted him against her chest, and the slow thumping he had heard in the dark was right there under his ear again.

He stopped crying. He didn't decide to. His body did it on its own, the way a body knows things before the mind has finished arguing.

Okay, he thought, as sleep pulled him down whether he liked it or not. Okay. We'll figure it out tomorrow.

---

He figured out very little the next day, or the next month.

Babies, it turned out, were terrible at research. His eyes wouldn't focus past an arm's length. His neck couldn't hold up his head. He fell asleep in the middle of thoughts and woke up hungry, wet, or both, with no memory of where the thought had been going. Twenty-six years of being a functional adult, and now the most complex task he could complete was grabbing a finger.

He grabbed a lot of fingers. It seemed to make people happy.

The woman was his mother. That much was obvious by the second week. She fed him, carried him, sang to him in a low, slightly off-key voice while she worked. She smelled of herbs: something bitter and green, something sweet, and smoke underneath it all.

The man took longer to place, because he was there less. He came home in the evenings smelling of sap and sawdust, washed his hands in a basin by the door, and only then picked the baby up, carefully, as if he might break if held wrong. He was big and quiet, with hands like rough bark. He didn't sing. He would sit on a low stool by the fire with the baby on his knee and say a few words now and then, and look at him for a long time.

Their names were the first words he learned to pick out, because they used them all day.

Lin Shan. The man.

Su Wan. The woman.

And the word they used for him, over and over, in every tone from crooning to exasperated: Lin Jin.

Lin Jin, he repeated to himself. It felt like someone else's name. He supposed it would stop feeling like that eventually.

---

The first year went in pieces.

Learning to roll over, and being absurdly proud of it. Learning that the house had one main room, a sleeping corner behind a hung cloth, a hearth, a table his father had made, and a door that let in a cold that cut through the gaps in winter. Learning that the village outside was small: a few dozen houses, mud and timber, fields on one side and a dark line of trees on the other. Learning the language one word at a time, with a programmer's attention to patterns. Verbs here, nouns there. A tone that turned a statement into a question. A whole set of words his mother used only for herbs.

He learned that they were poor, and careful about it. Meat twice a month. Shoes mended until there was more patch than shoe. His mother sold herbs and mended clothes for other villagers; his father cut wood and sold it in town. Neither job paid much. Both of them came home tired and still found time to hold him.

He hadn't expected that to hurt.

It came at night, mostly. When the fire burned down and his parents' breathing evened out behind the cloth, and the dark was quiet enough for him to think in full sentences.

His mum would have found out by now. The phone call from his manager, or worse, from the police. His dad standing in the kitchen with the pot of jollof still on the stove. His sister, who had been nagging him for months to "take a weekend, please, you look like a ghost on video calls," hearing it and going very still.

He had been going to go on Sunday.

He lay in a cot in another world with his small, useless fists balled up, and cried as quietly as a baby can, which isn't very. Su Wan woke, came out in the dark, and picked him up without saying anything, and swayed with him by the cold hearth until he stopped.

She didn't know what she was comforting him for. She did it anyway.

She's not my mum, he thought, his face pressed into her shoulder.

And then, a long time later, almost asleep: She's someone's mum. She's mine now, I suppose.

He didn't know what to do with that thought, so he left it where it was.

---

By two, he could walk, talk in short sentences, and pass as a clever child rather than a terrifying one, as long as he was careful.

Being careful was harder than it sounded. The urge to explain things was constant. Once, at the dinner table, his father mentioned that the cart wheel kept slipping, and Lin Jin very nearly told him about the axle being out of alignment, with diagrams. He caught himself and said, "Wheel broken?" instead, and Lin Shan nodded seriously and said, "Mm. Broken," and that was the end of it.

His mother thought he was bright. His father thought he was quiet. The neighbours thought he was a strange little boy who stared at things too long. Nobody thought he was a twenty-six-year-old man from another world, which he considered a win.

There was one problem with being a twenty-six-year-old man from another world, though, and it got worse the more he understood about this one.

He was useless.

He had read the stories. Hundreds of them. People who died and woke up in a fantasy world, a cultivation world, a historical court, and immediately set about changing everything. They introduced crop rotation. They made soap. They knew which rocks had iron in them, how to make gunpowder, how to set a broken bone, how to build a printing press from scratch, and why you should boil water before drinking it. They walked into the past and dragged it forward a century with sheer competence.

Lin Jin watched his father fight with a broken axe handle one evening and realised, with growing horror, that he did not know how to make a better one.

He did not know how to make soap. He knew roughly that it involved fat and something called lye, and he could not have told anyone what lye was made of to save his life. He did not know how to find iron ore. He knew how to boil water, which put him ahead of nobody, because everyone in the village already boiled water.

He knew how to do React. He knew a decent amount of SQL. He could set up a CI pipeline that deployed at three in the morning, and look where that had got him.

He knew how to get across a big city at night, where the safe streets were, how to read a bus timetable and when to cross on a red light. He knew which energy drink was least terrible. He knew how to beat most of the Soulsborne games without summoning help, and he had strong opinions about which bosses were badly designed.

None of it was any use here. There were no buses. There was no electricity. The nearest thing to a computer was the village elder's abacus.

All those people in the stories, he thought, lying awake one night, must have studied for this. Some engineer or history student somewhere who had read up on blacksmithing just in case. And he had read their stories, laughed at the idea, and gone back to work.

He'd never thought it was real. That was the whole point of reading it.

"You're frowning again," his mother said the next morning, tying a cloth around his hair to keep it out of his eyes. "What is a little boy thinking about so hard?"

"Soap," said Lin Jin, before he could stop himself.

Su Wan stared at him, then laughed until she had to sit down. She told the story to three neighbours that afternoon. For a month after that, the old woman next door greeted him with "Ah, the soap scholar," and he decided that the best response was to stop thinking out loud.

---

He was three when the world told him where he was.

It wasn't dramatic. That was what got to him later. There was no glowing sign, no old man appearing to explain his destiny. It was a market day, and he was sitting on a bundle of firewood at the side of the road while his father haggled over the price of a load with a man from the next village.

The man was in a talkative mood.

"Did you hear?" he said. "The deacon from the Spirit Hall is coming through again in a few years. Same as last time. He'll do the awakenings at Holy Spirit Village, and maybe here too, if the numbers are worth his while."

"Mm," said Lin Shan.

"My eldest's coming up on six by then. I keep telling the wife, if he's got a martial spirit worth anything, if he's got even a little spirit power, that's it. Spirit Master in the family. We'd never chop wood again."

"Mm," said Lin Shan, and pointed at the bundle with his chin. "Three coppers."

Lin Jin had stopped listening to the price.

Spirit Hall.

Martial spirit.

Holy Spirit Village.

The words were in the local language, but his brain translated them for him without being asked, the way it had learned to translate everything else. And on the other side of that translation was a set of names he had read so many times that he could have recited them in his sleep.

Spirit Hall. Martial spirits. Spirit Masters. Awakening at six. Holy Spirit Village, outside Notting City, where a blacksmith drank himself into the ground and his son made hidden weapons in secret.

No way.

He sat very still on his bundle of firewood, a three-year-old with his feet not touching the ground, and felt the world reorganise itself around him.

"Jin'er?" His father had finished. He was looking down at him with his usual mild expression, the bundle sold and three coppers in his palm. "Tired?"

"Papa," said Lin Jin carefully, "what's a martial spirit?"

Lin Shan thought about it. He was a man who thought about things before he said them, which Lin Jin had come to appreciate.

"When you're six," he said at last, "someone from the Spirit Hall comes. They do a ceremony. Something comes out of you. A tool, or an animal, or a plant. That's your martial spirit." He paused. "Most of the time it's useless. Mine's a woodcutter's axe. Good for wood." He hefted the empty carrying frame onto his back. "Sometimes it's something more. Then you can cultivate. Become a Spirit Master. Very strong."

"Like a hero?"

His father shrugged. "Like a lord," he said, and from the way he said it, Lin Jin understood that in this village those were not the same thing.

They walked home together along the dirt road, with the trees on one side and the fields on the other. Lin Shan carried the frame. Lin Jin carried a much bigger thing on the inside, and tried not to trip over it.

---

That night, after his parents slept, he made a list.

He didn't have paper. He didn't have a pen. He lay on his back in his small bed behind the cloth and built it in his head, line by line, the way he would have written a spec.

Known facts.

One. This is Douluo Dalu. Soul Land. Probably the first one, because the Spirit Hall's still in charge and nobody's mentioned anything from the sequels.

Two. Holy Spirit Village is close. Which means Tang San is close. Or will be. He tried to remember the timeline. Tang San had been reborn as a baby too. Same generation. If Lin Jin was three now, Tang San was somewhere around three, maybe a little younger, maybe a little older, living with a drunken father in a smithy a few hours' walk away.

Three. Awakening at six. Spirit power measured with a crystal ball. Innate full spirit power is the jackpot. Most kids get nothing.

Four. Spirit rings come from killing spirit beasts. The older the beast, the stronger the ring, and the more likely it is to kill you when you absorb it.

Five. The world gets very, very dangerous later. Wars. Title Douluo. Gods.

He'd read the first book from start to finish twice, and the second one once, staying up far too late on work nights, telling himself one more chapter. He knew the shape of the third and fourth from wikis and arguments in comment sections, and not much more. And under all of that sat a much bigger pile of fanfiction, where Tang San was a hero or a villain or a background extra, where the Spirit Hall was evil or misunderstood, where Xiao Wu lived or died or ran off with someone else.

That was the problem with the pile. He couldn't always tell which memories were canon and which were somebody's fanfic from three years ago.

Unknown facts, he added, and that list was longer.

Why am I here. Whether I'll have a martial spirit at all. Whether it's any good. Whether my being here has already changed something. Whether anything I remember is still true.

He lay there and stared at the dark underside of the roof.

There was a version of this, he knew, where he played it safe. Where he grew up, awakened some ordinary spirit, became a woodcutter like his father or a herbalist like his mother, married someone from the next village and stayed far away from the main characters and their wars. He would live a quiet life in a corner of the map and never come anywhere near the plot.

It was a perfectly good plan. Lots of people in lots of stories had chosen it.

He thought about the office floor. About the carpet against his cheek and the blue light going out above him. About the unsent message.

I spent twenty-six years being careful, he thought. Saving it for later. After the release. After this project. After I'm more senior.

Later had turned out to be a very small window.

In this world, later had teeth. War was coming, he knew that much, and the people who were weak when it came would be swept away with everything else. The Spirit Hall did not care about woodcutters. Neither did Title Douluo, or ten-thousand-year spirit beasts, or whatever came after them.

And on the other side of all that danger was everything the books had promised: rings of light, power that could move mountains, people who lived for centuries, people who became gods.

If I'm going to be here, he thought, I'm not going to be a background extra.

It felt a bit stupid to think it. He was three. He couldn't reach the shelf where his mother kept the salt.

He thought it anyway.

Strength first. Everything else after. And then, because he had been a gamer far longer than he had been a three-year-old: Okay. So how do we grind as a toddler?

---

The answer, he found out over the next few weeks, was badly.

He tried meditating, because every cultivation novel he'd ever read started with meditation. He sat cross-legged in the corner, closed his eyes and tried to sense the energy of heaven and earth.

He sensed that his legs had gone numb.

He tried running, and fell over. He tried doing push-ups, and managed one and a half before his arms gave out and he faceplanted into the dirt floor. Su Wan found him like that and asked if he was hunting for beetles.

"Training," he told her, with as much dignity as he could manage with dirt on his nose.

"For what?"

"For when I'm six."

She crouched down in front of him, wiped his face with her sleeve, and looked at him with an expression he couldn't read: half amused, half something else.

"You want to be a Spirit Master," she said.

He nodded.

"Most children don't get to be," she said, gently, as if breaking bad news. "Your father didn't. I didn't. That's all right. It's not something you can train for."

Watch me, he thought. Out loud, he said, "I know. I want to be ready anyway."

Su Wan was quiet for a moment. Then she smiled, the tired, warm smile he'd first seen through baby eyes, and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear.

"Then eat your dinner," she said. "Spirit Masters don't get strong on beetles."

He ate his dinner. It was thin vegetable soup with half an egg in it, and his father had quietly put the other half in his bowl too.

---

That night it rained, and the roof leaked in the corner where it always leaked, and his father got up in the dark to put a bowl under the drip. Lin Jin listened to the plink of water and the low murmur of his parents' voices through the cloth. He couldn't make out the words. He didn't need to. They were talking about him, about whether he was eating enough, about the cost of a new pair of shoes before winter, about whether the herbs would sell this week.

Somewhere a few hours' walk away, a boy who would become a god was asleep in a smithy, beside a father who drank to forget.

Somewhere much farther away, in a city of white stone, a woman with a cold voice sat on a throne and made plans for the continent.

And somewhere very far away, in a world with traffic lights and pipelines and Sunday dinners, a mother had buried her son.

Lin Jin lay in the dark and counted on his fingers, the way a three-year-old would.

Four. Five. Six.

Three more years. That was how long he had before the world would reveal what he had been given.

 

[Durolord]

His sister arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm, which Lin Jin felt was a bit much.

He was four. He had been sent next door to the old woman's house, the one who still called him "the soap scholar", and told to sit still and stay out of the way. He sat still for about an hour. Then the screaming from across the lane got loud enough to hear over the rain, and he stopped sitting still and started pacing, which in a four-year-old body meant walking in a tight circle around the old woman's table until she told him he was making her dizzy.

"Your mother's done this before," she said, threading a needle by the light of the fire without looking at it. "She'll do it again. Sit."

He sat. He stood up again.

Nothing about this is safe, he thought. No hospital. No doctor. No antibiotics. The midwife is a woman who also sells eggs. He knew, in the vague way he knew everything useful, that births in places like this went wrong. He'd read the statistics once, scrolling past an article at two in the morning. He hadn't kept the numbers. He wished, quite badly, that he had.

The screaming stopped.

The silence was worse. He was halfway to the door when a new sound cut through the rain, thin and furious and very much alive.

The old woman put down her needle. "There," she said. "Go on, then."

He ran across the lane through the mud with the rain plastering his hair to his head. His father was standing in the doorway, enormous and soaked and looking more frightened than Lin Jin had ever seen him. When Lin Shan saw him, his face did something complicated, and then he crouched down and picked his son up, mud and all.

"A girl," he said. That was all. His voice was rough.

Behind him, by the fire, Su Wan lay propped against a pile of folded blankets, grey with exhaustion and smiling. In her arms was a red, wrinkled, extremely angry bundle.

"Come here," she said. "Come and meet her."

Lin Shan set him down. He walked over slowly, dripping on the floor, and looked.

He had been an uncle, once. In the other life. His older sister's boy, who he'd held exactly twice at family gatherings before handing him back as fast as was polite. Babies had always made him nervous. They were so obviously breakable.

This one opened her eyes, which were dark and unfocused and wet, and looked roughly in his direction.

"Her name's Nuan," Su Wan said. "Lin Nuan. Warmth. Because she came on a cold night."

"Hi," Lin Jin said, which was not very profound.

The baby sneezed.

Something in his chest went tight. It wasn't the same squeeze as the office, but it was close enough that he noticed. He reached out and touched one tiny, curled hand, and the fingers closed around his, with a strength out of all proportion to their size.

Okay, he thought. Okay. This one's mine.

It was the first time anything in this world had felt like his. Not borrowed, not on loan from someone else's story. He stood there with rainwater running down his back and his sister holding his finger, and decided that he would rather die than let anything happen to her.

He had died once already. It turned out that didn't make the thought any less frightening.

* * *
​

The training started the week after.

He'd been doing what he could since he was three: push-ups against the wall, running in circles behind the house, holding a stick out at arm's length until his shoulders burned. But after Nuan came, it stopped being a hobby. He started getting up before dawn, while the house was still dark, slipping out past the cloth and the sleeping baby to the patch of ground between the woodpile and the trees.

He didn't have a sword. He had a broken axe handle his father had thrown on the kindling pile, about the right length for a four-year-old, and a memory full of swordplay from games, anime and two very ambitious weeks of a sword-fighting class at university that he had quit because it clashed with a lecture.

He swung the axe handle. He swung it again. He tried to remember how people in fight scenes stood: feet apart, knees bent, weight forward. He tried a spinning slash he remembered from a game, overbalanced and sat down hard in the dirt.

"That," said a voice from the trees, "is how you get your own guts on the ground."

Lin Jin scrambled up.

A man was leaning on the fence at the edge of the trees, a stack of kindling under one arm. He was old, or at least older than Lin Jin's father, with grey cropped hair and a face like a fist that had been in a lot of other fists. A long scar ran from his left ear to the corner of his jaw. He walked with a stiff right leg.

Lin Jin knew him. Everyone in Yuhuo knew him, in the way you know the village's one strange neighbour. Qin Han lived alone in a hut at the far end of the lane, kept to himself, paid for his food in coin nobody could quite explain, and had been, depending on who you asked, a soldier, a bandit, a bodyguard or a mercenary. The children dared each other to touch his gate. The adults nodded to him and didn't ask.

"Sorry," Lin Jin said. "I'll go somewhere else."

"Didn't tell you to go." Qin Han looked at the axe handle. "What's that meant to be?"

"A sword."

"It's a stick."

"It's a sword stick."

The old man's mouth twitched. It might have been the start of a smile. It didn't get any further.

"Hold it out," he said.

Lin Jin held it out.

"Elbow's wrong. Grip's wrong. Feet are wrong. You're standing like you want to dance." Qin Han set the kindling down on the fence post. "Who taught you?"

Several video games and a sword class I quit, Lin Jin thought. "Nobody."

"Shows." Qin Han limped through the gap in the fence, took the stick out of his hands without asking, and put it back in them a different way. His palms were hard and dry, like old leather. He nudged Lin Jin's back foot out with his boot, pressed one knee down with two fingers, and pushed his shoulders square.

"There. Now swing. Not like that. You're not chopping wood, you're not your father. From here." He tapped Lin Jin's hip. "Swing from here."

Lin Jin swung from there. It felt completely different, heavier, like the whole of him was behind it.

"Again."

He did it again.

"Again."

By the time the sun came over the trees, he had swung the stick about two hundred times, his arms were shaking, and Qin Han had said nothing more encouraging than "Again" and, once, "Less wrong."

"Why?" the old man asked finally, picking his kindling up again.

"Why what?"

"Why's a woodcutter's boy out here at dawn, swinging a stick like his life depends on it?"

Lin Jin thought about lying. Then he thought about Nuan's fingers around his.

"Because one day it might," he said.

Qin Han looked at him for a long moment. He had very pale eyes, almost grey. They didn't give anything away.

"Same time tomorrow," he said, and limped off down the lane.

* * *
​

Same time tomorrow became every day.

Qin Han never called it lessons. He called it "not watching you hurt yourself", and he never once said Lin Jin was doing well. What he said was "less wrong", and on one memorable occasion, "that wouldn't have got you killed straight away". Lin Jin learned to treasure that one.

He learned stances. He learned footwork, which Qin Han cared about more than anything else ("A fool with feet beats a swordsman without them"). He learned that a real cut came through the target, not at it, and that his wrists were the weakest part of him and would stay that way for years. He learned to fall without breaking anything. He learned what it felt like to have a stick rapped across his knuckles every time he dropped his guard, which was often.

He did not learn anything about Qin Han.

He tried, sometimes. "Were you a soldier?" got a grunt. "Did you fight spirit beasts?" got a longer silence and then, "Some." "Where did you get the scar?" got "Asked too many questions," which Lin Jin chose to take as a joke.

Once, after a session where Lin Jin had finally managed to block three strikes in a row, the old man sat down on the woodpile and rubbed his bad leg, and said, without being asked, "Had a spirit once. Knife. Not a good one. Seven, eight levels of spirit power, never got any higher. Good for cutting rope." He looked out at the trees. "Wasn't enough. That's the thing you want to know, boy. Wasn't enough."

Lin Jin waited for more. There wasn't any.

"Again," Qin Han said, and got up.

* * *
​

At home, nobody asked where he went in the mornings for almost a month. Then his mother found the blisters.

It was bath night, which in their house meant a wooden tub of warm water in front of the fire and a lot of protesting. Su Wan took his hands to scrub them and stopped.

"What," she said, very calmly, "is this?"

His palms were a mess: blisters on blisters, some burst and raw, the skin at the base of his fingers rubbed into hard pads.

"Training," he said.

"With what? A rock?"

"With Uncle Qin."

His mother's face went through about five expressions very quickly. Lin Jin watched them like a weather forecast: surprise, suspicion, worry, anger, and then something thoughtful that he didn't know how to read.

"Qin Han," she said. "At the end of the lane."

"He's teaching me the sword."

"He's teaching a four-year-old the sword."

"Four and a half."

Su Wan breathed out through her nose. Behind her, his father had looked up from mending a basket by the hearth. Nuan, three months old, was asleep in a box lined with old blankets, oblivious.

"Shan," his mother said, without turning round.

"Mm," said Lin Shan.

"Your son is learning to fight from the village mercenary."

Lin Shan put the basket down. He looked at his son for a long time, the same long look he always gave things he was working out. Then he got up, came over, and took one of Lin Jin's blistered hands in his own enormous one and turned it over.

"Hurts?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Going to stop?"

Lin Jin met his eyes. "No."

His father nodded slowly, as if that was the answer he'd expected. He let go of the hand and looked at Su Wan.

"He's a good man," he said. "Qin Han. Quiet. Doesn't drink." From his father, that was practically a speech. He went back to his stool and picked up the basket.

Su Wan looked at her husband. She looked at her son. Then she sighed, reached for the clay pot of salve she kept on the shelf, and started rubbing it into his palms, hard enough to sting.

"If you lose a finger," she said, "I'm not sewing it back on."

"You could, though."

"I could," she agreed. "I'm very good. Hold still."

The salve smelled of bitter green leaves and something like mint. She'd taught him the name of the plant the year before. He'd forgotten it. He felt bad about that, suddenly, and asked her again.

She told him. She told him what it was good for, where it grew, what it looked like before it flowered. And over the next two years, a lot of his evenings went the same way: his hands in his mother's lap, and the names of plants going into his head one by one while she worked salve into the newest blisters.

He didn't forget those.

* * *
​

Holy Spirit Village was a long morning's walk to the north, past a ridge and a stream. People from Yuhuo went there sometimes for the market, or for the blacksmith when their own tools broke, though the blacksmith, everyone agreed, was not what he used to be.

"Drinks," the old woman next door said darkly, sorting beans. "All day and all night. Shame. He used to do good work."

"He has a son," her friend said. "Little thing, about your Jin's age. Quiet. Does most of the work in that forge himself, people say."

"Poor child."

Lin Jin kept sorting beans and kept his face very still.

Tang San.

He'd known, of course. He'd worked it out on the night he made his list. But knowing it in the abstract was different from sitting at a table while two old women gossiped about him like he was any other unlucky kid down the road. A few hours' walk away, a boy with the soul of a Tang Sect master was hammering iron in a smithy, beside a father who was secretly one of the strongest people on the continent.

And his father would kill me without blinking, Lin Jin thought, if I gave him a reason.

That was the first thing he'd decided about Tang San, years ago: don't go near him. Not yet. Not as a small, weak child with no spirit and no idea how much of what he remembered was still true. In every version of the story he'd ever read, that smithy had Tang Hao in it. The fanfics disagreed about almost everything else, but they agreed that the Clear Sky Douluo did not like people taking an interest in his son.

So when his father went to Holy Spirit Village for a new axe head, Lin Jin asked to stay home. When the village children talked about walking up to the ridge to look at the smithy smoke, he found reasons not to go. It felt cowardly. It also felt like the single most sensible decision he'd made in two lifetimes.

Later, he told himself. We'll meet later. When I'm worth meeting.

He tried not to notice how much that sounded like after the release.

* * *
​

He turned six in the spring, and the awakening stopped being far off and became something he couldn't stop thinking about.

It got into everything. He would be swinging a stick for Qin Han and suddenly wonder what would happen if his spirit was a hoe. He would be helping his mother sort roots and imagine the crystal ball staying dark. He would be bouncing Nuan on his knee, now a solid, giggling two-year-old who had learned exactly one word that she used for him, which was "Ge", and he would think: What if I have nothing? What then?

He made lists in his head, the way he always did when he was frightened.

Worst case: no spirit at all. Or a useless one, like a farming tool or a plant. He thought about Blue Silver Grass, the most common, most useless spirit on the continent, and felt slightly sick. Tang San's had turned out to be the Blue Silver Emperor in disguise, but Tang San was Tang San. I'm a web developer.

Bad case: a spirit, but no spirit power. Can't cultivate. Basically the same as worst case, with extra disappointment.

Average case: a decent spirit, low spirit power. A few levels. Maybe Spirit Master eventually, if I'm lucky and work hard. Not enough for what's coming. Qin Han's knife.

Good case: He found he didn't want to finish that one. It felt like tempting fate.

Qin Han noticed, of course. He noticed everything.

"You're thinking," he said one morning, after Lin Jin had let three easy strikes through in a row. "Stop it."

"Sorry."

"It's the awakening."

"...Yes."

The old man leaned on his practice stick. "What do you want me to say? That it'll be fine? Might not be." He shrugged. "Most kids get nothing. You know that. Your father knows it. Doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"Then work out what you'll do if it's nothing," Qin Han said, "and stop worrying about it." He raised his stick again. "A man with a plan for losing can afford to fight. Guard up."

Lin Jin put his guard up.

He worked it out that night. If it was nothing, he'd keep training anyway. He'd be the best swordsman in Yuhuo. He'd learn every herb his mother knew. He'd find some way to protect Nuan and his parents that didn't need spirit rings. It would be harder. It wouldn't be impossible.

It was a perfectly good plan for losing. He hated every line of it.

The summer he turned five, the news came over the ridge anyway, with the market carts. The blacksmith's boy had been awakened. Blue Silver Grass, people said, and laughed. Then, not laughing: full innate spirit power. A teacher from the city had come and talked to the boy for an hour, and by the autumn he was gone to the academy in Notting.

Lin Jin heard it at the well and went home and sat on the woodpile for a long while.

It's started, he thought. A year ahead of me. Without me.

Then he picked up the axe handle and went back to work.

* * *
​

The news came at the end of summer, carried by a man who sold salt.

He came through Yuhuo once a month with a mule and a lot of opinions. This time he stood in the middle of the lane, mule chewing placidly behind him, and announced it to the whole village at once, enjoying himself.

"Spirit Hall's deacon's in Holy Spirit Village," he said. "Did the awakenings there this morning. Big fuss. Old Jack's been running around like a chicken."

A murmur went through the small crowd. Lin Jin, standing by the woodpile with Nuan on his hip, felt his heart start to pound.

"And?" someone called. "Anything good?"

The salt-seller shrugged. "Nothing much this year, I heard. Not like last year's lot. Doesn't matter to you lot, does it?" He grinned around at them. "Because the deacon's coming here next. Says he'll do Yuhuo's children tomorrow. Says your numbers aren't worth his while, but he's an honest man and the Hall wants every village done."

The murmur turned into noise. Parents turned to look at their children. The old woman next door pressed her palms together and muttered something to the sky.

He barely heard any of it.

Tomorrow.

Nuan grabbed his ear and pulled. "Ge," she said, sternly. "Ge, down."

He put her down. She wobbled off toward the mule, and their mother swooped in and scooped her up before she could get kicked. Over Nuan's head, Su Wan's eyes found his.

She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.

His father came home early that evening, his frame empty. He sat on his stool by the fire with his hands on his knees and looked at Lin Jin for a while.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow," Lin Jin agreed.

Lin Shan nodded slowly. Then he reached into his shirt and pulled out a small, flat piece of wood on a string, carved into a rough shape. It took Lin Jin a moment to see it was meant to be a sword.

"For luck," his father said, and held it out.

Lin Jin took it. It was smooth, sanded down so carefully there wasn't a single splinter, and the string was new. It must have taken weeks.

"Papa," he said, and found his throat had closed up.

"Mm," said Lin Shan. He patted his son's head once, heavily, the way he did everything. Then he went to wash his hands.

That night Lin Jin lay awake behind the cloth, the wooden sword on its string clutched in his fist, and listened to his sister's small, snuffling breaths from her box.

Whatever happens tomorrow, he thought, I'm going to keep them safe.

He just had no idea yet what he'd be doing it with.