He stepped out from between the pines with pine needles in his hair and the distinct look of a man who had just won a small, private argument with the universe. The cold air greeted him immediately, which was less a greeting and more an insult, biting at the exposed skin of his neck and wrists as if to remind him that winter did not care about spiritual breakthroughs. He pulled his collar up. The forest exhaled behind him. Somewhere above, a bird was complaining about something, and He Renxiao, for once, felt no need to complain back.
It would be difficult to navigate the Pine Frost Fortress if he wasn't at his full potential. Given his current circumstance, this seclusion had been not just deserved, but necessary. He Renxiao didn't know whether to laugh or cry about that. Mostly, when no one was watching, he had done a little of both.
After his rebirth, he had felt catastrophically weaker than he remembered being. Not just the ordinary weakness of a young body, but something deeper, like his meridians had been wrung out like wet cloth and then left to dry in a cold room. During the early days of seclusion he had sat very still with his hands on his knees and breathed carefully through the panic of not knowing what he was, what he had, what remained.
Then, somewhere on the second day, he had reached inward and found it.
His golden core. Whole and warm and burning like a coal someone had forgotten to put out. And not just a golden core: a golden core at the fifth level of Nascent Soul.
He Renxiao had sat with that for a long time.
Nascent Soul, at fifteen. Well. Possibly not fifteen, which was the uncomfortable part. If he was at Nascent Soul now, he must have been older than he looked. If he had somehow managed to form his golden core before sixteen, before the meridians had finished growing, then there was a very real chance that he would be stuck looking like this for a considerable amount of time.
Not forever, necessarily. He knew better than that. Forming a golden core merely stunted growth for a while, not stopped it completely. But "a while" was a deeply unsatisfying answer when one had the ambitions of a future general and the current height of a very tall twelve-year-old.
He Renxiao was not that short. He was taller than the average female cultivator at Nascent Soul stage, which would have been perfectly respectable if he were, in fact, a female cultivator.
He was not.
He was a male who had been meant to become a general.
He had armor to fill.
He had a reputation to build.
He had absolutely no interest in people looking at him the way cats look at something small and harmless they're considering toying with.
If worse came to worst, he supposed, there were appearance-altering spells for exactly this sort of indignity.
He Renxiao paused at the edge of the tree line, catching sight of the cabins they had been staying in, and more specifically catching sight of Mo Shuyi, who was crouched beside the pond wetting his hair in the cold water with the sort of unbothered ease that He Renxiao found both admirable and deeply aggravating.
He looked up at the sky. The light was thin and pale, the trees skeletal at their edges where the leaves had already gone. Winter was coming faster than he had expected, and with it, if he remembered correctly, the Spiritual Weapons Trial.
They had already stopped the Jade Valley Sect's first attempt at taking over the Pinefrost Village. But who knew whether they could hold them off again, when He Renxiao and his sect siblings weren't there to intervene?
He Renxiao had spent a considerable portion of his seclusion turning that particular worry over and over. and he had still arrived at no satisfying conclusion. If they had their spiritual weapons, they'd be stronger. If they were stronger, they had a better chance. That was the extent of what he could offer himself by way of comfort.
He exhaled and walked toward the cabin.
"Renxiao? You're back already?" Mo Shuyi murmured, straightening from beside the pond and wiping at his face with the back of his hand.
Water continued to drip from the ends of his hair and run down his jaw in thin rivulets. He had changed his robes while He Renxiao was away, from the standard sect blue into something purple, the fabric sitting well on his broad frame in a way that He Renxiao catalogued entirely without meaning to.
"Yeah," He Renxiao replied, keeping his gaze somewhere above Mo Shuyi's left shoulder, which was a perfectly reasonable place to look.
Mo Shuyi tilted his head. He had the peculiar habit of doing that when he was watching He Renxiao, as if the angle might make the younger male easier to read. It never worked. He Renxiao was extremely difficult to read when he was being avoidant, which was most of the time.
"I'm going to get a new set of robes," He Renxiao said, already walking past him. "Tell Shizun and A'Yuan I'm back."
Mo Shuyi watched him go. He had noticed the way He Renxiao's gaze had moved across his face, then lower, with the particular quality of someone who wasn't entirely aware they were doing it.
He opened his mouth.
He closed it.
He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the pond instead, which was less complicated and also not looking back at him.
Gods. What was he thinking.
He Renxiao, for his part, was thinking about nothing in particular as he entered the cabin and went to his chambers. He dug into his pack and produced one of the three robes he owned, a heavier one suited for cold weather, which He Renxiao preferred because he ran cold and was not interested in being humble about it.
He shrugged off his outer robe. The cold air hit his back immediately, making him flinch in the manner of someone being reminded that the world was hostile and they had briefly forgotten. He looked up.
There was a small mirror across from him, the glass slightly clouded at the edges with age. He looked at himself in it for a long moment. His face was the face of a young man, fine-boned and clean-lined and stubbornly pretty in the way that his older disciples at the sect had always needled him about.
Too feminine for a man, they'd said, as if that were a verdict rather than a bad opinion. He had grown taller eventually, in his past life. Had filled out. Had become something that people looked at differently, with less amusement and more caution. That had suited him considerably better.
He was mid-thought on this particular subject when the door to his room hit the wall with a loud crack, and he flinched hard enough to lose hold of his belt.
"What the hell, Shuyi!" He Renxiao snapped, clutching his robe back around himself and turning on Mo Shuyi with the full force of a look that could have singed paper. "I told you I was changing!"
Mo Shuyi had already looked away, a move born less from propriety and more from self-preservation. His face was doing something red and complicated. "Sorry, Shidi, I forgot, I just—one of the villagers stopped by. They've invited us to a festival."
He Renxiao stared at him with the flat expression of a cat that has been interrupted mid-nap by something it could not even be bothered to be properly angry about. He came in here to tell me that. He came barging through my door to tell me something I already know. "I already knew that, Shuyi. I went into town."
Mo Shuyi looked back at him briefly, searching his face with the quiet patience of someone accustomed to navigating difficult terrain. He Renxiao was hostile by nature, but not always by intent, and Mo Shuyi had long since learned to tell the difference. He sighed. "Yeah, okay. Sorry, Shidi. Dumb idea to bother you. I'll go."
"Who said it was a dumb idea?" He Renxiao said.
Mo Shuyi stopped.
"Really?" he asked, turning carefully, as one turns around when one is not entirely sure whether the creature behind them is about to run or bite.
"I was already planning on going," He Renxiao replied, with the particular brand of dismissiveness that in his vocabulary meant yes. "We've all been wound tight enough to snap. This is the time to breathe." He paused. "You pay too much attention to others' feelings lately. You never used to. What changed?"
It was a genuine question, asked in a tone approximately two degrees warmer than neutral. He had wondered about it since his rebirth. Mo Shuyi had always been observant, certainly, but this particular kind of careful attentiveness was new. Or old, in a way He Renxiao hadn't yet found the shape of.
Mo Shuyi was quiet for a beat too long. Then: "You're impossible, Shidi. Finish getting dressed. I'll tell Li Yuan and Shizun." And he was gone before He Renxiao could press further.
He Renxiao turned back to the mirror. Dumb mutt, he thought, with more fondness than he intended.
He finished dressing. Came out into the main room. Stood for a moment and looked at it, which he hadn't had a chance to do before, given that most of his time here had been spent either in seclusion or asleep or pretending to be asleep to avoid conversation.
He ran his fingers along the wood of the table as he walked around it, feeling the grain under his fingertips, the cold solidity of something real. It was grounding, in the way that small and unremarkable things could be grounding, if you let them.
Staying here for the next four or five years might not be so bad.
He Renxiao was still quietly making his peace with this thought when footsteps sounded down the hall, their cadence deliberate and even, each step placed with an unconscious precision that He Renxiao had come to recognize the way one recognizes a familiar piece of music.
Lan Qiang walked toward him, like the floor was a courtesy he extended to it rather than a necessity. He was dressed in the older, deep outer robes of the Azure Cloud Sect, a single silver pin holding his hair in place, and his expression, as usual, was perfectly composed, which was
to say that it gave nothing away except to those who had spent a long time learning to look for what wasn't there.
"Shizun," He Renxiao said, and bowed slightly,"This disciple greets you."
"As does this master greet his disciple," Lan Qiang replied. Even short as it was, there was still warmth to it, the restrained kind.
He said nothing further. He simply reached out and took He Renxiao's wrist in both hands, placed two fingers against the pulse point, and waited.
He Renxiao stood very still, watching his Shizun's face for the verdict.
Lan Qiang raised an eyebrow. He looked up. "Nascent Soul stage," he said. "Quite the advancement for a disciple your age, though not without precedent. Your meridians have also fully healed. You should be proud of yourself."
He Renxiao felt his face go warm, and he smiled anyway. "All thanks to Shizun."
Lan Qiang studied him for a moment longer, cataloguing. He exhaled. "Be careful from now on."
"Of course, Shizun," He Renxiao replied, and turned, "Did Mo-Shixiong call for you? Is that why you've come?"
"You know him," Lan Qiang said, a note of dry amusement entering his otherwise even voice. "He's dragging your precious brother out of bed as we speak."
He Renxiao sighed. Li Yuan was many things: talented, occasionally perceptive, and constitutionally incapable of getting out of bed before noon without physical intervention. The "golden son" of the sect, they called him. He Renxiao supposed that golden sons required dragging like everyone else.
"Speak of the devil," He Renxiao murmured, as the sound of the door creaking open reached the main room like the complaint of an old hinge that hadn't asked to be part of any of this.
Li Yuan emerged from the hallway looking precisely like a person who had been forced from sleep against their will and was deciding, in real time, how much of a scene to make about it. His outer robe was still being wrestled into alignment. His hair, usually meticulous, had the quality of something that had once been well-organized and then been briefly introduced to a tornado. He walked into the main room, took in the sight of He Renxiao already fully dressed and apparently functional, and narrowed his eyes.
"Why," said Li Yuan, "are you conscious."
"Sunrise," He Renxiao said pleasantly. "It happens every day."
"At a reasonable hour," Li Yuan said. "Not this one."
Mo Shuyi appeared behind him in the hallway with the expression of a man who had been managing a situation and was quietly hopeful that the situation was nearly managed. He looked between the two of them, then at Lan Qiang, who was watching the exchange with the stillness of a man who found certain things quietly amusing but had committed, long ago, to not letting anyone know which things. Mo Shuyi cleared his throat. "We should go soon if we want to arrive before the main ceremonies begin."
"There are ceremonies?" Li Yuan murmured
"There are always ceremonies," He Renxiao replied. He had already drifted toward the door, hands folded in his sleeves. "Come on."
The town had transformed.
It was not that Pinefrost Village had been unpleasant before. It had been a decent sort of place, modest and orderly and smelling of pine resin and woodsmoke, the kind of village that did not ask much of you and expected you to return the favor.
But whatever it had been before, it was something else entirely now. Paper lanterns had been strung between every building in strings of red and amber and pale white, swaying in the cold mountain air like a second set of stars that someone had decided to hang a little lower.
Stalls lined both sides of the main road, piled high with winter fruits, spiced nuts, bright bolts of embroidered cloth, spirit-burning lamps, paper charms, and small carved animals in painted wood.
People moved between the stalls in layers: village families, traveling merchants, pilgrims, and, notable against the winter colors like ink spilled on bright fabric, cultivators.
Several sects had sent representatives, young disciples wearing their respective sect colors with the self-conscious pride of people who had been told to make a good impression.
Disciples from the Iron Crest Sect stood near the eastern entrance in grey and black, speaking to no one and managing to look both disapproving and bored simultaneously. A small cluster from the Misty River Sect had colonized an entire stall of embroidered goods and were discussing the merit of the blue against the gold in voices slightly too loud for a festival crowd.
And there, across the main square, stationed near the ceremonial platform with the composed, proprietary ease of people who had arranged all of this and wished you to know it, were the disciples of the Jade Valley Sect.
Their robes were white and pale gray depending on rank, their crests embroidered in silver. They were, objectively, well-dressed.
They were also, objectively, watching the arrival of the Azure Cloud Sect with the particular brand of cool, measuring attention. One of them, a senior disciple with a long face, leaned toward his companion and said something behind his fan. His companion nodded.
He Renxiao noticed this without appearing to notice this. His gaze swept the square once, taking everything in, filing it, and then settled forward as he walked at Lan Qiang's right side with his hands in his sleeves and his expression pleasantly neutral.
"They're watching us," Li Yuan said, under his breath.
"They've been watching since we arrived in the village," Lan Qiang replied, without lowering his voice at all, because Lan Qiang did not modify his comportment for an audience. He had decided, sometime before He Renxiao had known him, that behaving consistently whether or not one was observed was simply the correct way to exist. "It is of no particular consequence. Smile."
"At them?" Li Yuan asked.
"At the festival," Lan Qiang said. "You are here to enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself."
Li Yuan looked at He Renxiao. He Renxiao looked back at him. An entire conversation happened in approximately one second, the kind that only works between people who have been annoying each other since childhood, and then Li Yuan turned back to the square.
He Renxiao, with slightly less effort, did the same.
Mo Shuyi had drifted naturally to He Renxiao's left, which was where he tended to end up, the way water finds low ground, without either of them consciously arranging it. He was watching the lanterns with the particular quality of attention he brought to things he found beautiful but wasn't going to announce, his hands clasped behind his back, his hair still slightly damp at the ends.
The light from the nearest string of lanterns caught the planes of his face in amber, and He Renxiao looked at him once, quickly, and then looked at the paper charms instead.
"They've done this for three hundred years," Mo Shuyi said. "The Pinefrost Festival. I read about it in the mission files."
"Naturally," He Renxiao replied.
"The original ceremony was a consecration offering to the mountain spirit," Mo Shuyi continued, undeterred by He Renxiao's tone. "The lanterns represent messages sent to those who've crossed over. The red ones are for gratitude. The white ones are for things unsaid."
He Renxiao looked at the white lanterns.
There were a lot of white lanterns.
"Cheerful," Li Yuan said, from Mo Shuyi's other side.
"Meaningful," Mo Shuyi corrected, with patient dignity.
"Both," said Lan Qiang, which ended the debate.