The cold came early that year.
Morning fog clung to the mountain like a ghost, veiling the stone paths and turning breath to mist. Inside the Assassin Hall's gathering chamber, a small group sat cross-legged around a fire, their expressions sober, the silence thick with tension.
Li Fan stood at the front.
He didn't raise his voice. He never did. But every word settled like stone.
"It's time we stop pretending this is a quiet resistance," he said. "We are not hidden anymore. The corrupt know we exist. The guilds know. The sects know. The world is watching."
He looked to each of them—Zhao Liang, Mei Xiu, young Jiao with her bandaged eye, the newly joined Lin brothers who had watched their mother executed for a debt their father never owed.
"We need rules," he continued. "A path. Not just to survive—but to be worthy of what we've begun."
From the corner of the room, Zhao Liang shifted. "You're talking about an oath."
"I am," Li Fan said. "One that binds us not by blood, but by belief."
He knelt slowly and placed a scroll on the floor. It was rough, handwritten by his own hand the night before. Charcoal still smudged the parchment.
It read:
The Iron Oath of the Shadow Hall
We kill not for gold, but for justice.
We strike only those whose corruption breaks the lives of the innocent.
We do not harm children, healers, or the helpless.
We do not kill to protect power, only to tear down its abuse.
We act in silence, leave no cruelty unmarked.
We protect our own—but never above the truth.
When our blade is drawn, our heart must be steady.
If we fall to pride, greed, or cruelty—we fall alone.
One by one, they read the scroll. Some aloud. Some under their breath. A few paused longer than others.
Jiao's small hands trembled slightly as she touched the parchment.
"I never had rules before," she whispered.
"You do now," Li Fan said softly.
Mei Xiu was the first to speak clearly. "I swear it."
Zhao Liang hesitated the longest. Not because he disagreed—but because he knew what oaths cost. He'd seen men kill in the name of ideals before. But in the end, he stood and bowed slightly.
"I'll follow it," he said. "As long as you do."
Li Fan met his gaze. "I'll die before I betray it."
The oath was not sealed with blood or branding. It was simpler than that.
It was sealed with choice.
Training intensified after that.
No more half-measures. Zhao Liang led drills from sunrise to nightfall, shaping raw anger into coordinated efficiency. Li Fan taught them how to walk without sound, how to read a room before entering, how to make a death look like an accident—or a warning.
But he didn't teach them how to kill for pride.
"Your blade is not your glory," he said one evening, as they stood around the sparring circle. "It's your burden."
They listened. Because they had seen what happened when blades were used for power.
Now they were learning to use them for something else.
One week later, their first real mission came.
Not one brought to them by parchment or a weeping villager, but through a chance whisper—a corrupt sect disciple in charge of tax collection in East River Hamlet. He'd ordered the seizure of grain stores during a winter drought, sentencing an entire village to starve, all to appease a minor elder of his sect.
It wasn't a grand target. Not an elder or a famed cultivator.
But he was a symptom. And Li Fan knew that symptoms became disease if ignored.
They didn't send him alone.
Mei Xiu and the older Lin brother accompanied him. It was a test—for them, for the Hall.
It was also a warning to the world: We are not a tale. We are here.
They arrived in East River under moonlight. Mei watched the house from the rooftops while Lin slipped into the courtyard and jammed the exit locks. Li Fan made the kill—not cruelly, not theatrically, but clean.
They left the symbol of the Iron Oath on the door: a black feather over a scale, drawn in ink.
The next morning, the village found the body. And for the first time, instead of running, they burned incense and left rice bowls outside their doors.
One bowl for the dead.
One for the ones who answered.
That night, back at the hall, Li Fan stood in the courtyard again, alone.
He stared up at the sky. So many stars. And yet, he felt no clarity—only gravity.
It would get worse from here. The more they acted, the more the world would push back. Cultivators with ego. Officials with armies. Assassins without ethics.
But there was no turning back.
Footsteps approached.
It was Jiao. She looked up at him, dark eyes wide but steady. "Can anyone take the Oath?"
Li Fan looked down. "Why? Do you know someone?"
She nodded. "A boy. In my old village. He hides birds in his coat to keep them warm. But he knows how to throw knives. I think... I think he's like us."
Li Fan smiled, faint and tired.
"Bring him. If he's ready, he'll choose."
The Assassin Hall was no longer just a shelter for the broken.
It was becoming a forge.
A place where purpose tempered pain. Where oath made killers into guardians.
And as the mountains darkened with snow and war drums echoed faintly from afar, Li Fan finally understood:
He was no longer walking the path alone.