"Most people learn to follow a style," Wren said, his bare feet silent against the bone-metal floor of the Broken Cloud training hall. "But we don't follow."
He circled Jian slowly, cloak trailing behind him like a coded scripture unraveling in midair.
"We deviate."
The chamber was more scar tissue than architecture—cracked biotech walls, exposed conduit, patches of old martial ink bled into the surfaces like bruises. AR projectors flickered, cycling ancient form footage—fragments of forgotten techniques never approved by any sect.
In the center, Jian stood shirtless.
His spine was bare, dermal ports pulsing faintly. Chi hummed in his bones.
"Show me White Needle."
Jian exhaled. Let the flow take him.
Sharp strikes. Rolling deflections. Elbows like spirals of thread pulled taut. His movements carried rhythm now—refined from the Dagger Tong skirmish and the drone encounter.
Wren's retinal HUD mapped the sequence.
> [WHITE NEEDLE FORM v1.0 | CHI FLOW: 84%]
[PATTERN MATCH: PREDICTABLE | CORP-TIER 1 FORMALISM DETECTED]
"You've mastered it," Wren said. "Now break it."
Jian blinked. "What?"
"Break its spine. Thread in something unstable. Show me motion that doesn't belong. Show me you."
Jian hesitated.
Years in Yulan had drilled form into bone. Structure into breath.
But Wren's voice cut through the hesitation like fire through silk.
"Your old scroll was written by someone else. Time to start burning it."
---
He let his breath collapse.
Then reached deep into the second chi stream.
Flame Aspect.
Unstable. Pirated. Corp-marked and dangerous. He felt it slither through his nervous system like a lit fuse inside a wet circuit.
He threaded it into White Needle—twisting speed with ignition, cutting corners with heat and pressure.
A jab flared at the fingertip.
A pivot caught fire mid-spin.
He ended with an elbow crackling with chi sparks, sliding out of form entirely.
It hurt. The movement wasn't smooth—it fought him.
But it fit.
> [NEW STYLE SIGNATURE DETECTED – "IGNITED THREAD v0.1"]
[CONFLICT: PATHS INCOMPATIBLE]
[STABILITY: 58% | INTERNAL BURN RISK: MODERATE]
Jian staggered slightly, teeth clenched.
Wren clapped once.
"Good."
"I almost blew out a spinal node."
"Power without friction isn't power. It's projection."
---
The next two days blurred into pain and progress.
Wren pushed him through shadow-AI trials from the Broken Cloud's corrupted archives. Jian fought simulations encoded with off-grid techniques: Whispered Bone grapples, Glass Step evasion, Ink Chain Lotus strike patterns.
Styles that hadn't seen daylight since Corp classification locked them away.
Each fight reprogrammed his rhythm.
Every time Jian lost, he rewrote.
Every time he won, the system learned from him.
His HUD tracked it all:
> [IGNITED THREAD v0.1 – SYNC STABILITY: 61% → 73%]
[NODE EVOLUTION: ADAPTIVE CHAIN ENABLED]
[SUGGESTED PATHWAY: FIRE WITHIN SILK]
Wren watched quietly. He rarely corrected. Occasionally, he manually redirected Jian's chi with a handheld tool when mod-glitches twisted his nerve signals too far. Each time, Jian grew faster at recovering.
---
One night, after a particularly brutal loss to a three-style construct, Wren handed Jian a dented cup of synthetic tea.
"Most sects raise disciples to serve a scroll," Wren said, eyes distant. "We raise scrolls to serve the disciple."
Jian let that sit. His shoulders ached. His hands still trembled from residual chi backlash.
He looked up. "Why help me?"
Wren's eyes flicked toward the old terminal at the far wall—its surface projected a gene-coded data stream Jian couldn't decipher.
"They buried something in your neural stem," he said quietly. "A bloodlock. A dormant node. I thought it was trash code when I scanned you."
He turned the projection toward Jian.
A cluster of symbols pulsed faintly.
> [SEED PATH SIGNATURE – PROTOTYPE TRACE DETECTED]
[REACTIVATION IN PROGRESS – 8% SYNCHRONIZED]
Jian's breath caught in his throat.
"You're saying I…"
"Weren't just trained," Wren finished. "You were engineered."
"A seed."
Wren nodded. "One of two. But you were the one they tried to erase."
Jian didn't speak.
He couldn't.
Wren stood and stretched. "You've got one more step before we see if the path wants you back."
He tossed Jian a disc.
A simple invite.
> [Location: STREET DOJO CIRCUIT | NIGHT MARKET | UNLICENSED MATCH]
[ENTRY REQUIREMENT: SELF-WRITTEN SCROLL OR MODDED TECHNIQUE DEMO]
"Go get your teeth kicked in," Wren said with a grin. "Let's see if what you made actually works when it bleeds."
---