Ethan set the yellowed Golden Body manual down and picked up one of the pre-Qin golden slips.
Eight centimeters long. Far too heavy for its size. Warm, almost jade-smooth, though it was not jade.
Aoki had given it to him when he joined the expedition group.
Serena's numbers from dinner kept running in parallel in his head: four slips ever recovered; two torn into fragments by competing factions; two complete pieces locked in New Star's largest bank vault.
If a complete set really ran to dozens of pieces, putting one back together was nearly impossible.
The carved figure on the slip - human face, serpent body - looked vivid enough to move if he stared too long, but he still couldn't parse what it meant.
Not enough samples yet.
He put the slip aside.
This road required accumulation. No point trying to solve the oldest riddle first.
---
At dawn he practiced the *fang shi* root method as usual.
Two days before work began. He treated the quiet routine as something fragile and worth protecting.
When he came back covered in sweat, his eyes landed on the Golden Body manual again.
He checked it page by page - paper, ink, wear pattern. The book itself was old, not fabricated. The problem was the claims.
After washing up, he switched to a special SIM and called Aoki on a clean line.
He summarized the manual. Aoki laughed immediately.
"Ancient authors loved inflation," Aoki said. "Hundreds of years, thousands of years - half of it is narrative seasoning. It makes the method sound extraordinary. Don't swallow all of it." A pause. "Golden Body... that's a known line. Earliest mention I remember is Northern Song. I'd have to check the details."
Ethan listened.
"You can train it," Aoki continued, voice flattening into practical warning. "Just don't worship the text. If the back half were literal, seven or eight layers already cost centuries. If someone in Song reached thirteen layers, where is he? Should still be alive. But there are records of a tomb."
Aoki ended with the same advice: train what you can verify, distrust lifespan claims.
Ethan sat for a while, irritated and oddly relieved at the same time.
For a few hours he'd allowed himself an unrealistic possibility: if the Golden Body text had even partial credibility, maybe the end of the old path still hid an open sky.
Aoki's logic pulled that fantasy back down to earth.
"Author of Golden Body," Ethan said quietly, "you've made my list. Maxwell too."
---
Later that day he went out to see Professor Lin.
The New Star-bound students would depart the next day. Lin was on the same interstellar ship. Ethan wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the vessel once transfer protocols started, so this was a farewell visit in advance.
Professor Lin looked better than Ethan expected - white hair, heavier body than before, but good color in his face and a strong laugh.
"Don't overreact," Lin said after hearing the issue. "A lot of old texts exaggerate. But Golden Body itself is not trivial. Tradition says the founder, Zhou Yunkong, was a true outlier - flesh harder than high-grade armor, lived past one hundred fifty, died old in Shu Mountain. In Ming, grave robbers opened his tomb and the manual re-entered circulation."
Ethan stared at him.
A man who lived one hundred fifty years had still written a method whose upper stages seemed to demand multiple millennia.
The contradiction was so blatant it almost became funny.
"Ancient people had frauds too," Ethan said.
"And real monsters," Lin replied. "Don't confuse those categories."
He continued, more serious now.
"Golden Body's longevity effect alone means something. And there are records that when the tomb was opened, the corpse had not fully decayed - reportedly harder than stone, resistant even to iron blades, centuries after death."
That landed.
In an era where one advanced firearm could erase an old-arts expert, a method that hardened life itself wasn't just vanity - it was strategic survival.
"Zhou Yunkong. Zhou Mingxuan." Ethan frowned. "Same surname. Could be ancestral?"
He shook his head before Lin answered.
Too neat. And if it were a core lineage inheritance, Maxwell wouldn't have handed it out in public.
"This copy is probably only a couple hundred years old," Lin said. "Most likely a later transcription. But the structure reads authentic to me."
Since losing practical combat ability, Lin had turned fully to theory and textual archaeology. His judgment on source quality carried weight.
Ethan exhaled. "This book destabilized my calibration. If Golden Body exaggerates this hard, how many other texts do the same? Did we over-mythologize the pre-Qin *fang shi* path too?"
"Not to that degree," Lin said. "Golden Body-style inflation is a minority phenomenon, tied to specific historical contexts. In some periods even official war dispatches did this - hundreds killed becomes tens of thousands in writing. If official records can inflate, folk histories inflate more."
Ethan was silent.
He said nothing, but the thought stayed: this path demanded more than pain tolerance; it demanded historical judgment too.
Lin added one more anchor.
"The pre-Qin *fang shi* power conclusions weren't guessed. New Star life institutes tested actual remains from Old Earth excavations. The baseline is credible."
"So I should not doubt that the old path once reached real heights."
"Exactly. If you walk this road, confidence matters."
Ethan straightened.
"I drifted," he said. "Wrong focus. I started this path from curiosity. Then from commitment to keep exploring. I don't worship inherited claims. I test them."
Lin looked at him for a long moment and nodded.
"In this century," he said softly, "old-arts practitioners live under constant pressure from technological civilization."
Ethan didn't deny it, and he didn't retreat from his line either.
If the road truly ended, he wanted to be there when it ended.
And if it didn't, he wanted to be one of the people who proved it.
---
That night, in his apartment, he worked through body-method notes, then root-method interpretation, then went downstairs and crossed to the tree line outside the residential block.
Moonlight, white and soft. He entered *cai qi* and *nei yang* in sequence.
Mind emptied. Perception expanded.
Then his forehead tightened all at once - a sharp pressure, as if a narrow metal tip were about to punch through skin and bone.
His body moved before thought.
A short hiss cut the air.
Heat flashed past his temple. A violent airflow brushed his ear. Burnt hair smell.
He dropped low and sprinted into the dense trees, breaking line-of-sight.
Old complex. Trees planted decades ago, now fully grown, canopy thick enough to erase a body in two steps.
He stopped behind cover, eyes hard, heart hammering.
He had just been shot at. Death had missed by less than a finger-width.
If he had not shifted at that exact moment, the round would have entered the skull.
Whoever fired had chosen a residential zone and used a suppressor.
No warning. No crowd panic. Nothing loud enough to draw people out.
Ethan didn't push out for a counter. Unknown number of shooters. Unknown number of weapons.
He stripped off his outer shirt and threw it out of cover in a lateral arc.
Three muffled cracks.
Three clean bullet holes through falling cloth almost instantly.
At least three trained marksmen outside the perimeter fence. Fast response, disciplined fire.
He could approximate all three firing positions.
He still didn't move to engage. There could be more guns waiting for exposure.
For one brief second, his first thought was the Golden Body text.
If the method were truly mature, he could ignore uncertain gun count and hunt under moonlight instead of hiding.
He put the thought away. Not useful right now.
He swapped to a special SIM and called Aoki again, concise and factual.
"You did the right thing," Aoki said immediately. "No hot weapon in hand means stay in hard cover. My side will send professionals. I'm coming too, with gear."
When Aoki ended the call, he was already moving.
Even for Aoki, this crossed a line.
In wilderness operations, organizations and financial houses might kill each other over relics. But urban fire discipline against civilians was an unwritten hard rule.
Break it, and the whole city order started to shake.
Every major group knew that, and most obeyed it.
Because if they didn't, the state would remind them what enforcement looked like.
Old Earth had declined. Its bottom lines had not vanished.
---
Ethan climbed to a high branch and waited in silence.
He began building the suspect matrix.
Fresh timeline first.
Yesterday: Qingcheng operation, relic conflict, unknown traces possibly left behind.
Relevant factions: Zhou, Ling, Wu. Internal expedition rival: Jin-chuan.
Personal node: Iris Wu, first contact last night.
Older nodes: Julian Zhou conflict chain. Maxwell Zhou.
Deeper node: forces that once kept him pinned to Old Earth and off New Star.
Maybe unrelated. Maybe not.
His eyes stayed on the dark perimeter beyond the trees.
Who had enough confidence to order live suppression fire in a city neighborhood?
If he had died, would the traces have been erased quietly before dawn?
Whoever signed off on tonight clearly believed the answer was yes.