Three weeks in the sect. Body Tempering Level Three, pressing toward Four. The Iron Question Fist forms were becoming natural — he practiced them in his sleep, twitching through positions in the night.
His stone-carrying punishment duty had ended. But he requested to continue it voluntarily. The guards at the quarry thought he was strange. Master Ren said nothing and made no note of it.
Li Meng had leveled up to a full Body Tempering Level Three. He celebrated by eating twice the normal ration at dinner.
Cai Rong had been quietly making allies among the non-clique disciples. He was well-liked. Wen Dao noted that Cai Rong's instinct for social navigation was something he himself lacked — useful to keep nearby.
On the twenty-second day, Wen Dao's assigned labor duty changed. Instead of stone-carrying, he was assigned to the drainage system maintenance — clearing the channels under the sect that carried water from mountain springs through the facility.
The channels ran through a series of underground passages beneath the sect's main buildings.
On his second day of this duty, he found something.
Near the oldest section of the maintenance tunnels — clearly original mountain construction, rougher stone, older iron fittings — one of the walls had a different sound when he struck it.
Hollow.
He studied the wall for ten minutes. Old mortar at the edges. Not recently sealed. Sealed perhaps a hundred years ago.
He looked at his tools. A chisel and a stone hammer from the maintenance kit.
He started on the mortar. Slow and quiet. Twenty minutes of careful work.
The wall section came free.
Behind it: a passage. Low-ceilinged. Dark. Running deeper into the mountain than any maintenance channel.
He looked at it for a long moment.
He went in.
He had light — a small oil lamp from the maintenance kit. He kept one hand on the wall and moved forward slowly.
The passage ran straight for forty feet, then turned, then descended. The air was cold and dry. Old. Undisturbed.
He found the room twenty feet past the descent.
Small. Stone walls covered in carved text. An iron pedestal in the center with a flat surface. On the surface: six glass bottles, each with different colored liquid inside. Sealed. Old.
And on the wall directly ahead, in large carved characters:
'THIS TRAINING ROOM BELONGS TO REN LONG. OUTER DISCIPLE 207. ENTER WITHOUT PERMISSION AND I WILL FIND YOU REGARDLESS OF WHAT WORLD I AM IN.'
Wen Dao looked at the name.
Ren. Ren Long.
He looked at the text on the walls. Training notes. Written densely, precisely. The same handwriting as the Iron Question Fist scroll in the library.
The creator. The man who had developed the technique six hundred years ago and died before fully demonstrating it.
He had been an outer disciple of Iron Mountain Sect.
This had been his private training room.
Wen Dao sat down on the floor and started reading the walls.
He read for two hours. He barely breathed.
The notes covered intermediate and advanced forms of the Iron Question Fist. Far beyond what the library scroll contained. With commentary in the margins — things that had worked, things that failed, questions the creator had asked himself.
At the bottom of the final wall, a note in smaller text:
'The technique is incomplete. The final form — the Silence Question — requires the practitioner to ask a question of the enemy's soul, not their body. I have not reached this. Perhaps the one who finds this will.'
Six glass bottles on the pedestal. Wen Dao picked up the first one and read the label etched into the glass:
'Bone Descent Pill — accelerates Body Tempering marrow stage by three months.'
He set it down carefully.
He looked at the room.
He had found something extraordinary.
And behind him in the passage, a sound. Footsteps. Light ones. Coming toward him.