Seventeen days. Then sixteen. Then ten.
He trained with brutal consistency.
Morning: Question Fist advanced forms, two full hours. Not drilling — developing. Each form examined for weakness, adjusted, reexamined. The Question Fist was not a fixed system. It was designed to evolve as the practitioner's understanding evolved.
Afternoon: Pale Flame sense extension practice. He used training partners — Cai Rong, Zhou Jin, Shen Yu when she was willing — to extend his qi reading range and accuracy. At Level Three he could reliably read internal qi architecture at twelve feet. He pushed to fifteen, to eighteen.
At eighteen feet, the sense became unreliable. He needed it reliable.
He pushed to fifteen and made it perfect.
Evening: cultivation. Pale Flame circulation, building density toward Level Four. Not rushing the breakthrough — forcing a breakthrough under the wrong conditions created instability. But continuous building created the right conditions for a natural break.
Shen Yu sparred with him five times in the ten days before the trial.
She won two of five. The losses were instructive — she had developed a technique for temporarily suppressing her surface qi signature to create a false read. When he read her as preparing for one form and she was actually in another, the timing gap cost him.
"You are exploiting the reading," she said after the third match, sitting across from him in the sparring room.
"You're hiding your qi architecture deliberately," he said. "That is a real technique."
"I developed it because I needed something that worked against you specifically." She looked at him directly. "I named it the Empty Form. The surface shows one thing, the internal executes another."
"Will Zhao Mingyu read qi as well as I do?"
"No. But he doesn't need to. His power differential is the tactic." She paused. "You need to reach Level Four before the trial."
"I know."
"Are you going to?"
He thought about the density in his dantian. The steady building pressure.
"Probably not in time," he said honestly.
She looked at him.
"Then you need a strategy that works at Level Three against Level Four. Not a hoping strategy. A real one."
"I know."
"And it needs to be better than what Shao Wei's technique can provide on its own, because Zhao Mingyu will have been briefed on the Pale Flame reading-sense. His family has been studying this inheritance for years."
"Also I know."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Tell me the real plan," she said.
He looked at her. She met his eyes without flinching.
"The trial format includes three rounds. Judges assess on technique, adaptability, and outcome. Outcome matters but not exclusively." He paused. "I don't need to beat Zhao Mingyu by power. I need to beat him by analysis — make his power look like a weakness in front of the observers."
"How?"
"By making him react to me instead of executing a prepared strategy. A cultivator trained for projection loses composure when the target refuses to be projected onto." He paused. "And when someone uses questions instead of declarations in a fight, it creates a second problem in the opponent's mind that runs parallel to the physical problem. They start wondering about things instead of just acting."
Shen Yu was quiet.
"That is either brilliant or deeply annoying," she said.
"Most effective things are one of those two."
She picked up her training staff. "Again," she said.
They went again.
Six days before the trial, the northern border formation activated.
The Void Tiger had moved inside the second ring.
Half a mile from the outer wall.