Wind wrote thin knives over the ridge.
Wu Renshu's palm descended with the tenderness of inevitability, a correction rather than a strike. The ridge-lip under Li Tian's soles buzzed with hidden wires; the Foramen rosettes behind him ticked toward sealed, and the white needle at his back nosed the jamb like a patient hound.
Match the beat, not the breath.
Li Tian didn't meet the hand. He met the wind. A Star Lung sip, held through the true hold, and his weight slid a finger's width inward along the lip's faint down-slope. Wu's palm arrived where a rib should have been, settled on air, and withdrew as if nothing had been attempted.
"Good," Wu said, as if noting a clean character on a practice scroll. A thin jade slip rotated between two fingers. "Again."
OUTBLAST.
Knife-rain hissed from the crown sky, a bright chime against bone and bronze. The lip greased beneath the Drag-Field pearl Wu had seeded; any honest step would peel free like wet paper. Li Tian angled his good heel across a ridge staple and rolled the Shard a quarter-degree—Service · Rotate. The bias turned treachery into slant. The wind shoved; the lip slid him inward, not away.
Cost tallied: the ring-bite around his ankle tore open another finger's breadth; hot wet soaked the boot; his chest vise ratcheted a notch tighter.
Wu's gaze flicked once to the staple's dull glow. "You're listening. The Ring does love a careful ear."
The white needle threaded the gate again, searching. Li Tian offered it a rail instead of his spine—Wreath-service · Redirect, a ghost-touch with the Shard as he shifted past the jamb. The needle branded architecture with a polite sizzle and went quiet for the breadth of a heartbeat.
The Foramen behind him sighed closed. The Archive's breath cut off. The ridge became all there was: a tilted ribbon of bone, a drifting snow of bright dust, a cliff of scarlet air.
Wu stepped with him, no hurry, no weight to his robes though the gusts plucked at the hems. His feet placed in the lee ripples, always on the true holds, never on lies. The measure was his.
"Junior Brother," he said softly, "you've run so far on borrowed time."
Li Tian did not answer. Words were breath, and breath was a lock he could not afford to trip. He let the Star-Veil settle over his bones—a clean starlight silhouette, orthodox angles, nothing devouring. The Ring cooled to a metronome under his skin.
Wu's next charm slid from palm to air with the ease of a sigh. Mirror-Louver. The ridge's lee flipped; safe silence behind Li Tian became a hairy lull, pressure snagged and waiting. The white needle felt it and sharpened.
He answered with a Shunt on the jamb hinge. A fingernail turn; a thread of hiss. The hairy lull frayed and fell apart. The needle kissed stone instead of blood, embarrassed as a scholar whose ink had blotted.
"A shame," Wu murmured, almost amused. "Another."
Phase-Shear struck the ridge staples. The next true hold vanished. A drag of crooked gravity tried to pivot Li Tian's hips toward the drop even as Outblast stung his face.
He refused the lie. Half a count off, toes diagonal, hips narrow, ribs screaming. Vein Step on a beat that wasn't in the music, because the lip and wind could be made to hum a note the talisman didn't own. The measure wavered, then grudgingly allowed him through.
Wu's hand lifted again—never striking, always arriving. It landed against Li Tian's scapula on an exact half-beat, enough to ride balance, not break bone. A corrector's touch. The world tilted.
He let it.
He fell into the wind's curve, not away from it. The Drag-Field's tack grabbed for his sole and missed by a whisper; the rotated staple bias hummed him inward again. Wu's palm left him as clean as it had found him.
"You truly will not devour," Wu said, tone unreadable. "That is… interesting."
The Ring flared—a single hot lash of Ban. Li Tian didn't need it. The hunger down in his core had been loud since the Storm Crucible, a dark mouth asking for the wind, the blade, the blood. He kept it shut with iron.
Spend only what returns.
They reached a narrower run where the ridge bit its own lip into a wedge. Whistle-wires webbed the air like frost; the OUTBLAST drove knife-rain through them so the net sang. The lee here was wicked—safe holds moved, and moving safety was a paradox that killed careless men.
Wu did not stop. He walked into the web as if he had invented it. The wires flexed and did not cut him. His sleeve brushed one and it bent, music quieting.
Li Tian couldn't mirror that. He was flesh and pain, not immaculate art. He went lower. A belly-crawl Vein Step, elbows scraping bone. The dead right arm hung like rope; the left hand dragged the Shard like an unfeeling hook.
Wind-harp filaments vibrated an inch from his cheek. He smelled old bronze, bone chalk, and a thin sweetness from the knife-rain's passing. A wire ticked across his scalp and took three hairs with it—no more, no less.
Behind, the Foramen gate's inner plate—indexed by the redirected needle—sang a low complaint. Somewhere within the Archive, a Ninefold lens blinked, interested.
Wu glanced back once. "They're watching," he said. "Do you feel it? How the gaze thins the air?"
Li Tian felt only the vice of his chest and the fire in his leg. He made the measure smaller—two staples, a breath, a toe's width of stone. The world obeyed because that's what worlds did when you made them small enough to hold.
The run opened to a shoulder of ridge where a star-stapled mast rose, braided with wind-harp strands. The mast hummed; the strands plucked invisible notes from the OUTBLAST and tied them into snares.
Wu trod into that music and laid a jade slip against the mast's notch. The hum deepened by a quarter-tone; the snares tightened.
"An honest duel," he said, courteous, as if they'd both agreed to draw characters with knives. "No elders. No witnesses that matter. Show me the edge of what your Ring taught you."
Li Tian had nothing to show. He had only the ledger of what he would not spend. He set the Shard against a lower staple and turned a Service · Detune by a hair. The mast's chord wavered, one strand going slack, one going sharp. The snare geometry opened a breathing seam.
Wu's eyebrows moved half a millimeter. Compliment, reprimand—impossible to say. Another slip woke, infused the mast with a faint crimson, and a Severance skein braided through the harp, a white-on-red lattice whose mathematics promised to cut any liar in the shape of his lie.
The Star-Veil across Li Tian's bones held clean. He felt the skein taste him and move on, displeased that there was nothing to eat.
Then Wu changed the game.
He flicked a nail-sized talisman across the ridge and let it vanish into a crack. The ridge's hum split—a second rhythm emerged, a false lee that moved in counter-time to the true wind. Two beats. Two holds. One would betray him.
"You can't hear them both," Wu said softly. "No one can."
Match the beat, not the— Which? Not the breath. He nearly laughed; the cracked tooth kept it in.
He placed the Shard like a tuning fork on stone. It rang—not aloud, but in the bones of his fingers. The Ring cooled to that note. Beneath the double hum he found a lower, older pulse: the colossus's crown seiche, slow and patient. He let that be sovereign. The false lee wrote calligraphy over it—beautiful, confident—and he ignored it like a boast.
Vein Step on the elder beat. Slip between snares that were correct only in the younger song.
He passed. The severance skein combed the space his shin would have occupied if he'd been cheap. Wu's gaze didn't change, but the jade slip in his fingers darkened by a shade.
"Very good," he said, and a charm bloomed in his other hand—a skein anchor, tiny and vicious. He pressed it toward Li Tian like an offered coin.
It wasn't for the body. It was to tag the core.
The Ring knifed ice through his finger—Ban, absolute.
Li Tian didn't swat the anchor. He let it arrive, and at the last inch he laid the Shard's edge against a ridge staple and turned a Wreath-service · Redirect. Not to him. To the mast.
The anchor kissed metal; the skein bit the mast's own heart and coiled itself there with satisfied hunger.
Somewhere under their feet, a Ninefold lens hiccuped, unsure which object to index. The mast glowed white where the tag sank, not crimson.
Wu's smile warmed by a fraction. "Ungenerous," he observed. "But elegant."
He turned, lazy as a cat, and the ridge answered him: behind Li Tian the Foramen's plate jolted; the white needle found a fresh seam and drew a neat diagram through air that ended in the ridge stone at Li Tian's kidney height.
He did not bend. He found the older beat again and was not there when the world expected him to be. The diagram scorched an exact sigil into the ridge, nine nested lines crawling along bronze.
Indexed. Not Li Tian.
The colossus rolled then—not the violent tumble of before but a heavy adjustment, a tide moving inside a mountain. The ridge twisted; the gravity vector tipped another degree. Knife-rain thickened from a hiss to a light applause. Far above, the Storm Eye pulsed, displeased.
The mast's tagged skein shivered and began to drink. A faint white rosary of lights climbed the braids toward the crown. Somewhere a lens tried to follow that ladder. Wu watched the climb and sighed, amused.
"They'll want this recording," he said. "Our little duet."
His hand moved—not to strike, but to set. A jade bead rolled from thumb to lip and chimed without sound. The ridge beneath Li Tian's good foot turned to glass.
OUTBLAST.
He went. No purchase, no grit, only a polished slide toward crimson air. The Drag-Field bias he had set earlier grabbed and failed; the glass beat it.
He did not reach for Hollow Spiral. He did not reach for mDev. The ledger would not survive either.
He reached for posture again.
He threw his dead right arm outward like ballast and let his ribs scream as the torque caught his frame, turning his body from a fall into a slow, deliberate spin. Knife-rain stitched his sleeve without finding flesh. The ridge's ripple approached—a tooth of bone like a punctuation mark. He set his left heel for it, felt the elder beat move through the stone, and let the punctuation end the sentence.
The heel caught. Pain exploded hot-white up his leg. He used it. Pain made time slow. The ridge's glass hissed; his boot found friction. The spin became a lurch inward. He slid to a stop against a staple, breath sawed into ribbons.
Cost: a flare at the ring-bite that made the world black at the edges; a grinding spark at the cracked tooth; a grinding grind at the rib that promised future debt.
Wu's bead chimed again. "Again," he repeated, patient as winter.
"Your elders," Li Tian rasped, voice hoarse from swallowed breath, "—like a good performance?"
"They like a measurable one," Wu said. "You are almost measurable."
The wind paused. True hold. The ridge waited.
Li Tian made a small thing larger: the world became two inches of staple under his palm, one lungful of thin air, a Shard's edge touching cool metal. He turned the tiniest Service · Detune he had turned all day—less than a thread of an angle. The mast's song wavered by a whisper. The severance skein riding it lost a half-step.
The Storm Eye's pulse above missed a sync. The next pressure ping came late.
Wu's eyes, finally, finally, showed a hairline of surprise.
"You're listening," he said again, and the approval in it was real and terrible. "Good. Then hear this."
He tapped a talisman against the air between them. Not to blade. To speak.
Sound unfurled—a traced note that showed him the next four beats before they came. The lip here would go glass, then sticky, then glass again. Knife-rain would thin on the second hold and thicken on the third. The white needle would thread the fourth at knee height.
Insight, given like poison. If Li Tian obeyed it like law, he would be where Wu wanted him each time.
He didn't refuse the map. He refused its sovereignty.
He angled his weight so the first glass made him lower, not faster. He accepted the stick and used the bias he'd set three staples back, invisible to anyone not running on the older beat. He let the thin rain cut his hair again and kept his eyes open through the sparks at the edge of his vision. He lifted his knee over the fourth because the needle had been told to believe in knees.
He passed through the predicted corridor without occupying any of the predicted points.
Wu's smile dropped away. Not anger—interest stripped of courtesy.
The colossus's crown groaned—deep, deep. Somewhere a far lens rang like a bell. The mast's white ladder reached a threshold and flashed. Above, something like a lid blinked.
"Enough," Wu said, regretful as a tutor ending a good lesson. His hand dipped; a bead fell toward the ridge.
Annihilation talisman. Not the Storm Eye's city-killer—smaller, personal. It would hollow the lip for thirty paces, scour the ridge staples to wineglass stems, throw Li Tian into the scarlet with a neat eraser's sweep.
Li Tian had no strength for HSP. No ledger left for mDev. No Crossing Line to burn.
He had breath, posture, the Shard, and the older beat.
He put the Shard against the mast's lowest bracket—where the skein anchor still pulsed—and turned a Wreath-service · Redirect not of a thread or a hinge, but of a descending vector.
The bead struck the ridge and flared—brief, perfect—but the pressure learned a new path in the instant before it bloomed. The mast drank a third of the blossom through the tagged skein and spat another third into the white ladder climbing its braids. The blast that remained opened the lip not outward, but inward—shearing a bowl into the ridge at Li Tian's feet, a cupped, scooped depression that did not erase him.
The world shook. The mast boomed like a struck bell. Ninefold lenses deep in the crown flickered and then steadied, their hum gone from curious to hungry.
Wu's hair stirred for the first time, the blast's edge making his sleeve flare. He looked at the mast's burned tag and smiled properly—bright, wolf-sincere.
"Noted," he said, and the courtesy in the word felt like a knife sheathed for later. He stepped backward into the gale and was gone in three puts of the wind, his footfalls perfect notes on the moving holds, his robes folding themselves into the mist like statements into a correct conclusion.
The ridge rang. The mast hissed. The bowl smoked.
Li Tian stood in the cupped scar, breath ratcheting, chest a brick in a vise. The Ring cooled to a faint, steady thrum. Not safety. Readiness.
Behind him, the Foramen's jamb crawled with the needle's brand; the Archive's white eye watched without watching. Ahead, the ridge narrowed to a rapier, edges feathered with descending snow of bright bone.
He bent, pressed the Shard to the bowl's inner staple, and turned a Service · Mute—dulling the nearest watchers by a hair. He could feel them only as a pressure eased at the back of his neck, like a room with one fewer audience member.
The wind shifted—deeper, stranger. Not Outblast. Not Draw. A long, tidal inhale that did not belong to weather.
The colossus moved, not rolling, but lifting, as if some vast muscle in its neck flexed after a long sleep.
Far below, somewhere under all the stone and organ and star-metal, a roar rolled up that wasn't wind and wasn't machine. It was older. Simian—and not. The Alpha of the scarlet apes answered with a drum-roll of chest, and further still, something under both of them replied with a single, sovereign thump that made the mast's tagged skein shiver.
"Into the crown," Li Tian whispered to himself, because language made intention hard. "Not the rim."
He set his heel on the rapier's first ripple, found the elder beat once more, and went, limp and breath and posture and Shard, into a wind that had begun to learn his name.