They did not let them rest.
The Blood Pits were only the first cut.
By midday the burning in his flesh had settled into a deep, ugly throb. Every breath scraped. His muscles felt full of ground glass. Even his eyelids stung.
Perfect time for more training, in other words.
"Orphans," Instructor Kuan barked, "shadow drills. Bone Stream has their turn after."
Groans rippled through the line, too quiet to be heard by anyone with authority. The orphans filed out of the pit cavern in a wavering column, dripping red onto stone, clutching rough cloth to their skin as the poison mix dried in uneven streaks.
Jin limped beside him, each step stiff. "My legs feel like they're full of snakes," he muttered. "Big ones. With teeth."
"Snakes don't have teeth," he said.
"Then whatever hurts and hates me." Jin squinted at him. "You barely flinched in there."
"I did," he said. "On the inside."
Jin snorted. "No, on the inside you were staring at something only you could see. Your eyes go funny when you do that."
He hadn't realized. That was…not ideal.
He made his face blank, the way he had learned in the war. Blankness was armor. In a demonic clan, emotion was allowed, even used. But showing too much of the wrong kind in the wrong direction at the wrong time got you killed.
The tunnels twisted downward, then leveled. The air cooled, losing the thick iron reek of blood and taking on damp soil and cold stone instead. Shadows thickened in the corners where torchlight didn't quite reach.
Kuan led them into the Shadow Arena - a low, wide cavern with a sand-dusted floor and vertical cracks along the walls. High above, thin slits in the stone let in razor slivers of daylight, more suggestion than light.
This place had always felt like the inside of a skull to him. Empty, echoing, waiting to be filled with pain and memory.
"Line," Kuan snapped.
They lined up. Thirty children, blood-streaked, shivering, eyes too big. The older instructor looked them over like a butcher inspecting carcasses.
"Blood Pits took five," he said flatly. "You stand because the mountain hasn't spat you out yet. Do not mistake that for value."
Five.
He had counted differently under the blood. Panic, poison, the strain of holding his own breath. He had felt at least six movements go still. Maybe one of them had been dragged out and revived.
It didn't matter. The number was only going to go down.
He suppressed the urge to look for the faces that were gone. He already knew at least two of them. Names blurred. Faces did not.
Kuan lifted a wooden staff, flipped it to catch by the middle, then stabbed one end into the sand. "Shadow Stream teaches that fear is a tool. Panic is a weakness. The Blood Pits woke your fear. Good. Now we see how much panic rots in you."
He jerked his chin at the cracks in the walls.
"Drill one. Into the shadows. Out of the shadows. Move until you fall. If you vomit, clean it with your tongue."
There were worse threats, but that one was vivid enough for the younger children to flinch.
He did not flinch. He remembered this drill. In his first life he had stumbled through it half-blind with panic, lungs still tasting of blood, body refusing to obey.
Today his body refused for different reasons. The poison burn, the exhaustion, the deep ache from the pits. But his mind was steady in a way it had not been the first time.
Kuan's gaze slid across the line, paused on his face, then moved on.
"Begin!"
The line broke. Children scattered toward the walls, vanishing into cracks two, three bodies wide, then bursting out again into the center. Some hesitated before entering the narrow dark. Others tried to squeeze too many at once and jammed.
He walked, not ran, toward a crack he remembered well. Its floor angled down sharply then turned, making a tight curve that could easily twist an ankle.
[Observation: host's stride length stable.]
[Observation: respiration elevated but controlled.]
The words flickered through him like cold ink poured into water. No sound, no glow. Just knowledge that appeared without being learned.
He stepped into the shadow.
The change was immediate. Temperature dropped. Sound muffled. The air smelled of dust and old sweat. Stone scraped his bare feet.
He let his hand trail lightly along the wall, fingers brushing roughness and old gouges. Other hands had done the same for years. Decades. This place smelled like the ghosts of children who had run themselves into the ground and found only more ground waiting.
His heartbeat thudded. Breath in. Breath out. The poison burn spiked with each movement then leveled, like a beast roused and soothed in the same motion.
[Body load: high.]
[Current collapse risk: moderate.]
[Recommendation: reduce wasted motion.]
"Working on it," he thought dryly.
If the system heard, it gave no sign.
At the bend, his foot skidded on a patch of sand. Memory overlaid the moment - the first time, falling, knees slamming into stone, chin cracking against the wall, teeth cutting into tongue. The hot rush of blood in his mouth. Kuan's boot in his ribs a minute later when he emerged too slowly.
He shifted his weight before the skid finished this time. Let his heel slide, toe catch, body roll with it instead of against. The stumble became a low step. He pushed off the wall with his palm and flowed out of the crack into the arena center.
Light hit his eyes again. He did not blink.
Kuan's head turned a fraction. Thexn he looked away, barking at a girl who had emerged gasping and bent double.
"In," Kuan said.
They went back.
The drill blurred into repetition. In, out. Dark, light. Narrow, open. Breath, burn. The body tried to fall into old patterns of panic. The mind refused.
He used each circuit to test something.
One time, he shortened his stride further, making his steps soft, toes contacting first, then heel. Less jarring. Less waste.
[Energy use decreased.]
Another time, he focused on not thinking about the next bend. Let his body move and his awareness stretch wider instead - counting other heartbeats, other breaths in the crack.
Three children in this tunnel besides him. One wheezing harshly. One taking tiny, tripping steps. One moving almost as smoothly as he was.
He filed that away.
By the twentieth pass his thighs burned fiercely. His shoulders ached though he wasn't using his arms for anything but balance. Poison, he knew. It sank deeper more quickly with exertion.
Children began to drop. First a boy with too-thin legs, collapsing in the arena center and lying there, chest heaving. Then a girl whose hand slipped from the wall and who slammed into stone with a crack. She staggered out with blood on her temple and promptly fell again.
Kuan didn't stop the drill.
"Do you think enemies wait when you fall?" he called. "Do you think righteous swords will give you time to stand?"
Enemy.
Sword.
For a moment the arena floor swam. The sand turned to rubble. The cracks in the walls became shattered tunnels. Torchlight warped into fire. The air filled with smoke and screaming.
His breath hitched. The old, deep-standing panic reared and the system bit.
[Recollection spike detected.]
[Emotional disturbance: severe.]
[Stabilizing.]
A cold line cut through the rising chaos, as sharp as a blade. His field of vision sharpened instead of narrowing. He saw the wall, the crack, the exact angle of Kuan's staff as it rested against his shoulder.
He inhaled. Smoke turned back into dust. Screams into panting children. Fire into torches.
Useful, he thought. You're useful if you keep doing that.
His body was still shaking with remembered fear. His training in this life had not yet shaped reflex into weapon. But his mind, scarred from another life, knew the shape of breakdown and how to walk around its edges.
When Kuan finally snapped, "Stop," the world in his chest felt like a furnace that had run out of fuel. His legs were jelly. The poison burn had settled into the marrow like a bitter taste that wouldn't leave.
Eight children lay on the floor and did not rise when the instructor passed. Two of them twitched weakly. The rest stared at the ceiling or into nothing.
"Seven of you survived the Blood Pits only to fail at walking in the dark," Kuan said coldly. "Remember them. If you cannot move when ordered, that is the worth of your life."
He gestured to a pair of older disciples lurking at the edge of the arena. "Drag them to Ash Stream. If they live, they can scrub latrines."
The Ash Stream handled everything that turned to waste - trash, corpses, spilled blood. Surviving as a servant under them was a different kind of death.
Jin sucked in a breath beside him. "They're not even… they're kids."
"So are we," he said quietly.
Jin shot him a glare that held more hurt than anger. "You talk like an old man sometimes."
"I feel like one."
"Then die quietly like one, instead of dragging me along," Jin muttered.
There was no heat in it. The boy's hand brushed his knuckles briefly, as if confirming he was still solid.
"Bone Stream's turn," Kuan said. "Try not to embarrass me."
Bone Stream.
He crushed the flinch before it reached his face. The Blood Pits had been pain. Shadow drills had been exhaustion. Bone Stream was different.
Bone Stream broke you in ways that never fully went back.
They shuffled after a thin man in gray, legs heavy, bodies unsteady. The Bone Stream attendant smelled faintly of herbs and old ash. His hair was tied in a strict knot, his eyes always half-lidded, as if nothing in front of him was worth fully seeing.
The bone halls were colder. Narrower. The walls here were smoother, carved more carefully, as if the stone itself had been shaped under slow, grinding pressure.
They passed rooms with doors of iron lattice, behind which he glimpsed racks of strange tools - hooks, clamps, rods. The air here held the metallic tang of old medicine and the faint, distant sound of someone moaning through clenched teeth.
The attendant stopped at a side chamber and gestured them in.
"Assessment," he said simply.
The chamber was rectangular, lit by four evenly spaced lanterns. Eight low stone platforms lined the walls. On each, a wooden frame had been strapped - crude but well-used. Ropes dangled from the sides, stained darker at the middle from years of contact with sweat and blood.
Elder Lin was already inside, hands bare now. Her fingertips were indeed darker, callused in ways that had nothing to do with weapons.
"Lie down," she said. "Back flat. Arms at your sides."
The order rolled over him, almost making his body obey automatically. This room was where he had first learned that his bones were not truly his. That in this clan, flesh and bone were clan property to be broken and reforged like any other tool.
He chose a platform near the center. Not closest to the door - those were grabbed by children whose first instinct was escape. Not farthest back, where the most fearful tried to melt into shadows.
Middle was best. Close enough to see everything. Far enough that any sudden blow might hit someone else first.
He lay down. The stone was cold against his back. The wooden frame creaked faintly under his weight. Rope brushed his wrists and ankles, rough but not yet tight.
On his left, Jin swallowed audibly as he lay back. "Do you know what..."
"Yes," he said. "They're not doing full reforging today. Just testing."
"How can you..."
"Because you can still walk," he said. "They don't waste reforging on legs that can't hold you up."
That was the clan's mercy: purely practical.
Elder Lin moved from platform to platform, pressing fingers into joints, prodding along ribs, tapping bones with knuckles. Her touch was impersonal, assessing. Children hissed or bit back yelps as she found bruises or old fractures.
When she reached him, her fingers paused a fraction longer at his collarbones, along his shins, over his ribs. She pressed at his wrists and ankles, testing range of motion.
"Too stiff," she murmured. "Pits tightened everything. Good."
Her gaze flicked to his eyes. "You did not drown."
"No, Elder," he said.
"Did you want to?"
He blinked. In his first life he had not been able to understand questions like that. Now he heard the trap and the genuine curiosity tangled together.
"No," he said slowly. "I want to see more than the bottom of a pit."
Her mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. It might have been a spasm.
"Ambition is useful," she said. "If your bones hold it."
She pressed two fingers hard into a point just above his knee. Pain shot up his thigh.
[Minor microfracture history detected.]
[Past damage: healed improperly.]
[Risk under future strain: increased.]
He clenched his teeth. Not at the pain. The pain was manageable, but at the way the system's observation lined up with memory.
In battle, years from now, he had taken a hammer strike to that leg. The bone had snapped more easily than it should have. He had thought it misfortune.
Maybe it had started here.
"Did you injure this in training?" Elder Lin asked.
"Yes, Elder," he lied without hesitation. "Fell on the stone last week. It still aches."
Training accidents were acceptable. He could not tell her the truth: An echo from a life you never saw.
"Hm." Her thumb shifted to a slightly different spot and pressed. The pain changed angle.
"It will break there later if I leave it," she said calmly. "It will break when you need it least. When you are running from someone faster. When you are carrying someone heavier. When you are climbing out of fire."
His throat tightened.
"Better to break it when you have no worth," she went on, voice almost gentle. "When the clan can afford to lose you."
In his first life, he had heard that speech and only understood that pain was coming. Now he heard the cold practicality in it and the twisted, brutal care.
"Not today," she decided, releasing his leg. "Your blood is already busy surviving the pits. We break what we can mend quickly. Not what we can't."
Relief was a curious thing. It felt less like weight lifting off and more like a reprieve from a sentence that still waited on the horizon.
"Strap wrists and ankles," she told the attendant. "We realign their joints. No fractures."
Ropes tightened around his limbs, snug but not cutting off circulation. He flexed fingers and toes once before the knots bit fully.
Elder Lin's methods for joint realignment were legendary. She could twist an arm until it popped, then slam it back into place in a way that improved flexibility and future force.
It also hurt like being pulled apart.
As she moved to the first platform and began, the room filled with the sharp, wet pops of joints shifting and the hissed cries of children trying not to scream.
"Breathe when she pulls," he told Jin quietly. "Hold your breath and you'll pass out."
"Why do you know all of this?" Jin whispered back, eyes wide. "You talk like you've done this ten times."
He had. And more.
"Because I don't like surprises," he said.
It was the closest thing to the truth that didn't sound insane.
The system hummed. Not a sound, not a voice - just a sense of threads being spun quietly in the background, weighing pain, tension, angles of bone.
[Forecast: post-session mobility decrease 40–60%.]
[Forecast: long-term flexibility increase probable.]
It was odd, having his suffering quantified. Oddly…comforting, too. Pain with clear gain was easier to endure than pain that felt random.
When she reached his platform, Elder Lin did not waste words.
"Left arm," she said.
He exhaled as her hands closed around his wrist and elbow.
The pull was sudden, sharp. The joint slid, then caught. A flood of heat rushed through the limb, followed by a strange, light feeling, like the arm had been hollowed out and refilled.
He hissed between his teeth but did not cry out.
"Good," she said. "Again."
"Wait..."
Too late. The second wrench caught him mid-inhale. Pain flared brighter, then settled deeper. His vision spotted for a heartbeat.
[Joint alignment: improved.]
[Micro-tears: present.]
[Recovery window: three days under normal load.]
Normal load. Nothing in this clan was normal.
She moved on. Right arm. Ankles. Each adjustment set his nerves on fire, then left a strange clarity in their wake, like a limb after long numbness.
By the time she stepped away, his body felt wrong in ten directions at once. Too loose and too tight. Too light and too heavy.
"Sit," she ordered the room.
Ropes were cut. Children pushed themselves up, some swaying, some unable to hide whimpers.
"If you can stand, stand," she added. "If you cannot stand, crawl. If you cannot crawl, lie there until someone decides whether you are still worth food. Do not sleep. Sleep is for after work."
He slid off the platform. His feet hit the floor and nearly slid out from under him. He caught himself on the edge of the stone, knuckles whitening.
Jin tried to bounce down and almost fell on his face.
"Careful," he snapped.
"Careful? My legs are made of noodles," Jin groaned. "Elder Lin took them away and put them back wrong."
"They're better," he said.
"How would you know?"
"Because later you'll be grateful. Or you'll be dead and it won't matter."
"Those are terrible choices," Jin muttered.
He didn't disagree.
They made it out of Bone Stream's hall on unsteady legs. The tunnels beyond seemed to stretch longer than before, every step a negotiation with muscles that had been twisted into new shapes.
The clan's daily rhythm moved around them as if nothing had changed. Outer disciples trotted past carrying bundles of herbs or sacks of beast meat. A Blood General strode by with a group of Shadow Stream trainees behind him, their steps synchronized.
No one spared the orphans more than a passing glance. In Blood Shadow Clan, suffering children were the most common decoration.
"Back to orphan hall," the gray-robed attendant said. "You will be summoned for evening drills. If you're late, you know what happens."
They did. Late meant lashes. Lashes left scars. Scars that hindered future training were sanded off one way or another.
The orphan hall was a long cavern divided by hanging cloths into clusters of pallets. Smoke from cooking fires drifted at chest height, blurring faces and carving light into slanted bars. Simple stew smell - thin, but hot - coiled through the air.
The moment they stepped inside, a reedy voice called, "Late again, Jin. Instructor Kuan will..."
The speaker cut off as he saw the state of them. Blood streaks. Shaking limbs. Eyes too hollow.
"Oh," the man said. "Bone Stream day."
Orphan-Mentor Hui. Thin as a reed, with a permanent stoop and hands scarred from old work. Once a mid-tier fighter, now a caretaker for children who might or might not live long enough to replace him.
In his first life Hui had been the closest thing he'd had to a parent.
"Sit," Hui said, voice softening. "Eat. Slowly. If you puke it up, I'll cry. And then you'll clean it."
Jin nearly collapsed onto a pallet. "You won't cry," he muttered. "You'll just beat us with the spoon again."
"That is how I cry," Hui said.
He shuffled over with two bowls, pressed one into Jin's hands and another into his.
The stew was mostly broth, with occasional shreds of meat and bits of root. It tasted like heaven.
He drank it carefully, small sips, letting the warmth slide into the cold, aching spaces between bones. Bodies that had been shocked and twisted all morning responded greedily, muscles relaxing a fraction.
Hui watched from a crouch, sharp eyes missing little.
"You kept your head above the pit," the older man said quietly to him after a while. "I saw."
"You were in the cavern?" he asked.
"I sweep after," Hui said. "Less screaming. More quiet. But I stand in the upper arch when they dunk you rats. I like to know who I'll still see tomorrow."
He took another careful sip. "Five fewer," he said.
"Four," Hui corrected. "One of them started breathing again after I kicked his ribs."
Jin choked on his stew. "You kicked..."
"Gently," Hui said. "Mostly gently. It's amazing what a body will do when you remind it it owes you money."
Jin wheezed laughter into his bowl.
Hui's gaze shifted back to him. "You were calm in the pit. You were first into the cracks. You didn't flail when Lin tore your joints apart." He tilted his head. "Something on your mind, Xue Yan?"
Revenge. Survival. A Swordsman's silhouette etched into his bones. The traitor's last, twisted smile. A system whispering cold facts behind his eyes.
"Just…didn't want to drown," he said.
"A good reason." Hui scratched at his jaw. "Also a rare one." He leaned closer. "Listen, rat. Whatever you think, the elders don't see you. Not yet. You are bones and meat and potential. Not a person. You understand?"
"I do," he said.
"Good. That means you survive long enough for them to notice," Hui said. "Don't be first. Don't be last. Don't brag. Don't cower. Don't look like you have secrets."
That last instruction was…awkward.
"Hard when he always looks like that," Jin said, gesturing with his spoon. "Like he's hiding something clever and rude."
"I'm hiding how much I hate you," he said evenly.
Jin grinned weakly. "See?"
Hui eyed them both. "Annoying. But you watch each other. That increases survival." He patted his knee as if soothing an old ache. "I like brats who survive. They come back later and complain about how badly I raised them. Very satisfying."
He turned to go, then paused. "Oh. There's a girl from Venom Stream who keeps asking if the orphan with the ugly scowl survived the pits. Didn't say which one. But your scowl is uglier than most."
Venom Stream.
His mind flashed to a face he half-remembered: sharp eyes, quick hands, a smile that flashed like a knife. Older in his last life. Dead early in the war, lungs eaten from the inside by a righteous poison that had turned her own arts against her.
"Name?" he asked.
"Mei," Hui said. "They call her Little Viper. Which is unfair to vipers."
Yes. That one.
In his first life they had barely spoken until both were nearly grown. By then the clan was already sliding toward disaster.
"If she comes looking," Hui continued, "try not to bite her. Venom Stream brats hold grudges."
Jin elbowed him. "He can't bite anyone. He only glooms at them until they regret being born."
He ignored them both and focused on finishing his stew. The warmth spread. His limbs felt less like loose rope and more like bruised wood.
Evening drills would come. Pain would come. Tomorrow would drag them back to one of the same places: pits, shadows, bone halls.
But a baseline had been set.
He had made it through the Blood Pits without drowning. Through shadow drills without freezing. Through joint alignment without losing consciousness. Jin was alive. Hui was here. Mei existed somewhere in the hive of tunnels, still snarling at anyone who got in her way.
And behind his eyes, the system had stirred.
As he set the empty bowl aside, the cold presence whispered again.
[Day summary:]
[Blood Pits initiation: survived.]
[Shadow Drill basic pattern: recorded.]
[Bone realignment: partial.]
[Host status: alive.]
There was no approval in it. No praise. Just fact.
He lay back on the pallet, staring at the cloth ceiling that sagged between ropes, smoke shadows painting it in blotches.
Alive.
In his first life, that word had been something he clung to out of stubbornness, without any clear goal beyond one more day. One more breath. One more step.
Now it was a starting point.
He closed his eyes.
Watch, he told the cold thing in his skull. Remember what I can't see. Count what I can't count. I'll handle the rest.
No answer. But he felt, faintly, something like attention sharpen.
Outside, somewhere above all the stone, Poisoned Ridge's poisonous wind hissed through twisted trees. Somewhere beyond that, on distant cold mountains, righteous swords gleamed in the hands of men who had never seen these tunnels and did not care they existed.
Yet.
He let the ache in his bones spread, let the fatigue drag him toward the thin, brittle sleep of demonic orphans.
Tomorrow, he would begin to shape this childhood into a weapon.
Tomorrow, he would start pulling at the threads that had strangled them the first time.
One day, far from now, he would stand before the Swordsman who had cut his clan from the world.
And when that sword came down again, his bones would not break where Elder Lin had warned.
They would hold.
His shadow would move the way Kuan wanted it to.
His blood would remember the pits and refuse to spill for free.
And the man behind that sword would see his own reflection in Xue Yan's eyes as he died.
For now, he slept.
The system watched.