The rain tasted like iron and regret.
Jin Yu knelt in the mud, his master's blood soaking through his robes as he tried—uselessly, desperately—to press his hands against wounds that were beyond any healing. Master Chen's breathing came in wet, rattling gasps that Jin Yu knew, with the cold certainty that had kept him alive on the streets as a child, were numbered and finite.
"Master, please—" His voice broke. Eighteen years old and he sounded like the eight-year-old orphan Master Chen had found starving in a Clearwater City alley. "The sect has healers. If I can just—"
"Jin Yu." Master Chen's hand, surprisingly strong despite everything, caught his wrist. "Stop."
The old man's grip was still cultivator-firm, but Jin Yu could feel the qi bleeding out of him with each heartbeat. Around them, the forest clearing bore the scars of violence—scorched earth where Elder Jiang had unleashed his flame techniques, shattered trees from Master Chen's earth pillars, and puddles that reflected nothing but darkness despite the pre-dawn light beginning to gray the sky.
And twenty feet away, Elder Jiang's corpse cooling in the rain.
It had happened so fast.
---
*Twelve hours earlier*
"You're distracted today." Master Chen didn't look up from the spirit herb he was preparing, his knife moving with the precise, economical movements of a master alchemist. "Care to tell me why?"
Jin Yu looked up from his own workstation, where he'd been attempting—unsuccessfully—to properly segment a Crimson Ginseng Root for the past quarter hour. The workshop was warm despite the autumn chill outside, heated by the carefully banked alchemical furnaces that Master Chen maintained with obsessive care.
"I'm not distracted," Jin Yu lied automatically.
Master Chen's knife paused. He finally looked up, one eyebrow raised in that expression Jin Yu had learned to recognize as skeptical amusement. "You've cut that root into sixteen pieces instead of the required twelve, and you're about to tell me you're not distracted?"
Jin Yu looked down. Damn. The old man was right.
"What's bothering you?" Master Chen's voice was gentler now. After ten years together, he knew when to push and when to simply... be there.
Jin Yu set down his own knife, carefully. Everything in Master Chen's workshop was done carefully—hasty movements could ruin experiments worth more than most outer disciples earned in a year. "I overheard some elders talking yesterday. About you. About..." He hesitated.
"About what I'm hiding?" Master Chen finished. His expression didn't change, but something in his eyes did. A shadow, perhaps, or a resignation. "What exactly did they say?"
"Elder Jiang. He told Elder Wen that you'd been seen entering the sect archives again. Late at night. Looking at records about ancient artifacts." Jin Yu met his master's eyes. "He said you were searching for something specific."
The workshop fell silent except for the soft hiss of furnace flames and the steady drum of rain beginning to fall outside. Master Chen was still for a long moment, then he smiled—the same patient smile that had convinced a starving street urchin that maybe, just maybe, this cultivator wouldn't hurt him.
"And if I was?" Master Chen asked softly. "Would you trust me to have good reasons?"
"Always," Jin Yu said, and meant it with everything he was.
That smile widened, warmed. "Good. Because tonight, Jin Yu, I'm going to show you something. Something I probably should have shown you years ago, but..." He turned back to his herb preparation. "Sometimes wisdom is knowing when to reveal a truth, and sometimes it's just cowardice dressed up in caution."
Jin Yu wanted to ask more—his perfect memory was already cataloging every word, every inflection, the way Master Chen's hands had trembled slightly when he mentioned cowardice—but a lifetime of learning to read people's boundaries kept him quiet. Master Chen would explain when he was ready.
He always did.
Except this time, there wouldn't be a chance.
---
*Present*
"Listen to me." Master Chen's voice was weakening, each word clearly an effort. Rain ran into his eyes and he blinked it away with irritation, as if this dying thing was merely an inconvenience interrupting an important lesson. "The storage ring. On my hand. Take it."
"Master, I can't—"
"Jin Yu." The name was sharp. It cut through panic and grief like a blade. "This is your last lesson from me. Don't disappoint me by not paying attention."
Jin Yu's hands shook as he removed the ring from Master Chen's finger. It was a simple thing, hardly worth noticing—plain iron, no decorative engravings, the kind any moderately successful cultivator might own. His perfect memory noted, with the detached precision it maintained even in crisis, that it was warm to the touch.
Warmer than it should be.
"Inside," Master Chen whispered, "there's a compartment. Hidden. You'll need to—" His breath hitched. Blood flecked his lips.
"Don't talk. Please. Just hold on—"
"I'm *teaching* you, boy!" The old man's eyes flashed with that iron will Jin Yu had witnessed a hundred times in the workshop, that same stubborn determination that wouldn't accept imperfection in either alchemy or students. "The Crucible. That's what Jiang wanted. What he killed me for."
Crucible? Jin Yu had never heard Master Chen mention any artifact by that name. But before he could ask, his master continued, words tumbling out faster now, urgent.
"It chose you. Years ago, when I first found you. I could see it in your eyes—the hunger for understanding, the need for perfection. The same things that drove the Refiners. That's why I took you in, Jin Yu. Not kindness. Not pity." A painful smile. "Well. Not *just* those things."
"I don't understand—"
"You will." Master Chen's hand reached up, touched Jin Yu's face with a gentleness that made his chest ache. "You're damaged, Jin Yu. Incomplete. All those years on the streets, learning to survive instead of to live. But you burn. And that burning—that's what the Crucible needs."
Jin Yu felt wetness on his face and couldn't tell if it was rain or tears. Probably both.
"Don't let anyone know you have it," Master Chen continued. His voice was fading now, growing distant. "Hide it. Study it. It will teach you things I never could. Show you the path that was lost. But Jin Yu—" His grip tightened one last time, pulling Jin Yu down until their foreheads nearly touched. "Don't lose yourself to it. The Refiners did, once. That's why they're gone. Remember: strength without wisdom is just destruction with purpose."
"Master Chen, please—"
"Your name." The old man's eyes were starting to glaze. "Did I ever tell you what it means? *Jin Yu*. Metal and jade. Hard and pure. That's what I saw in you. What you can become." A rattling breath. "What you will become, if you survive long enough."
Around them, Jin Yu heard sounds in the forest—footsteps crashing through underbrush, voices calling out. The sect's disciples, finally arriving. Too late. Always too late.
"Promise me," Master Chen whispered. "Promise you'll survive. Promise you'll become strong enough that this—" He gestured weakly at the ruined clearing, at Elder Jiang's corpse, at his own failing body. "—never happens again. To you or to anyone you protect."
"I promise." The words came out fierce, hard. A vow carved in iron and jade. "I'll never be this weak again."
Master Chen smiled. His last smile, Jin Yu realized with crystalline horror. "Liar. You're already strong. You just don't know it yet."
Then his eyes closed. His chest stilled. And Jin Yu was alone in the rain with his master's corpse and a storage ring that pulsed warm against his palm.
The disciples burst into the clearing—young, wide-eyed outer sect members led by an older inner disciple Jin Yu vaguely recognized. They stopped short at the scene: two bodies, destruction everywhere, and Jin Yu kneeling in the mud, covered in blood that wasn't his own.
"What happened?" the inner disciple demanded, hand already on his sword.
Jin Yu looked up at them. Through them. His perfect memory was already filing away this moment, cataloging it with crystalline precision: the way their faces paled in the dawn light, the smell of blood and ozone and rain, the weight of Master Chen's storage ring in his hand.
He forced himself to stand. His legs shook, but he stood.
"Elder Jiang attacked us," Jin Yu said. His voice sounded strange—flat, emotionless. The voice of someone who'd learned, on brutal streets, how to hide everything that mattered. "My master killed him. Then he died."
It was truth. Not the whole truth—there were questions about artifacts and Crucibles and burning hungers that Jin Yu would keep to himself—but truth nonetheless.
The inner disciple's eyes flickered to Elder Jiang's corpse, then to Master Chen, then back to Jin Yu. Calculating. Suspicious. "Elder Jiang attacked? A senior elder? Why would—"
"Ask him," Jin Yu said, gesturing to the corpse. "Oh, wait. You can't. Because my master killed him for trying to kill us."
Tension rippled through the group. A few hands moved toward weapons. Jin Yu was outnumbered, exhausted, emotionally devastated, and still somehow managed to not care. Let them try. Let them all try.
"Jin Yu." Another voice, older and calmer. The disciples parted and an elderly woman in inner elder's robes stepped through. Jin Yu recognized her—Elder Shen, one of the sect's formation masters. She'd been kind to Master Chen, in the past. Maybe she'd be kind to him now.
Maybe.
"Elder Shen," Jin Yu said carefully.
She looked at the scene, her weathered face giving nothing away. "You're injured?"
Jin Yu looked down at himself, noticed for the first time the gash across his ribs where Elder Jiang's flame blade had caught him. Not deep, but bleeding. "It's nothing."
"It's something," Elder Shen said firmly. "Come. The sect master will want to hear your account, but first we get that treated." She glanced at the bodies. "Retrieve them both. Gently. Master Chen was a good man."
As the disciples moved to obey, Elder Shen placed a hand on Jin Yu's shoulder—lighter than Master Chen's grip had been, but steadying nonetheless. "You're safe now," she said quietly.
Jin Yu almost laughed. Safe? He'd never been safe. Not in the orphanage, not on the streets, not even in Master Chen's workshop. Safety was an illusion people told themselves to sleep at night.
But he nodded anyway and let her guide him toward the sect proper, the storage ring heavy in his pocket and heavier still in his thoughts.
Inside that ring was something called a Crucible. Something worth killing for. Worth dying for.
Jin Yu was going to find out why.