The first time water had touched his anchor, it had tried to float it up and out of his control.
It had been, in his professional opinion, rude.
Yuan He spent the next day pretending he was normal.
He walked. He worked. He kept his face neutral while his ribs complained and his mind looped the same sequence like a prayer he refused to believe in.
Neutral. Earth. Metal. Water. Abort.
Neutral. Earth. Metal. Water. Abort.
By the time night came, he understood two things.
One: the sect's rules could be twisted.
Two: his own body could be twisted too, if he let impatience do the work.
He didn't let it.
He waited until the dorm quieted into its late-night shape, the one where people stopped watching each other because they were too tired to keep pretending. When the snores became steady and the muttering turned incoherent, he slid off
his bunk.
He didn't take the manual this time.
Not because it wasn't useful.
Because he already had the dangerous parts memorized, and carrying a book out at night was a kind of announcement.
He slipped into the yard and then into the herb yard, moving along walls and shadows like he was borrowing space rather than owning it.
Behind the drying racks, the air was cooler and cleaner. The plants didn't care about his reputation. They only cared if water ran in the channels.
He sat in the same spot and listened.
A distant dog.
Insects.
A soft rustle as wind shifted dried leaves.
No close footsteps.
Good enough.
"Okay," he whispered to himself, barely shaping the sound. "We do this like a sane person."
He set his tongue, relaxed his jaw, and placed his hands in the seal. His shoulders tried to lift. He forced them down.
He ran the neutral cadence first until the anchor returned.
Then he did it again. Same result.
"Still there," he murmured. "Good."
He added earth, because earth had behaved like a polite guest.
One earth-leaning breath: weight, settling, sand in a jar. The anchor stayed put.
Then metal.
One metal-leaning breath: boundary, edge, definition.
A thin static traced along his forearms. Brief, clean, and then gone.
Repeatable.
He let himself breathe normally for a few beats, just to prove he could stop without collapsing into nothing.
Nothing bad happened.
He nodded once, almost reflexive.
"Same conditions," he whispered. "Same results. Good."
Now the variable.
Water.
He didn't change the cue this time. He didn't give himself permission to change words and time and order all at once. If he couldn't control his own experiments, he deserved what happened to him.
So he kept the cue.
Coolness. Flow. Loosening without slipping.
He changed only one thing.
Time.
He reset to neutral until the anchor returned, then walked earth into metal again. The same faint static. The same clean fade when he went neutral.
He waited until his body felt like itself.
Then he tried water again, but he treated it like a needle, not a flood.
On the exhale, he touched the idea of water only briefly, then let the rest of the breath go neutral.
The anchor wavered.
Just once.
A tiny lift, a hint of upward motion like a bubble wanting to rise.
Yuan He's hands tensed.
He caught it.
He loosened his fingers and dropped his shoulders.
"Don't be tense," he whispered. "Observe."
He breathed normally and waited.
No nausea.
No climbing sickness in the throat.
No tightening spiral in the chest.
The anchor settled again, lower than before, as if it had reconsidered.
He stayed still.
Then, because he wasn't allowed to be optimistic without paying for it, he did the only honest thing.
He ran the whole sequence again.
The anchor tried to lift again, less than the first time, like a reflex losing confidence.
He released his focus on water early and returned to neutral for the rest of the exhale.
The anchor stayed seated.
His stomach stayed calm.
His ribs stayed sore, but they had been sore before. That was noise, not a new signal.
He let out a breath and realized it had turned into something close to a laugh.
He swallowed it.
"Okay," he whispered. "So you don't hate water. You hate… too much water."
He sat there behind the racks and did not do the thing his brain wanted to do, which was add another water step to "confirm," and then another to "strengthen," and then another until he recreated yesterday's drift by sheer stupidity.
He capped it.
Like a civilized man.
Like a scientist.
Like someone who didn't want to die.
He breathed normally for a minute and ran his recovery check, because the check was the point.
Head: clear.
Stomach: calm.
Forearms: static gone.
Chest: no pressure spike.
Breath: steady.
If there was a faint warmth in his belly now, it was so small he refused to call it anything.
He didn't need warmth.
He needed boring.
Repeatable.
He closed his eyes and replayed the sequence like he was saving it to memory:
Neutral. Earth. Metal. Water, but just briefly. Stop before drifting away again.
"Elemental Interlock," he murmured, and this time the name didn't feel like a joke. It felt like a handle. "Version… fine. Version 'don't drown.'"
He almost smiled.
He didn't, not really.
He rose and slipped back toward the dorms.
On the way, the herb yard channel water made a quiet sound as it moved through the dirt, and for a moment his mind tried to map it onto his breathing.
Flow with constraints.
Loop, not pile.
He lay down on his bunk and stared into the dark.
The Merit Hall's rules were still waiting to be used against him.
Sun Ba's orbit was still waiting for him to make a mistake.
He was still a weak outer sect disciple with a five-element root that looked like a joke.
None of that had changed.
But water had stopped being rude.
That was…something.
"Tomorrow," he whispered, so quietly it was almost just breath, "we keep it boring."
Then he added, because he couldn't help himself, "And if it stops being boring, we stop."