—————
The library smelled of old paper and neglect.
Not the romantic kind of neglect that ancient archives wore like a badge—this was the practical variety. Dust on the upper shelves where no one reached. A water stain spreading across the ceiling in the northeast corner like a slow-moving continent. Three of the eight reading lamps unlit because no one had replaced the oil. The Freya City Academy library served its students the way a tired horse served its rider: adequately, without enthusiasm, and with the quiet understanding that neither party expected excellence from the other.
Ron sat at a desk in the far back, tucked between a shelf of agricultural almanacs and a wall that someone had scratched initials into at some point in the previous decade. The location was deliberate. From here, the librarian's desk was invisible behind two rows of shelving, and the nearest occupied table held a girl he didn't recognize, asleep on her folded arms with a book about mineral classification serving as a pillow.
Privacy. He needed privacy for this.
The bruise on his jaw was fresh—three hours old, already swelling into a hard knot beneath the skin. Li Feng this time, not Chen Bao. A shoulder check in the corridor that had escalated the way these things always did with eleven-year-olds: words, then shoving, then a fist Ron hadn't seen coming because he'd been watching Li Feng's eyes instead of his hands.
But something had been different this time.
When Li Feng's knuckle connected with his jaw and Ron's back hit the corridor wall, the pain had been familiar—sharp, disorienting, accompanied by the copper taste of a bitten tongue. What followed was not. Instead of the usual wash of helpless anger, a thought had surfaced with strange clarity, rising through the shock like a bubble through dark water.
There are ways to stop this.
Not soul skills. Not spirit power. Something older, simpler, more fundamental.
The dream-memories were fading. Each day they lost definition, like a charcoal sketch left in the rain—the broad shapes remained, but the fine details blurred and ran together. He'd already lost most of the plot. The boy with twin spirits was a silhouette now, featureless, walking through events Ron could no longer sequence. The rabbit girl was a feeling more than an image. The war was a rumor his sleeping mind had once overheard.
But certain things persisted with stubborn clarity. The glowing rectangles. The scrolling. And movies—moving pictures on screens, telling stories with sound and light and actors who performed impossible physical feats that audiences consumed like popcorn.
Popcorn. A word he knew the meaning of but couldn't source. Corn, heated until it exploded into white puffs. Eaten from paper bags in dark rooms where the moving pictures played.
None of that mattered.
What mattered was the fighting.
In those moving pictures, people had fought with their bodies—not with spirits, not with soul power, but with technique. Structured, systematic methods of combat that transformed the human body into a weapon through training and repetition. He remembered watching—had he watched? Had the other him watched? The boundary was uncertain and increasingly irrelevant—figures in white uniforms executing precise strikes. Feet rising to head height. Hands moving in patterns that were simultaneously beautiful and brutal.
Martial arts.
The words carried weight in two languages, one of which he was rapidly forgetting.
Ron pulled the nearest book from the shelf without looking at the title. A Practical Survey of Body Cultivation Techniques in the Pre-Spirit Era. Dry. Academic. Perfect.
He opened it.
The text was dense and poorly organized, written by someone who valued thoroughness over clarity. But the information was there, buried in paragraphs that wandered like lost travelers. Before the widespread awakening of spirits—before soul masters became the dominant martial force on the continent—human combat had relied on physical conditioning and structured fighting methods. The book referenced them dismissively, the way a man with a carriage might reference walking. Historically noteworthy. Practically obsolete.
But they were real.
Ron turned pages. Found references to striking systems—open hand, closed fist, elbow, knee. Grappling traditions from the northern plains. A brief mention of weapon-based methods that had evolved in the coastal regions where spirit awakening rates were historically low.
He closed the book. Pulled another. Regional Combat Traditions of the Western Provinces. Then a third: The Body as Instrument: Physical Training Methods for Low-Level Soul Masters. This last one was more useful—it acknowledged, grudgingly, that soul masters below level twenty often lacked combat-applicable spirit skills and might benefit from supplementary physical techniques.
Ron read for forty minutes, cross-referencing passages, building a framework. The books confirmed what the dream-memories suggested: structured fighting arts existed, had existed for centuries, and were largely ignored by a culture obsessed with spirit rings and soul skills. The gap between knowing this and using it was the width of a canyon, but the bridge was already forming in his mind.
Because the dream-memories held something the books did not.
Kendo.
The word didn't exist in any of the texts before him. It belonged to the other world—the dream-world, the novel-world, the place where popcorn existed and stories were consumed on glowing rectangles. But the concept was vivid. A sword art, stripped to its essence. Not flashy. Not complex. A weapon—traditionally a blade, but a stick would serve—wielded with both hands, emphasizing strikes along central lines. Overhead. Diagonal. Thrust. The geometry of it was elegant in its simplicity: you stood here, you cut there, and everything between was discipline.
He remembered stances. Footwork. The way a practitioner's weight settled into the rear leg before a strike, loading energy like a drawn bow. The raised guard—sword above the head, tip angled back, exposing the body in a way that felt wrong until you understood that the exposure was the point, because it shortened the distance between intention and execution.
Chudan. Jodan. Gedan.
Terms from a language that was dissolving in his mind like sugar in tea, but the physical reality they described remained solid. He could see them. Feel them, almost—the phantom sensation of a wooden handle against his palms, the rotation of his hips driving force through his arms.
Ron pulled the sheet of rice paper from his bag.
The pen came when he called. Yellow ring, faint glow, the familiar warmth settling into his right hand. He held it beneath the desk, angled away from the sleeping girl three tables over. The golden tip touched the paper.
He drew.
Not diagrams this time. Figures. A human form in the basic ready stance—feet shoulder-width, knees slightly bent, weapon held at center line. Then the same form transitioning into an overhead guard, weight shifting back, arms extending upward. Then the cut: a descending strike that traveled along the body's central axis, driven by the drop of the hips and the snap of the wrists at the terminal point.
The pen's skill engaged. Substrate Inscription burned each image into the rice paper in luminous gold, and as the lines took shape, the familiar analytical deepening began—that reorganization of knowledge that transformed vague impressions into structured understanding. The phantom stances in his dream-memory sharpened. Clarified. He could feel the weight distribution now, could sense where the balance points were, could identify the mechanical logic that connected the footwork to the hip rotation to the strike.
He drew another figure. The diagonal cut—kesa-giri, the word surfacing and dissolving almost simultaneously. Blade descending from the left shoulder to the right hip. The body mechanics were different here: the rear foot pivoted, the torso rotated, and the cutting arc followed the natural spiral of the spine's movement.
Another. The thrust. Direct, linear, deceptively simple. The power came not from the arms but from the forward drive of the rear leg, the entire body converting into a delivery system for a single point of force.
Ron drew for an hour. Then another.
The sleeping girl left at some point. Other students filtered in and out of the library's front section, their voices a distant murmur that didn't reach his corner. A class bell rang—his third-period combat theory session with Master Wen. He registered the sound, weighed it against what was happening on the paper before him, and kept drawing.
The rice paper filled. He flipped it over and filled the back. The golden figures multiplied—a catalog of stances, transitions, strikes, and the connecting movements between them. Each one inscribed not just on the paper but into the architecture of his comprehension, the pen's skill grinding dream-fragments into something structured and functional.
By the time he stopped, his hand ached and the light through the library's high windows had shifted from white to amber. Two hours, perhaps more. One class missed—Master Wen would note his absence, and there would be consequences. Small ones. A reprimand. Additional drills. Nothing that outweighed what lay before him on the paper.
Ron held up the sheet.
Forty-two figures, front and back, each one rendered in precise golden lines. A complete system of basic kendo—not mastered, not even truly learned yet, but mapped. The dream-memories had provided the raw material. The pen had refined it.
Something pulled at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a grin—more the involuntary tightening of muscles that preceded one.
He folded the paper carefully, slid it into his bag, dismissed his spirit, and left the library.
—————
The stick was ash wood, roughly straight, as long as his arm and the width of two fingers. He found it in a pile of discarded lumber behind the carpenter's shop on Mei Hua Lane, three blocks from home. Not ideal—too light, slightly warped near the midpoint—but sufficient. He tested the weight by swinging it twice in the fading light, feeling the way it moved through the air. The grain was tight. It wouldn't splinter easily.
Dinner was rice and pickled vegetables, stretched thin across six bowls. His mother noticed the bruise on his jaw but said nothing, her silence communicating more than questions would have. His father ate with the focused efficiency of a man who had been lifting crates at the riverside warehouse since dawn and would do so again tomorrow. His siblings bickered. Mei wanted another horse drawing. His brother, Tao, had lost a tooth and kept probing the gap with his tongue, producing a faint whistling sound that drove their older sister Lian to quiet fury.
Ron helped wash the bowls. Swept the floor. Waited.
The alley ran between the back of their building and the windowless wall of a grain storage facility. Narrow—barely wide enough for two people to pass—but long, stretching thirty paces before it dead-ended at a drainage grate. At night, the only light came from whatever leaked through shuttered windows above, and even that was sparse. The cobblestones were uneven, slick in places where water pooled.
Ron stepped into the alley with the ash stick in both hands and the folded rice paper unrolled in his mind.
Chudan.
He settled into the ready stance. Feet finding their width. Knees softening, not bending—there was a difference, and his inscribed understanding supplied it without hesitation. The stick rose to center line. Tip oriented forward. Arms relaxed but structured, elbows down, shoulders settled.
The air in the alley was cool against the sweat already forming on his palms.
He cut.
Men. The overhead strike. Stick rising above his head, tip angling back, then driving down along the center line. His hips dropped. His wrists snapped at the bottom of the arc.
The stick whistled through the empty air and stopped at waist height, trembling faintly.
Wrong. The wrist snap was late—a fraction of a second behind the hip drop, which meant the kinetic chain broke at the shoulder. Power leaked. He could feel it, the way he'd felt the inefficiency in his meditation cycle when the pen had made it visible. The knowledge was there. The body hadn't caught up yet.
He reset. Cut again.
Better. The timing tightened. Still imprecise, but the stick moved faster, and the stopping point felt more controlled—less like catching a falling object and more like placing one.
Again.
Again.
He lost count somewhere past fifty. The alley's darkness became irrelevant; the movements didn't require sight, only the internal sense of alignment that the inscribed figures had mapped into his nervous system. Overhead cut. Diagonal cut, left to right. Diagonal cut, right to left. Thrust. Return to ready. Each repetition polished the connection between the knowledge in his mind and the execution in his muscles, grinding away the gap between understanding and ability like a whetstone working steel.
This is real.
The thought arrived between the sixty-third and sixty-fourth repetition, quiet and certain.
This is real, and this is strong.
His palms burned where the rough ash wood abraded the skin. His shoulders ached from the unaccustomed overhead motion. His calves trembled from holding stances that demanded more from his legs than eleven years of casual activity had prepared them for.
He practiced until the last window above the alley went dark and the only sound was his own breathing and the whisper of wood through air.
—————
Ten days.
Ron found the routine the way water finds a channel—naturally, inevitably, cutting deeper with each repetition.
Mornings: school. He attended every class now, including Master Wen's combat theory, where he sat in the back and absorbed information with the hunger of someone who had discovered a use for it. Afternoons: the library corner, the pen, the rice paper. He drew three things, always in the same order.
First: the cultivation diagram. His meditation cycle, refined further with each iteration. The solar plexus compression was tighter now—he'd shaved another fraction of wasted energy from the loop by adjusting the entry angle of the descending channel. The skull-base timing issue was solved entirely; the backpressure had vanished once he'd internalized the correct sequencing, and the energy flow through his upper meridians ran smooth and continuous for the first time since he'd begun cultivating.
Second: the day's lesson material. Master Huo's classifications. Master Wen's combat principles. Even the mathematics instructor's geometry proofs, which Ron inscribed not because he enjoyed them but because the act of inscription consolidated everything, and a mind that could analyze a triangle's angles was a mind that could analyze a strike's trajectory.
Third: kendo.
Each day he added new figures. Combinations now—not just individual cuts but linked sequences. Strike, recover, reposition, strike again. The transitions between techniques, which were where real combat lived. Footwork patterns that allowed him to close distance or create it without sacrificing his guard. The relationship between breathing and timing—when to exhale, when to hold, how the rhythm of the lungs synchronized with the rhythm of the blade.
The pen consumed it all. Ground it down. Built it back up, cleaner.
Evenings: the alley. The ash stick. Repetition upon repetition in the narrow darkness between brick walls, until his shirt soaked through and his arms hung heavy and the calluses on his palms thickened from raw pink blisters into hard yellow ridges that no longer split.
The calluses came first. Then the changes in posture—subtle, visible only to someone who knew what to look for. His shoulders settled lower, the chronic tension of a boy who expected to be hit dissolving into the relaxed readiness of someone who understood how to be hit and, more importantly, how not to be. His weight sat differently in his hips. When he walked, his steps were quieter, his center of gravity lower, his movement more economical.
His body had always been tall for his age—nearly six feet already, a gangly awkwardness that his classmates mocked and his mother attributed to his father's side of the family. The gangliness was receding. Not because his proportions had changed, but because he was learning to use them. Long limbs meant reach. Height meant leverage. The kendo stances that had felt unstable on the first night now felt rooted, his length an advantage rather than an impediment.
And the cultivation—
Level seventeen.
He felt the threshold give way on the eighth night, during a meditation session that lasted two hours. Not a dramatic breakthrough—no pillar of light, no trembling earth. Just a quiet deepening, like a well that had been slowly filling suddenly finding a new depth to settle into. His spirit core compressed another fraction. His soul power reserves expanded by a margin that was modest in absolute terms but significant relative to his previous rate of progress.
The pen's efficiency, compounded. The refined meditation cycle, compounded. Ten days of consistent cultivation without a single wasted session, compounded.
Compound interest, Ron thought, and almost laughed at the irony of borrowing financial terminology from Spirit Hall's lending practices to describe his own growth.
On the eleventh morning, he walked into the academy and found Li Feng waiting by the courtyard fountain.
—————
Li Feng wasn't alone. Chen Bao flanked his left, Wei Lin his right—the usual formation, the familiar geometry of adolescent intimidation. Three boys who had decided months ago that Ron's height and his pen-spirit and his quiet manner constituted an invitation that required regular checkups.
The courtyard was not empty. A dozen students milled near the entrance, waiting for the morning bell. Master Wen's office window overlooked the fountain from the second floor. This was not a private space. Li Feng didn't care. Li Feng had never cared, because Li Feng's father donated generously to the academy's equipment fund, and this purchased a certain latitude in matters of discipline.
"Pen Boy." Li Feng's greeting. Reliable as sunrise. "Missed you yesterday. Were you hiding in the library again?"
Ron stopped walking. Not because the words demanded it, but because the distance was right. Three paces between them. Close enough for conversation. Far enough for reaction time.
Li Feng's weight sat on his front foot. It always did—the boy led with aggression, leaning forward, closing distance before the first word was finished. Chen Bao stood slightly behind and to the left, hands in his pockets, serving as audience rather than participant. Wei Lin mirrored the position on the right, though his hands were out, fingers curling and uncurling with nervous energy.
Ten days of inscribing combat stances had given Ron a vocabulary for reading bodies the way the pen gave him a vocabulary for reading texts. Li Feng's forward lean meant his rear foot was unloaded—he could close distance quickly but couldn't retreat without first shifting his weight. Chen Bao's pocketed hands meant slow engagement. Wei Lin's fidgeting meant uncertainty.
"I was here yesterday," Ron said. Neutral. Factual.
"Must have missed you, then." Li Feng took a step forward. Two paces now. "Small target. Easy to miss. Like your spirit."
The laugh from Wei Lin was performative. Chen Bao didn't join in.
Ron breathed. In through the nose, slow, the way the kendo rhythm demanded before a committed action. His bag hung from his left shoulder. He let it slide to the ground.
Li Feng noticed. Something shifted behind his eyes—not caution exactly, but the recognition that this interaction was deviating from its established script. Ron was supposed to tighten his jaw and look away, or mutter something conciliatory, or simply absorb the insult and keep walking. These were the established options. The bag dropping to the ground was not among them.
"Pick that up and keep moving, Pen Boy."
"No."
A small word. It landed in the space between them with disproportionate weight.
Li Feng's spirit was a bronze gauntlet—a combat-type, level nineteen, the kind of spirit that awakening examiners praised with genuine warmth. He didn't summon it now. This was beneath that. This was fists and hierarchy and the maintenance of an order that had Ron positioned firmly at the bottom.
Li Feng stepped forward and swung.
A right cross, aimed at the jaw—the same jaw he'd bruised eleven days ago. The boy's shoulder telegraphed it a full half-second before his fist moved, a rotation that Ron's trained eyes read like a headline printed in bold type.
Ron's rear foot pivoted. His torso rotated left, and Li Feng's fist passed through the space where his head had been, close enough that the displaced air brushed his ear. Li Feng's momentum carried him forward, off-balance, weight committed to a strike that had found nothing.
Ron's right hand came up from below. Not a kendo cut—he had no stick, and the alley's lessons translated imperfectly to empty hands. But the principle was the same: drive from the rear leg, rotate the hips, deliver force along the shortest available line. His palm struck Li Feng's solar plexus with the heel leading, a compact, rising blow that compressed the diaphragm and interrupted the breathing cycle.
Li Feng folded. Not dramatically—he didn't fly backward or crash to the ground. He simply bent forward at the waist, mouth opening, lungs refusing to cooperate, hands dropping to his knees.
The courtyard went quiet.
Wei Lin took a half-step forward, then stopped. Ron's gaze found him, and whatever Wei Lin saw there convinced him that the half-step had been sufficient.
Chen Bao hadn't moved. His hands were still in his pockets.
Li Feng sucked air in a thin, whistling stream. His face had gone the color of uncooked dough. He straightened slowly, one hand pressed to his sternum, and stared at Ron with an expression that contained no anger—only the raw confusion of someone whose map of the world had just been proven inaccurate.
Ron picked up his bag.
He walked past them and into the building. The morning bell rang as he crossed the threshold, and the sound merged with the blood drumming in his ears until he couldn't distinguish one from the other.
—————
Master Wen's summons came during the second period.
The office was small, cluttered, and smelled of the herbal liniment that the combat instructor applied to his own joints with the regularity of a man who had spent thirty years demonstrating techniques on bodies harder than his own. Wen Dahai was fifty, compact, built like a barrel that had been left in the sun and shrunk by a third. His spirit—a iron-ringed staff—leaned in the corner behind his desk, unsummoned but present in the way that a soldier's weapon was always present.
"Sit."
Ron sat.
Master Wen studied him across the desk. The instructor's face was constructed for disapproval—heavy brow, downturned mouth, cheeks that sagged in a way that made neutral expressions look critical. But the eyes were careful. Measuring.
"Li Feng's father has already sent a message to the headmaster."
"I understand."
"Do you." A statement, not a question. "You struck a student with higher spirit rank in the open courtyard in front of witnesses. Li Feng claims it was unprovoked."
Ron said nothing. The truth was more complicated than provocation, and explaining the accumulated weight of months of harassment to a man who had certainly witnessed portions of it would accomplish nothing except making him appear to be pleading.
Master Wen leaned back. His chair protested.
"Your spirit is a pen."
"Yes."
"Level seventeen."
"Yes."
"And you struck a level nineteen bronze gauntlet user hard enough to wind him with an open-palm technique that I don't recognize from any curriculum taught at this academy." Master Wen's fingers drummed the desk once, twice. "Where did you learn that?"
"Self-study."
The drumming stopped. Master Wen's careful eyes did something complicated—a narrowing that wasn't suspicion, exactly, but its first cousin.
"Self-study," he repeated.
"From books in the library. Historical combat methods."
"The non spirit fighting manuals."
"Yes."
A silence. Master Wen's gaze drifted to the corner where his iron-ringed staff leaned, then back.
"Fighting in the courtyard will result in disciplinary action regardless of who initiated it. You understand this."
"Yes."
"I can reduce the severity if you demonstrate restraint going forward. Which means if Li Feng or his companions provoke you again, you walk away. Clear?"
"Clear."
Master Wen nodded. The dismissal was implicit in the nod's finality, but Ron was halfway to the door before the instructor's voice caught him.
"Focus on what is imortant."
Ron closed the door behind him without turning around. In the corridor, alone, he allowed the grin that had been building behind his expression for the past five minutes to surface fully.
It stayed for the length of the hallway and most of the stairs.
—————
That evening, the alley. The ash stick. But first, the pen.
Ron sat on an upturned crate near the alley's entrance with the rice paper spread across his knees and the yellow ring rotating lazily around his waist. The pen touched the paper, and he began a new series of figures.
Not kendo this time.
The dream-memories offered another art—one that had surfaced with increasing clarity over the past several days, pushed to the front of his consciousness by the confrontation with Li Feng and the simple revelation that his legs were his longest weapons.
Taekwondo.
A kicking art. He remembered the word in a language that was now almost entirely gone, retained only in these specific technical terms that his mind refused to release. The art emphasized strikes delivered with the feet and legs—high, fast, powerful, exploiting exactly the kind of reach advantage that his six-foot frame provided. In the dream-memories, practitioners in padded armor threw spinning kicks at head height with a speed that seemed to violate basic physics.
Ron didn't need spinning kicks. Not yet. Maybe not ever. What he needed was the vocabulary—the front kick, the roundhouse, the side kick, the back kick. The fundamental tools that would let him use his longest limbs as primary weapons at a range where shorter opponents couldn't touch him.
The pen moved. Golden figures appeared on the rice paper.
The front kick: chamber the knee high, extend the leg, strike with the ball of the foot, retract. The mechanical principle was a piston—compress, extend, compress. The power came from the hip's forward drive, not the leg's extension.
The roundhouse: pivot on the support foot, rotate the hip, swing the striking leg in a horizontal arc. The shin or the instep as the striking surface, depending on distance. The key was the pivot—without it, the kick was an arm's-length swing. With it, the entire body's rotational force fed through the leg.
The side kick: the most structurally powerful. Chamber sideways, extend directly outward, strike with the heel or the blade of the foot. The body aligned behind the kick like a battering ram behind a door. At his height, a side kick to the midsection could be delivered from a distance that most of his peers couldn't close without taking two full steps—and two steps was a lifetime in a fight.
He drew for an hour. Twenty-three figures, front and back of the paper. Each one seared into his comprehension by the pen's analytical fire. Each one building on the last, constructing a system that married the dream-memories' technical knowledge with the inscriptive skill's consolidating power.
When he finished, the paper glowed faintly in the alley's darkness. Ron studied it, feeling the understanding settle into his mind the way his meditation cycle's energy settled into his spirit core—compressed, organized, available.
He stood. Set the paper aside.
Raised his right knee to chamber height.
Extended.
The kick snapped out—fast, linear, the ball of his foot stopping at an imaginary target five feet from the ground. His supporting leg held steady. His balance didn't waver. The retraction was clean, knee pulling back to chamber before the foot returned to the ground.
First try.
Not perfect. The hip engagement was shallow—he was kicking with his leg rather than driving with his body. The pen's inscription told him this the way a mirror told him he needed a haircut: plainly, without judgment. But the fundamental structure was there. The frame was sound.
He kicked again. Adjusted the hip. Better.
Again.
The night deepened around him. The ash stick leaned against the wall, resting. His legs worked—front kick, roundhouse, side kick, the combinations flowing into each other as the inscribed knowledge translated itself into movement. The calluses on his hands had been earned over ten days of stick work. Now his feet began their own adaptation, the skin along the ball and blade toughening with each impact against empty air.
Ron stopped when his legs trembled too badly to maintain form. He leaned against the alley wall, breathing hard, sweat cooling on his skin.
His spirit was a pen. An ordinary pen with a single yellow ring and a skill that inscribed marks on surfaces.
But when he inscribed knowledge—when he took what existed as formless memory or raw information and carved it onto paper with his spirit's power—the knowledge transformed. Consolidated. Deepened. What took other people weeks of physical repetition to internalize, he could accelerate by first making it visible, tangible, real on the page.
The pen didn't make him a fighter. The pen made him a learner.
Ron picked up the ash stick. Tucked the folded rice paper into his shirt. Walked home through streets that were empty and dark and full of potential.
His legs ached.
His hands were rough.
His spirit core hummed at level seventeen, and the gap to eighteen felt closer than it had any right to.
He did not think about what kind of story he was in. He thought about tomorrow's training, and the day after that, and the compound interest of incremental improvement applied across weeks and months and years.
The alley would be there. The pen would come when called. The rest was repetition, and repetition was something Ron had stopped finding tedious ten days ago, on the night he first picked up a stick and discovered that an ordinary spirit could do extraordinary things if you were willing to bleed for it.