Chapter 7: The City of Yanjin (Part 1)
The walls of Yanjin rose from the plain like the spine of some ancient beast, gray stone weathered by centuries of wind and rain. Chen had seen them from a distance for most of the third day of travel, a smudge on the horizon that slowly resolved into towers and battlements, gates and rooftops. Now, as the merchant Lin's cart rolled through the northern gate, the city swallowed him whole.
The noise was the first thing that struck him. After six years in a village where the loudest sounds were the wind and the occasional argument between farmers, the chaos of Yanjin was overwhelming. Merchants shouted from stalls that lined every street, hawking vegetables and cloth and tools and things Chen had no name for. Carts rattled over cobblestones, their wheels grinding against the stone. Children ran between the legs of adults, laughing and screaming. Somewhere in the distance, a bell tolled the hour.
Lin guided the cart through the press of bodies with the ease of a man who had made this journey a hundred times. "I'll drop you at the market district, " he said over his shoulder. "The academy is on the eastern hill. You can walk from there. It's not far. "
Chen nodded, his eyes moving constantly, cataloging everything. The architecture was different here—buildings of stone and timber rising two, sometimes three stories high, their roofs tiled in dark clay. The people wore clothes of better quality than anything in Luo Ye Cun, their fabrics dyed in colors he had never seen. Some of them carried themselves with a confidence that spoke of money, of power, of a world far removed from the poverty of the village.
Lin stopped the cart at a wide square where the crowd thinned slightly. "This is where we part, young master. The academy is up that street, past the fountain, then left at the temple. You can't miss it. "
Chen climbed down, his bundle on his back, the small chest of coins hidden within it. He turned to thank Lin, but the merchant was already urging his oxen forward, swallowed by the flow of traffic before the words left his mouth.
He stood alone in the square, surrounded by strangers, and for the first time in six years, he felt small.
The market district sprawled around him, a maze of stalls and shops that seemed to go on forever. Chen forced himself to move, to walk, to observe. He needed to understand this place if he was going to survive here.
He passed stalls selling food—roasted meats, steamed buns, skewers of vegetables sizzling over charcoal. His stomach growled, but he did not stop. There would be time for food later. Now, he needed something else.
Near the eastern edge of the market, where the stalls gave way to more permanent shops, he found what he was looking for. A narrow storefront with a sign that read "Wei's Metals and Ores" in faded paint. The door was open, the interior dark, the smell of rust and dust heavy in the air.
An old man sat behind a counter, his eyes half-closed, his spirit—a small magnifying glass—floating beside his head. He did not look up when Chen entered.
"I need metals, " Chen said. "Small samples. Iron, copper, silver. And whatever else you have that is cheap and unusual. "
The old man's eyes opened. He looked at Chen—at the patched clothes, the thin frame, the bundle on his back—and something like amusement crossed his face.
"You're the one from the village, aren't you? The body spirit with level seven? "
Chen said nothing.
The old man chuckled. "News travels fast in a small city. Mestre Wei made sure everyone knew about the wasted talent from Luo Ye Cun. A body spirit with level seven power. They're taking bets on how long you'll last here. "
He pushed himself up from his stool and shuffled to the back of the shop, returning with a tray of metal samples. Iron, dull and gray. Copper, reddish and bright. Silver, a small sliver that caught the light.
"That's three copper coins for the iron and copper. Eight for the silver. And this... " He placed a dark, pitted rock beside the others. "This I'll give you for five. Found it in the eastern hills. No one knows what it is. Feels strange, though. Like it's waiting for something. "
Chen studied the rock. It was smaller than his Stardust Iron, darker, its surface unremarkable. But something about it hummed at the edge of his perception, a faint resonance that made his skin prickle.
He counted out eighteen copper coins from his chest and placed them on the counter.
The old man raised an eyebrow. "You know you're paying too much for that rock, don't you? "
"I know. "
Chen gathered his purchases and left without looking back.
The Junior Academy stood on a hill at the eastern edge of the city, a compound of stone buildings surrounded by a low wall. Chen presented himself at the gate, gave his name to the attendant, and was directed to the dormitory for work-study students—a narrow building behind the kitchens, its rooms small and spartan but clean.
His cell had a bed, a desk, and a window that looked out over the city wall toward the distant mountains. He unpacked his bundle in silence, placing the Stardust Iron beneath the floorboards, the merchant's book on the desk, the metal samples hidden in his pack.
A knock came at the door. A boy about his age stood in the doorway, thin and dark-haired, his clothes nearly as patched as Chen's.
"You're the one from the village, " the boy said. It was not a question.
"Chen. "
"Wei. I'm from the village of Stone Bridge. Two days east of here. " He leaned against the doorframe, his eyes curious. "They're saying you have level seven power. In a body spirit. Is that true? "
"It's true. "
Wei whistled softly. "Level seven. That's higher than anyone in my village ever got. But a body spirit... " He shrugged. "Well. At least you're here. Most of us don't even have that. "
He gestured toward the courtyard, where other students were gathering. "Come on. They're assigning work duties. You'll want to get something easy before the older students take all the good jobs. "
The work-study students were assigned to maintenance and cleaning duties, their labor exchanged for tuition and lodging. Chen was given the task of sweeping the training grounds and maintaining the equipment—simple work, but work that would keep him outdoors, keep him moving, keep him watching.
The paying students watched them work with the casual indifference of those who had never known want. They wore better clothes, carried themselves with the confidence of families who had resources, connections, futures. Some of them, Chen noticed, wore small pins on their collars—symbols of the families they belonged to.
Wei, who had attached himself to Chen with the easy camaraderie of the outcast, followed his gaze. "Those are the Family pins. The Li, the Zhao, and the Chen. "
He pointed to a cluster of students by the main building. "Those three with the bronze pins? The Li family. Their spirits are defensive—shields, barriers, that sort of thing. They run the city garrison. Don't get on their bad side. "
He indicated another group, leaner, sharper, their movements precise. "The Zhao. Their spirits are blades—wind blades, mostly. They run the mercenary contracts in the city. Quick tempers, quick swords. "
And finally, a smaller group, quieter, their clothes finer than the others. "The Chen. The oldest family in the city. They founded Yanjin, back when this was just a trading post. Their spirits are... plants, mostly. Healing herbs, growth acceleration. They control the medicine trade. The patriarch, Chen Yucheng, is the strongest spirit master in the region. Four rings. Spirit Ancestor. "
Chen studied the Chen students with particular attention. They moved with the ease of those who had never known uncertainty, never wondered where their next meal would come from. They were his family's namesake, but they were nothing like his family.
A girl with a Chen pin walked past them, her eyes flicking over Chen and Wei with the briefest glance of dismissal. Beside her, a boy with a Li pin laughed at something, his voice carrying across the courtyard. A Zhao student was practicing forms near the training ground, his movements sharp and precise, a faint shimmer of wind curling around his hands.
Wei leaned closer. "They're all here, you know. The heirs and the spares. The ones with real talent get sent to the capital, or to the Heaven Dou Empire. These are the ones who weren't good enough. Which means they're arrogant enough to think they were. "
Chen said nothing. He was watching, learning, filing away every detail.
The next morning, before the sun rose, Chen slipped out of the dormitory and made his way behind the academy. Lin had told him of a stream there, a place where the ground was soft and the trees thick enough to block the view from the buildings.
He found it easily—a narrow ribbon of water cutting through a small ravine, the banks lined with willows and wild grass. The ground was uneven, the stones slick with moss, the shadows deep even at dawn.
He pulled out his blindfold and tied it tight.
For weeks before leaving the village, he had been running the forest path with increasing difficulty. Now he needed more. He took a strip of cloth from his pocket and wadded it into his ears, muffling the sound. Then he took another strip and tied it around his nose, blocking his sense of smell.
He stood in the center of the ravine, blind, half-deaf, his nose plugged, and began to move.
The world narrowed to touch. The ground beneath his feet, the air against his skin, the subtle shifts in pressure that told him where the trees were, where the stream cut across his path. He walked slowly at first, testing the space, feeling for obstacles. Then faster, letting his body respond to stimuli he could not consciously perceive.
A branch swept toward his face—he ducked, felt the air of its passage. The ground sloped suddenly—he adjusted his stride, found purchase on a rock. The stream—he heard it through the cloth in his ears, a whisper of water over stone—he leaped, landed on the far bank, kept moving.
He added complexity. He began to vary his pace—sprinting, then stopping suddenly, then changing direction without warning. He forced his body to respond to the terrain without thought, to trust the feedback his senses were feeding him even when his conscious mind could not process it.
He ran for an hour, then two. When he finally stopped, his body was slick with sweat, his muscles trembling, his heart pounding against his ribs. He pulled off the cloths and stood in the morning light, breathing hard.
Something had shifted. He could feel it—a presence at the edge of his awareness, a sense of the space around him that went beyond what his physical senses could perceive. He closed his eyes and reached for it, and for a moment, he could see the ravine without seeing it—the shape of the trees, the flow of the water, the rocks beneath his feet.
Then it was gone.
He stood in the silence, his heart still pounding, and smiled.
That afternoon, Chen attended his first theoretical class. The room was a stone chamber in the main building, the walls lined with scrolls and charts, the windows high and narrow. The other students were a mix of workers and paying students, the former clustered at the back, the latter in the front. Among the paying students, Chen noticed the pins of the Three Families scattered throughout—Li, Zhao, Chen. They sat in small clusters, their attention only half on the professor, their whispers and glances marking the invisible boundaries of their rivalries.
The professor was a thin man of middle years, his face sharp, his eyes quick. A scroll spirit floated beside his head, its surface covered in characters that shifted and changed as he spoke. His name was Mestre Ren, and he was a Spirit Elder of three rings—two yellow, one purple.
"Today, " he said, his voice dry, "we discuss the foundation of our existence. The beasts that grant us power. The rings that mark our progress. And the kingdom that tolerates our presence. "
He unrolled a chart on the wall, revealing a map of the region. "East of Yanjin, three days' journey, lies the Balak Royal Hunting Grounds. This is where you will obtain your first spirit rings—if you obtain them at all. "
He pointed to a marked area on the map. "The grounds are managed by the Crown, but the Spirit Hall and the Three Great Families have rights to hunt there as well. The beasts are classified by age: ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years. For your first ring, you will be permitted to hunt beasts of no more than a hundred years. Anything beyond that would kill you. "
He turned to face the class, his expression grim. "Let me be clear. Most of you will never obtain a second ring. Some of you will die trying to obtain your first. The beasts of the hunting grounds are not tame. They are not patient. They will kill you without hesitation, and no one will mourn you. "
He let the words settle, then continued. "The grounds are divided into zones. The outer zone, nearest the city, holds beasts of ten to a hundred years. This is where you will hunt. The inner zone, deeper in the forest, holds beasts of a thousand years and above. You will not go there. If you do, you will die, and the families will use your death as a lesson for future students. "
He paused, his eyes scanning the room. "Any questions? "
A student in the front—a boy with a Li family pin—raised his hand. "What about the thousand-year beasts? Has anyone in the city ever hunted one? "
Mestre Ren's expression did not change. "The patriarch of the Chen family, Chen Yucheng, obtained his fourth ring from a thousand-year beast. It took twelve hunters to bring it down. Three of them died. That was forty years ago. No one has attempted it since. "
The room was silent. The Chen students in the front straightened slightly, a flicker of pride crossing their faces.
Another student spoke—a Zhao. "And the royal family? What do they hunt? "
Mestre Ren's lips thinned. "The royal family hunts in the capital's grounds, not ours. Their beasts are... larger. They have resources we do not. "
He did not say more, but the implication was clear. Yanjin was a frontier city. The real power lay elsewhere.
"The kingdom of Balak, " he continued, "is a vassal state of the Heaven Dou Empire. The Spirit Hall has a presence here, but not a strong one. The Crown and the Three Great Families—the Li, the Zhao, and the Chen—hold the real power in this region. They are rivals, yes. But they are also allies against the interference of the two great powers. The Empire wants our resources. The Hall wants our souls. The families want to keep them both at arm's length. "
He looked at the students in the back—the workers, the villagers, the ones with no family pins. "You will graduate from this academy with a level of power. Some of you will serve the families. Some will serve the Crown. Some will join the Spirit Hall, if you are lucky. None of you will ever challenge the order of things. That is not cruelty. That is reality. "
Chen sat at the back, his hands folded on the desk, his face expressionless. A hundred-year beast for a first ring. That was the limit. That was what the world expected of him.
He would need more.
That night, alone in his cell, Chen pulled out the metal samples he had bought. The iron, the copper, the silver. And the dark rock the merchant had called a mystery.
He closed his eyes and summoned the furnace.
It appeared between his hands, its dark metal surface gleaming in the candlelight, the runes pulsing with faint light, the pentagram at its top slowly rotating. He placed the iron into the pentagram and focused.
Information flooded his mind. Composition: iron, carbon, trace impurities. Melting point. Density. Structural weaknesses.
He moved to the copper, then the silver. The silver was interesting—it conducted energy better than the others, its crystalline structure aligned in ways that made it receptive to spiritual power.
Finally, he placed the dark rock in the pentagram. The response was immediate and complex.
Base composition: seventy-two percent common rock matrix. Twelve percent tin. Eight percent copper. Seven percent unidentified crystalline structure.
He frowned. The unidentified structure—that was what had caught his attention. He pushed more power into the furnace, demanding deeper analysis.
The pentagram glowed brighter, and new information surfaced.
Crystalline structure composition: trace amounts of Stardust Iron. Approximately one percent of total mass. Remaining crystalline structure consists of degraded byproducts of Stardust Iron refinement—resonance fragments, conductive traces, residual energy markers.
Chen's breath caught in his throat. Stardust Iron. Even in trace amounts, it was there. The rock was not pure, not even close—it was mostly worthless stone and base metals, with barely a whisper of the true ore. But that whisper was enough.
He thought of the Stardust Iron hidden beneath his floorboards, pure and dense, pulsing with stored starlight. This rock was what happened when the ore degraded, when it mixed with common stone, when its power was diluted and scattered. It was a shadow of a shadow.
But it was proof. Proof that Stardust Iron existed in this region, that there might be more of it somewhere in the hills. Proof that his furnace could detect it, could identify it even in trace amounts.
He had an idea.
He took a small piece of silver and a fragment of the dark rock, grinding the latter into a fine powder with a stone from his pocket. The silver was pure enough, its crystalline structure clean. The powder contained the trace Stardust Iron, diluted but present.
He placed both in the pentagram and began to push his spiritual power into them.
The metals heated. The powder glowed with a faint, familiar light—the same resonance he felt from his Stardust Iron, but weaker, fainter. The silver began to soften, to flow, to accept the powder into its structure. He could see it in his mind—the crystalline lattice of the silver, the trace Stardust Iron particles settling into the gaps, the way they wanted to merge, to become something new.
He pushed harder. The furnace pulsed with heat. The metal glowed brighter.
And then, nothing.
His spiritual power was gone. Drained. Empty. The pentagram flickered, the runes dimmed, and the metal—half-formed, incomplete—cooled and hardened into a lump of misshapen silver shot through with dark veins.
Chen stared at it, his breath ragged, his body trembling with exhaustion. He had failed. He did not have enough power. Not yet.
He let the furnace fade and slumped back on his bed, the failed alloy cold in his hands.
'Not enough,' he thought. 'Not strong enough. Not yet.'
He closed his eyes and let the exhaustion take him. Tomorrow, he would train harder. Tomorrow, he would learn more. Tomorrow, he would be stronger.
The metal cooled in his hands, its dark veins pulsing faintly in the darkness, waiting.