Killing Ethan had been a side errand — housekeeping on the way to something else?
Ethan heard the summary, flicked his right hand once, and a yellow leaf drifting toward his chest parted clean down the middle. Both halves whispered to the pavement.
Noon.
He walked out to eat alone and kept the phone call short.
Outside, in public, he told Aoki only that he was in for the op.
Words stayed minimal. Meaning did not.
The shooters, per Aoki's intel, belonged to an outfit called **Grayblood** — mercenary DNA, New Star roots, willing to take contracts for exploration work, retrieval, and "cleanup." They had even intercepted a major find that belonged to Aoki's expedition network once, years back, and the debt had teeth.
Aoki had escalated as soon as Grayblood footprints on Old Earth crossed his desk.
Perimeter teams were spinning up fast — men with old grudges sharpening their patience.
Even without history, the bait would have done it.
Anyone who believed they had locked a *liexian* tomb on Old Earth would light a fire under every player with enough muscle to reach the site.
"Whoever hired Grayblood to kill me paid well," Ethan thought. "And they paid for distance — a proxy's fingerprints instead of theirs."
Fine.
He had time.
Urban near-death was not something he could pretend away. Until he understood the sponsor chain, the risk would keep returning.
Then the bigger hook caught him anyway — an "immortal" grave on Old Earth, repeated like a rumor until the word stopped meaning anything.
Over the decades, several "discoveries" had made headlines and died into footnotes.
Dig sites opened.
Expectation ran hot.
Reality cooled.
Each time, the dead turned out to belong to the same category the institutes already catalogued: pre-Qin *fangshi*, peak-human by bone, still human by biology.
"If this one is real," Ethan told himself, "texts and objects tied to *liexian* would hit the world harder than another paper."
In an age that treated old arts like museum noise, a genuine anchor might bend the narrative — or break it.
---
After lunch, he stopped for a haircut — short, neat, sides blended so the odd broken strand from the city shoot did not read like a story.
Tomorrow he would start a job.
Tomorrow he might also step into forest violence again.
The split in his schedule felt absurdly clean, like two versions of him sharing one body.
Aoki did not pull him the next morning.
Ethan's first day at work stayed intact — clock-in unbloodied, identity ordinary.
The posting sounded prestigious on paper: a branch office of a design bureau under a subsidiary under **Interstellar Group**.
Paper lied kindly.
Anything that mattered for deep-space engineering still lived on New Star. Old Earth's "interstellar" subsidiaries were mostly legacy branding and waiting rooms — places where budgets came to age gracefully.
This branch had not produced anything important in years.
Ethan's desk bay confirmed the obituary.
Empty stations.
Six warm bodies in a space meant for thirty.
At nine, the man in black-frame glasses was already losing a fight with a news feed, chin creeping toward his chest.
The only bright-eyed person in the room was a young woman angling a pocket mirror, applying lipstick like she meant business.
She noticed Ethan first.
Welcoming. Loud enough to wake the room without trying.
The rest had the slow kindness of people who expected nothing from the day — invitations to lunch, no turf wars, no hunger.
Ethan had chosen the posting for what the rumors promised: quiet.
He had not expected quiet to mean *morgue* quiet — two coworkers discussing mahjong strategy before lunch, a fifty-something man on a thirty-minute phone call about weekend fishing.
When someone suggested a welcome meal at noon, Ethan offered to pay and got voted down with benevolent firmness.
He tried to look useful.
They told him to breathe.
Learn the rhythm.
Nothing urgent.
By eleven he was reading Daoist reference PDFs on his monitor and accepting the truth: for his purposes, this was not a bad cage.
Many people would have killed for hours this empty.
---
At lunch, the new colleague — **Skye Liu**, chatty, meticulous about her face, hired in July "for the lifestyle" — grabbed Ethan's trench off the back of his chair to be helpful.
The coat hit the tile with a slap heavy enough to be a suitcase.
Skye yelped, hopping back from her own reflex.
She stared at the fabric like it had insulted her.
Picked it up again.
"This can't — it's just cloth," she said.
The weight disagreed.
The office gathered, everyone taking turns hefting the coat, marveling in the petty way adults reinvented wonder.
Ethan smiled the way you smiled when you needed a lie to land.
Custom training load, he explained. Tailored. He was "doing fitness," and dragging mass through a normal life kept him honest.
Admiration came easy after that.
When Skye reached for his cap next, Ethan got to it first and clamped it on — specialized weave, also heavier than it looked, and not something he wanted measured in grams in front of witnesses.
The meal went warm. The advice came blunt: relax into the glacier pace, stop auditioning for a productivity medal.
Afterward, the floor emptied again — headaches, early exits, reasons that sounded like kindness.
No punch clocks. No facial scanners. No managers hunting headcount.
Ethan exhaled.
The environment suited research.
It would not suit someone practicing old arts long without leaving fingerprints eventually.
He still assumed New Star lay ahead of him, close enough to matter, far enough that a few months of camouflage held.
That loose discipline let him vanish again after two days without triggering a crisis — the veterans treated his absence like weather.
A car took him to the rural compound.
He exchanged civvies for kit, fitted his mask, and accepted the weight of layered armor under a protective shell.
This hunt would be worse than Qingcheng, not better.
He planned accordingly.
---
In the craft, Aoki named the grid.
**Greater Khingan** — not a famous myth-mountain on a tourist map, just forest and slope until someone decided the ground hid a corpse that should not exist.
Mu had the stick.
Blackthorn and Kite worked blades and energy weapons with the quiet repetition of people turning nerves into checklist.
"Aoki," Ethan said. "Have you ever had a window where everything — senses, gut, timing — felt *too* sharp?"
He would not say *inner landscape.*
Institutes and houses had appetites. So did legends.
He wanted Aoki to hear the shape without inheriting the whole truth.
Blackthorn answered first.
"Long time ago," he said, almost solemn. "Mind empty. Body light. For half a second I thought I was going to ascend through the ceiling like a story."
Ethan's attention pinned.
"If you can reproduce that," he started — careful, eager, already building a bridge — "then maybe—"
"Ten years back," Blackthorn said. "With my first girlfriend. Never again. The sea has been ordinary ever since."
Ethan blinked.
Violence flashed in imagination — a single corrective slap, theater only.
Kite opened his mouth.
Aoki's palm met the back of Kite's head with a sound like a policy.
"Pre-battle jokes stay on the road," Aoki said. "Not in the ditch." He looked at Ethan. "You're practicing old arts. Something clicked?"
Ethan felt Aoki's gaze scrape him anyway — not hostile, diagnostic.
*Stronger,* that gaze said. *More than last week.*
"I hit a state once," Ethan admitted, wording it like weather, not revelation. "Vision. Hearing. Smell. Instinct. Everything stacked — too high to be coincidence."
Aoki's expression tightened, then loosened into something older.
"Rare," Aoki said. "Even for people we call grandmasters. Old lineages had different names — *empty-bright bodhisattva threshold*, sometimes *heaven-human unity* — poetry, not manuals." He exhaled. "In the stories, if you had a true *fangshi* over your shoulder — or a patriarch who still remembered how — that state could be *led* somewhere. Guided. Fed." A shrug that was not casual. "Now? No *fangshi*. No living ancestors. Almost no accidents. What you brushed might have been nothing — or the open edge of something you can't return to without a door you don't have."
Sympathy threaded the last sentence.
Aoki thought Ethan had brushed glory and lost the guide — missed a once-only ladder.
Ethan listened and filed a different file.
Ancient practice assumed **escort** into the inner landscape — a hand on the back from someone already finished with maps.
Ethan had kicked the door in alone.
Hyper-sense plus pre-Qin root method — self-keyed.
Not the same legend.
Not safe to say aloud.
"We'll talk more later," Ethan murmured.
They crossed into true wilderness — dense conifer walls, sky reduced to strips.
Other expedition cells checked in — more bodies than Qingcheng, tighter veterans.
Aoki alone had brought twelve teams.
The forest watched.
Not long after, Mu's voice rose from the console.
"Front ridge," he said. "Something's wrong with the air."
Ethan looked.
Light lifted off a stretch of hillside without a source — soft at first, then bright enough to read as *wrong*.
The ridgeline shimmered.
Trees doubled and slid apart like a heat mirage, except the cold bit through the hull and the sky stayed still.
Sacred and sick at once — the kind of combination that made primates want to kneel or run.
Aoki's hand tightened on his strap.
Even at distance, unease landed like a weight on the chest.
"*Liexian,*" someone whispered — half prayer, half curse — and the word did not sound ridiculous anymore.