Jiàn kept her vigil at the archway, the stone chill pressing against her back, sword balanced lightly across her knees. The ruins were hushed save for Tala’s restless murmurs. The girl shifted and twisted, her brow pinched in sleep as if even her dreams carried the weight of fragments and voices. Min sat close beside her, ever watchful, dark eyes steady. Her copper snaked slinking slowly across the grass towards the hem of Shaohua’s robe, jeweled eyes glimmering almost mischievously in the dimming firelight.
Footsteps returned through the grass. Jiàn did not turn at once, but she heard them; Rennie’s heavier stride, Daiyu’s lighter one. When they stepped into the silver light, there was something different between them, a subtle change in posture and air. Daiyu’s expression carried a new brightness; Rennie’s, a rare softness at the edges.
Jiàn’s lip curled in the faintest scoff. Foolishness, in such a time. She set her eyes back to the horizon, to the deep shadow of the hills, as if the night itself might reveal the next calamity. Her fingers ghosted along the length of her blade, the mist curling faintly in the moonlight. It had been restless tonight, more restless than usual. As if it, too, knew the fragments were stirring.
She remembered another mountain night.
After Locke’s betrayal.
The fire in Shanghai had burned red that evening, and the taste of iron was still thick on her tongue. Master Wen’s robes were soaked through, a spreading pool darkening the floor of the library where he had fallen. Jiàn had pressed her hands against the wound, but the life in him slipped away like sand through her fingers. Locke had watched with those calm, calculating eyes. Then took the scrolls, the manuscripts, the maps of machines that had survived dynasties, and fled. Ripped away by a man who had smiled like a brother.
When she buried her mentor, the world had felt hollow.
Master Wen had been no legend, no untouchable sage, but something rarer; a man who lived his wisdom quietly. A scholar of machines and spirits, he had kept the palace’s archives in order, believing that every line of ink, every gear and spring, held a memory worth preserving. To Jiàn, he was more than a teacher: he was patient hands guiding hers over parchment, a steady voice reminding her that invention without harmony was folly. He had once said that the true measure of a life was not brilliance but balance.
The rites were arranged hastily, yet with all the precision tradition demanded. A feng shui master chose the slope beyond the city walls, a hillside that faced the rising sun. Jiàn stood among the mourners as incense curled toward the heavens, its bitter smoke stinging her eyes. Joss paper fluttered into ash, spirit money meant to carry her master safely into the afterlife. Bowls of rice wine and fruits were laid at the grave’s edge, offerings that felt pitiful against the weight of what had been stolen.
When the earth closed over him, she pressed her hands to the soil until her nails split. Around her, others cleansed themselves in silence, washing away the stain of death with water and ash. Jiàn lingered, unwilling to leave. Rage still shook her bones, but beneath it pulsed a deeper wound, the unbearable quiet of a voice that would never again answer her questions.
It was there, on that hillside, that she swore she would not rest until Locke paid for his betrayal.
That night, Jiàn turned her back on Shanghai. She carried only a spear, her grief, and a purpose sharp enough to cut through mountains.
The whispers guided her. Old travelers spoke of Master Gyatso, a monk who lived high in the snow-peaks, said to have touched the bones of the world itself. A keeper of secrets older than dynasties, a listener to machines that breathed like gods. She pursued him, eastward into the high passes.
The journey was merciless. Hunger thinned her body, frost cracked her lips, and the air clawed at her lungs until she gasped like a dying fish. She fought off desperate men who saw only a lone woman to be stripped of her belongings. She fought sky pirates who swept down on harnesses of brass and sailcloth, wielding blades that shone like broken stars. Their ambush nearly killed her—one slash across her shoulder, another gash at her thigh—and she stumbled for miles, blood freezing against her skin, before she collapsed into snow.
When she woke, she was not dead. Silent, robed figures had found her, lifting her as if she weighed no more than drifted snow. They carried her into the mountain itself. The monastery was carved from stone, doorways framed in prayer-wheels, its halls humming faintly with the resonance of old machines.
There, she healed. Slowly. The monks first taught her how to breathe again: deep, steady inhalations until the thin air no longer clawed at her lungs. Then how to walk, step by step, until her legs held as firmly as iron. She prayed beside them, shared their plain bowls of rice and tea with quiet gratitude. At night she lay beneath silk banners inked with endless sutras, the painted words swaying with the draft, and for the first time since her master’s death, her sleep was touched not by fire and blood, but by peace.
Gyatso was no myth. He was flesh, though old as stone, his eyes sharp as a hawk’s. His voice was patient, but each word carried weight. “To mend a machine,” he told her once, “you must first still the soul within.”
And so Jiàn learned stillness.
Years passed beneath the monastery’s eaves. She rose with the monks at dawn, her breath frosting the air as they chanted sutras that rolled like thunder through the stone halls. She tilled the terraced fields in summer, carried water from the frozen streams in winter, and mended the prayer wheels whose gears whispered as faithfully as the monks’ lips. Discipline carved her sharper than any blade; patience filled the cracks left by grief. In quiet hours, she studied with Gyatso; learning to still her thoughts until even the hiss of snow on stone became a teaching, to touch a machine not only with hands but with spirit, to hear the difference between silence and absence.
Until one day, during meditation, the silence was broken—not by gong or bell, but by a sound beneath the wind. A steady rhythm. Not heart, not drum, not water. Steam and steel. The pulse of something buried, waiting.
She opened her eyes, breath fogging in the cold. “Master,” she whispered, “I hear it.”
Gyatso’s eyes opened slowly, gray as mountain mist. “You have learned to listen,” he said. “But hearing is not enough. You must act. Go alone. Seek what calls to you. It is your destiny, and yours alone.”
He did not give her a map. He did not give her a companion. Only a small flint striker and the silent blessing of the monastery. “Do not fail. But if you do, you will still learn,” he added, his voice like gravel softened by snow.
For two weeks, Jiàn wound through passes lost to maps, guided by instinct and the faint pulse in her chest. Snowstorms buried trails, cliffs dropped into clouds, and sky pirates, desperate for coin and glory, attacked with blades and whistling rifles. Twice she nearly fell to the ice below; twice she crawled on hands and knees through drifts that rose above her head. Her body screamed, but her mind held steady.
On the fourteenth morning, she stumbled into a hidden valley where the wind stilled as if holding its breath. The shrine revealed itself not as a building, but as ruins overgrown with ice and moss. A forgotten altar, carved into the mountain itself, cradled the blade.
It was exquisite: jade-steel veined with brass, mist curling ceaselessly from its hilt, pulsing like a heartbeat. When she laid her hands on it, the pulse synchronized with her own.
At first, it resisted her touch. Her muscles burned, her hands shook, and scalding steam hissed from the blade like a kettle ready to explode. The mist coiled along its ridges, twisting and writhing as if testing her resolve. Then, slowly, it yielded; steam bending to her intent, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. In that instant, she realized the truth of the echo-machine: it was not merely a tool, nor a weapon, but a living fragment of something far greater, a spirit waiting for a hand capable of understanding and guiding it.
When the first bandits from the pass arrived, chasing her as they had for days, they recoiled before the hiss of her newfound blade. Not a single strike was needed. The mountain itself seemed to rise behind her, protective, and she realized: she had not only found the blade—she had been claimed by it.
Master Gyatso’s gaze was steady, unshaken by the wind tugging at his robes. “There is nothing more I can give you,” he said, voice like stone worn smooth by time. His hand inclined toward the mist blade at her side, its hilt still warm, steaming faintly in the cold air. “That is the hinge upon which your fate will turn. What you seek does not lie in these peaks. It waits in the city by the sea. Go, and follow the thread already woven for you.”
The words cut deeper than she expected. Leaving the monastery felt like severing a lifeline, and grief coiled tight in her chest. Memories of Master Wen rose unbidden; the weight of his failing body in her arms, the library’s smoke-stained silence, the scent of ink and incense that clung to his robes. The scrolls he had guarded were gone, stolen by a traitor, but the echo of his teachings still burned within her. She steadied herself with a hand on the mist blade, drawing in breath until her resolve hardened.
The descent from the high passes was merciless. Snowdrifts swallowed the trail, rivers ran fast and biting, and the mountains themselves seemed to resist her departure. Yet she pressed on, each step carrying her closer to Shanghai. From afar, the city rose out of the haze like a wound, its skyline split by the rigid order of British compounds, its earth scarred by cannon fire, its sprawl bristling with the machinery of a new age. Familiar, and yet unrecognizable.
She had not yet reached the gates when the sky split open. The shriek of tearing metal and shattering glass ripped her head upward. A massive dirigible, flailing and broken, plummeted from the clouds, its descent ending in a roar that rattled the very streets.
Without thought, Jiàn ran. Smoke and sparks bloomed ahead, wreckage scattered like bones across the earth. And there, in the heart of the ruin, she saw her: a young girl, unburned, shielded by a strange wooden-winged machine that pulsed with unmistakable life.
The resonance struck her instantly. A heartbeat that answered her own.
The memory bled away with the hiss of steam and the phantom weight of mountain winds. Jiàn exhaled, grounding herself in the present; the crackle of firewood, the scent of ash, the muted shuffle of bodies settling for uneasy rest.
Across the flames, Tala stirred in her fitful sleep, her brow furrowed as though even dreams demanded too much of her. Min watched close, eyes alert despite the weariness in the young girl’s posture.
Rennie had claimed a patch of earth at the fire’s edge, his posture loose but his gaze anything but. His eyes followed Daiyu as she lowered herself onto her blanket, the silence between them taut with things unspoken.
Jiàn’s hand brushed the mist blade at her side, its steady warmth a reminder of every road that had brought her here: Shanghai, the mountains, the monastery, the wreckage that introduced her to the girl now dozing by the fire.
Soon, the sun would rise. Soon, they would have to continue their strange pilgrimage, following machines that pulsed with the weight of gods.
For now, though, Jiàn kept watch.
