Three days after the morning with his grandfather, Míng Xīn met the boy who would become his first enemy.
His name was Fang Liú. He was nine years old, two years older than Míng Xīn, with a cultivation base already at early Vein Breaker level and the particular confidence of someone who had been told since birth that he was exceptional and had not yet encountered sufficient evidence to the contrary.
He was also Elder Councillor Fang's grandson.
Míng Xīn had known this before they were introduced. He had made it his business to know the family trees of everyone in the Eternal Courts compound by age six, which his tutors also found unsettling and said nothing about.
They met in the east training courtyard during the junior cultivation drills that Míng Xīn was required to attend despite having nothing to cultivate. He stood at the edge of the group as he always did, watching the other children cycle hollow energy through their meridians with varying degrees of success, cataloguing their techniques and their weaknesses and their individual tells with the automatic attention that had become, over seven years of quiet observation, simply how he experienced the world.
He noticed Fang Liú watching him from across the courtyard eleven minutes into the session.
Not the casual glance of a child noticing another child. Something more deliberate than that. More prepared.
Míng Xīn had seen that look before. On Elder Fang's face across a court assembly hall. Smaller version. Same architecture.
He filed this and waited.
Fang Liú crossed the courtyard toward him when the supervising instructor turned to correct another student's form. Unhurried. The walk of someone who had rehearsed this.
"You are Tiān Míng Xīn," he said. Not a question.
"Yes," Míng Xīn said.
"My grandfather says you have not awakened yet." He said it the way people say things they want to seem casual about and are not casual about at all.
"Your grandfather is correct."
Fang Liú studied him with open assessment. "My grandfather also says that a branch cannot flower if the roots are wrong. He says it often." He paused. "I think he means it for you."
Míng Xīn looked at the boy in front of him. Nine years old. Vein Breaker cultivation. Grandfather who pressed his fist against his thigh in meetings and called it loyalty. He had prepared something specific to say and had waited for a moment when the instructor was not watching to say it, which meant this had been planned, which meant someone older had been involved in the planning.
"Your grandfather is a careful man," Míng Xīn said. "He does not say things directly when he can say them through someone else."
Fang Liú blinked.
It was a very small blink. Barely visible. But Míng Xīn saw it because Míng Xīn saw everything, and what it meant was that the boy had not expected the conversation to go this direction and had not prepared anything for this particular response.
"I only meant," Fang Liú said, with slightly less certainty than before, "that it must be difficult. Not having awakened. At your age."
"It is not difficult," Míng Xīn said simply. "I am waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
Míng Xīn looked at him for a moment. Then he looked past him, at the clan tree visible beyond the courtyard wall, at the amber hollow light on its ancient bark, at the place where he had sat that morning and felt something vast and patient acknowledge his existence from somewhere impossibly deep below.
"I don't know yet," he said honestly. "But I think it will be clear when it arrives."
Fang Liú had no answer for this. He stood for another moment with the expression of someone whose rehearsed conversation had gone in a direction that left him with no more rehearsed lines, and then the instructor turned back and Fang Liú returned to his side of the courtyard with the careful walk of someone pretending they had not just lost an exchange they had expected to win.
Míng Xīn watched him go.
He did not feel victorious. He felt tired in the way he sometimes felt after observing something unpleasant, when the gap between how people behaved and how he wished they would behave sat especially wide and heavy.
He thought about his father, who had never once pressed his fist flat against his thigh while smiling at someone. Who had never once said something through another person that he was unwilling to say himself.
He thought about his grandfather, who had defended him without being asked and told him the truth without being gentle about it and expected him to be strong enough for honesty.
He thought about his mother, who had chosen thirty years of silence and then one day stopped choosing it.
He pressed his hand briefly against his own chest, over the place that had no name.
Something there, patient and vast and waiting in its own ancient darkness, pressed back.
Not waking.
But close.
Getting closer every day.