There was no shortcut to mastery.
For most cultivators, meditation was the first path, sitting cross-legged under waterfalls or beneath starry skies, drawing qi into their cores.
But Jin Muyeon's meditation was the ring of steel, the clang of the hammer, and the heat of the forge.
The morning sun barely crept over the horizon when Muyeon began his routine. Each day started the same—hauling buckets of cold water from the well, chopping wood for the forge, then heating the furnace until the fire raged like a beast demanding tribute.
But now, something had changed.
The fire recognized him.
When he stoked it, it surged higher—as if welcoming him, hungry to shape metal under his hand. The silver-tinged flame pulsed faintly each time he breathed in rhythm with the strikes of his hammer. The primordial essence that had once simply warmed the metal now stirred in time with his soul.
Still, Muyeon refused to get ahead of himself.
He worked like a madman possessed.
First, physical drills—hundreds of swings with his hammer, forging worthless chunks of scrap metal over and over just to hone technique. His arms ached. His back groaned. His palms split open and bled onto the handle. But he didn't stop.
"Master the hammer before you master the blade," his late father had once told him.
He remembered.
Then came movement drills—Muyeon had begun training with wooden weapons, not to fight, but to understand balance. Each blade, each staff, each dagger had a different rhythm. A different soul.
He swung them slowly at first, learning the way they cut the air. Then faster, blindfolded, until he could move around the smithy as if every weapon were a natural extension of his body.
"If I am to craft the best," he whispered to himself, "I must become the best wielder."
Evenings were the hardest.
That was when he sat alone before the forge, cross-legged, with soot staining his skin and the flame's warmth flickering against his face. He tried to breathe in sync with the fire. To feel the qi moving inside him.
At first, he thought he was imagining it—but by the fifth night, it wasn't imagination.
He could feel it now.
His meridians had always been sluggish, barely responsive. But the constant physical exertion, the meditation before the elemental flame, the rhythm of forging—it had stirred something in him. The qi inside his dantian began to swirl, faint but undeniable.
It wasn't a breakthrough. Not yet.
But it was close.
One day, as he trained in the clearing near the river—his shirt soaked through with sweat—Ruo Lianhua approached him, watching quietly from under the shade of a cedar tree.
"You've changed," she said.
Muyeon blinked, panting. "Have I?"
She nodded, eyes trailing over the crude blade in his hand. "You're getting stronger. Not just your arms or your strikes. Your… spirit. It's sharper."
He didn't say anything.
Lianhua walked forward, pulling a white cloth from her sleeve and dabbing the blood off his palm where the handle had reopened his wounds.
"You push too hard," she murmured. "You don't have to become a god in a day."
Muyeon chuckled softly, his voice tired. "I'm not trying to be a god. I just… I want to be ready."
"For what?"
He looked past her, toward the horizon, where the mountains loomed like sleeping giants. "For when the heavens finally notice me."
That night, he returned to the forge once more.
And this time, when he placed his hands above the flame…
…it answered.
A whisper, not in words, but in feeling—a pulse in his bones, in the metal, in the air. He wasn't just working with fire anymore. He was speaking to it.
The first stage of Qi Condensation was finally within reach.