The night Tang San died, a soundless snap shivered through the city.
I was ten, crouched beneath a rusted water tank on the orphanage roof, spying on the alley below because that's what the older boys did when they wanted to pretend they were wolves and not strays. Wind combed the laundry lines into pale banners. Somewhere, a train wailed. And then—like a harp string plucked by a god—the world tugged, as if a single filament had been pulled free from the weave of fate.
I didn't know his name then. I only felt the absence—the echo that follows when a bell stops ringing.
A thread broke.
The wind fell quiet for a heartbeat. My skin prickled. The ordinary noises returned like they'd been embarrassed for stopping. I stood there with my hands gripping the water tank's pitted rim, feeling stupid for shivering in the summer heat.
I didn't see the man leap. I didn't see the cliff or the sect or the stolen manuals that would become legend. All I caught was the empty place he left behind, an outline cut out of the night—and for reasons I couldn't explain, it felt familiar, like the ghost of a scar I should've had.
Later, rumours drifted in. A craftsman of hidden weapons was gone. A heretic. A loyal son. A fool. People can dress a death in any costume they like, but the naked truth of it had pressed against my bones that night: the world had changed. The pattern had rewritten itself without asking permission.
The next morning, the orphanage matron dragged a boy twice my size out by the ear for stealing steamed buns, and I was still thinking about that broken thread. I spread rice thin on a chipped plate so everyone would think I'd eaten, then slipped back to the roof, cupped my hands to the early light, and tried to feel the tug again.
Nothing. Just pigeons and the hum of traffic and the city blinking awake.
I told myself it was imagination.
It stopped being imagination the day the men in grey came.
They called themselves "civic guardians," the kind of bland title that means the exact opposite. We'd seen them before—shadow coins on the street, casting faces toward the ground when they passed. This time, they came for me.
"Lu Ruochen?" the leader asked, reading my name off a clipboard. His voice was also grey.
"That's me," I said, because I'd already decided no one would say my name for me if I didn't.
He studied me like a technician evaluating a spare part. "You climb roofs. You don't eat enough. Your reflexes are good." His gaze flicked to the rail where I often perched. "You memorise faster than you speak. You don't sleep much."
"Do you read diaries now?" I asked.
"We read the world," he said mildly. "Come."
The matron wrung her apron. "Is this necessary? He's small."
"Small things fit where others cannot," the man said, and I learned the first truth of my new life: they were building a machine and I happened to be the right shape for one of its cogs.
They called our place a school. It wasn't. Schools didn't smell like metal, oil, inkstone, and fear. It sat behind a misdirecting facade—a clinic that treated sprains and knife slices with old recipes and new stitches. In the back were rooms without windows. In those rooms were maps. In those maps were lines. Follow the lines, the instructors said, and a city falls open like a puzzle box.
We learned how to move without being named by the air. We learned the anatomy of locks and the uglier anatomy of the human body. We learned how to listen for a purse string, a tooth click, a hesitation, a lie. But what I learned most was the silence between all of it—the way the world held its breath before something happened.
Every night, alone on my bunk, I tried to hear the broken thread again. If a death could ring like that, what else could? What if that sound wasn't an ending but a door? I held my breath, counted heartbeats, and waited for the pattern to twitch.
Some months after they took me in, Master Nie—the oldest instructor, who looked like the kind of man everybody underestimated once—threw a stack of vellum diagrams onto my desk. It was an evening class, when the younger trainees were sent to sleep and the older ones sharpened their hands on secrets.
"What do you see?" he asked.
The topmost sheet was a human figure made of lines and annotations, the old meridian map I'd seen in martial treatises—lung channel, spleen, governor vessel. The next sheet was the same figure, but the lines were thinner, braided, almost like silk strands twined together. The third wasn't a body at all. It was a spiderweb drawn over a city map.
"Same pattern," I said before I could stop myself.
Master Nie's mouth ticked. "Good eyes. Most only see roads and veins. They don't see threads."
I told him about the night on the roof. The snap I'd felt. The sense of absence.
"Ah," he said softly, like I'd confirmed a suspicion he'd been courting for years. "There are a few who can feel it. The cut in the cloth."
"What is it?"
"Causality," he said. "Destiny, if you like theatre. Some call it karma, some call it momentum. I call it a thread. And that night, boy, the world was yanked so hard that even the blind blinked. A craftsman removed himself from one warp to appear in another. And the loom…adjusted."
"You knew him?" I asked.
"I knew of him. And I know the hole he left. You felt it because you've got fingers in the weave."
He tapped the second diagram—the braided meridians. "This is mine. Not finished. But if a man can cut his thread and begin elsewhere, perhaps a man can strengthen his—twist it, braid it, anchor it deeper into the loom."
"Live longer," I whispered, heat rising in my chest like shame or hope. "How long?"
"Depends on how well you weave." He looked at me directly then, and the room felt very small. "The young always think of forever. There is no forever. There is craftsmanship, and there are limits. I think five hundred years is the border where the thread frays, no matter how you coax it. With genius, perhaps a thousand. After that, the loom wants its thread back."
My mouth was dry. "Teach me."
"Why?" he asked, and the question was a needle.
Because I was an orphan twice over—once in body, once in fate. Because I felt the world breathe, and it made me greedy for more breaths. Because death had already been too loud in my ear.
"Because I want to stay," I said. "Long enough to see what people do with the tools we leave them. Long enough to stop being blown around by other people's stories."
He considered. "Staying is work, not a wish. We'll see."
He didn't teach me a forbidden manual that night. He handed me a basin and a brush and set me to copying his braids, stroke by stroke, until my fingers cramped and the characters blurred. The work was maddening and exactly right. The pattern lived better in the hand than in the head.
My first field job came the next winter.
A rival guild held an auction in a bathhouse disguised as a tea parlour. Hidden weapons were the specialty on the block—coiled darts, swallow knives, a spring-spear that could punch through thin armour—things the absent craftsman would've cursed as cheap imitations. Our task was simple: switch a single lot with a decoy before dawn. Not glorious. Precise.
We went in as laundry boys.
Steam made everything bodiless. Voices echoed wrong. The master of the bathhouse had a habit of clacking his teeth together when he laughed, a sound like two stones meeting. He'd filed them, rumour said, to remind himself not to bite off more than he could chew. He chewed anyway.
My hands didn't shake. That surprised me. The trick to nerves is to give them a job. I made mine count the breaths between footsteps, time the clack of teeth, and note the pause of the guard who liked to scratch his ear every sixth step.
When the time came, the switch took less than a heartbeat. The decoy slotted in as neatly as a lie into a conversation.
We were almost clear when a boy my age stepped out of a door I hadn't marked. He wore a porter's apron, eyes sharp and too old. We saw each other and the steam between us trembled. I knew the look in his face because it was mine: counting, mapping, learning.
He opened his mouth to shout.
I moved without thinking, fingers finding the pressure point Nie's anatomical maps had warned me about—not a killing touch, just the brief fog of pain to bend a decision. He faltered, mouth closing on a curse. I slipped past and was a ghost by the time his breath found its volume.
The city nights after that tasted different. The air had a comparable. I knew what my body could do within the pattern, where to press and where to release. I also knew I'd just stepped onto a long counting rope. Every success adds weight. One day, it drags you under if you don't build something strong enough to hold you up.
So I built.
I copied Nie's diagrams until his ink stones wore down. I read what the clinic's physickers would let me read and what they wanted to keep to themselves. I traced my own pulse until I could feel the way it rushed when I lied and slowed when I told the truth. I listened for the thread. When it tugged, I moved with it. When it stilled, I made myself a cup of bitter tea and made the stillness my practice.
I grew. Ten became twelve, then thirteen. The world has become smaller and more complex. I picked the lock on my fear and found competence. I picked the lock on my competence and found arrogance. Nie rapped my knuckles until the arrogance learned to keep its voice down.
On a night like the one that began it all—windy, laundry snapping silent flags across rooftops—Nie found me on the clinic's rear stair and handed me a small black case wrapped in oiled cloth.
"You earned this," he said. "Don't mistake a gift for a promise."
Inside lay five needles so fine they were almost implied. A spring tool whose teeth were polished to a mirror. A ribbon-weight that collapsed into a coin. And a folded packet of vellum: The Silkworm's Way.
"Your braid," I breathed, pulse tripping.
"My notes," he corrected. "Half-proven. Dangerous if you pretend they're whole. The gist: you don't cultivate more life by hoarding. You braid by learning to place tension where the world can't cut you. Moments. Vows. The kind of action that tethers."
"Teach me the rest."
"I just did," he said, and the corner of his mouth tilted. "Now go tie yourself to something that matters. You can't knot a thread in a vacuum."
"What matters?" I asked, almost angry at the simplicity.
He tipped his head toward the city. "Find out."
I found out two days later in a market that stank of ginger and gun oil.
A woman was buying chillies with hands that shook. Her son—seven?—tugged at her sleeve. The boy's pupils were blown wide as if his body had decided it was safer not to see too clearly. The woman had a scarf wound too tightly around her throat, hiding bruises in an obvious way. A man in a police jacket—not a cop; the jacket was wrong at the seams—stood three stalls down pretending he didn't care about them.
If I closed my eyes, I could hear the world hold its breath. A small thread, already frayed, about to snap.
You cannot braid your life by hoarding it, Nie had written in a careful hand. You twist strands together by choosing where to stand and then standing there again tomorrow.
I didn't plan. I picked up a bag of flour and walked into the man's shoulder just hard enough to bounce the bag out of my hands. White dust exploded across his chest and face. He cursed and reached for me. I flinched like a kid, then darted behind a stall. His hand closed on air. The boy laughed once, a sharp, surprised bark that sounded like sunlight in winter.
The man spun toward the sound. The woman stepped between them on instinct. I was already moving. The spring-tool kissed the inside of his wrist, teeth nipping a tendon barely enough to make his fingers spasm open. His grip failed. The stall keeper's old husband—bless his slow anger—rapped the man's other hand with a broom handle. The crowd decided, all at once, that this was a problem for them, not a theatre for fear.
The jacket was wrong at the seams. The man did not belong. He left, wiping flour and insults from his face.
The woman adjusted her scarf. The boy clutched a chili like a trophy. I melted away because that's what we were trained to do, but my hands were shaking—not from fear, from the recognition of weight settling around a knot I'd just tied.
That night, the city gave me a gift in return.
Back on the clinic roof, the laundry lines sang, the air smelled of flour and victory, and I felt it again—the tug. Not the brutal snap of a thread breaking. A subtle pull, like the world had noticed my knot and was testing it.
"Good," I told it. "Hold."
In the weeks that followed, the Silkworm's Way began to breathe under my skin. It wasn't a cultivation in the storybook sense; there were no glowing cores, no overnight leaps. It was a craft practiced in how I sharpened a needle, how I swallowed an insult, how I chose which lock to open and which to leave alone. The braid grew a hair's breadth each day and sometimes frayed a hair's breadth back, and I learned to accept that patience is a weapon that cuts quietly.
I kept thinking of the absent craftsman—the one who gouged a door through his destiny and stepped into another world where rings of light bind souls to spirits. Rumours painted him as a villain or a saint, depending on the storyteller. I didn't like him for what he'd done—to the Sect, to the rules, to the pattern—but I couldn't pretend the door he pried open didn't draw my eye.
One evening, after drills left my arms vibrating, I leaned my head against the cool brick of the stairwell and whispered to the absent man like he could hear me through the warp. "You broke the thread," I said. "I'm going to braid mine until breaking it becomes a choice I make, not a fall I can't stop."
The city answered with the faintest tremor.
A promise is a knot.
On the anniversary of the night the world tugged, Master Nie took me to the river. The water was a dark mirror, light kneeling across it in thin lengths. He handed me a coin stamped with an old sigil—the Clear Sky. I rolled it across my knuckles. It was heavier than it looked.
"Do you know why he jumped?" Nie asked.
"Because he believed something waited," I said.
"Because he believed something better waited," Nie corrected. "Belief is a stronger poison than fear. It's also a stronger remedy." His gaze slid to me. "When you choose—and you will—don't pretend you were pushed. Live long enough to make the decision from the high ground, not the ledge."
"How long is long enough?" I asked.
"The day you can look at the shape of your life and say: I tied it there, on purpose."
We stood in silence as a barge moved like a patient animal under the bridge. I felt the braid of my days settle another loop into place. Five hundred years? A thousand, if I learned the craft well enough? The numbers stopped sounding like fantasy and began to feel like units of work.
I didn't know then that I would live to count them all. I didn't know yet the names of the weapons I would wield or the way my hair would take on the glint of metal in another sky. I didn't know that a hammer older than empires would one day rest easy in my hands like it had been waiting.
But I knew this: a thread had broken when I was ten. I had chosen to braid mine instead of cutting it. And somewhere in a world I couldn't yet touch, rings of light flickered around beasts and men, and a path was being levelled that would run straight through my chest.
The river lapped gently at the bank, as if tasting its own patience.
"I will stay," I said to the water, to the city, to the absent craftsman, to the loom. "I will watch. I will learn. And when it's time to cross, I'll walk there—on a bridge I built."
The coin flashed in my palm, a small sun, and then cooled.
Behind us, the clinic lanterns snapped alight one by one. Somewhere much farther away than miles, a hammer fell, and a world we do not yet know shuddered in its sleep.
I turned toward the lights.
The thread held.