The bruises from that night lingered for weeks. Jie could feel them every time he shifted in his sleep, every time he drew a breath too deep. His ribs ached like splintered wood, his arms carried faint lines of pain where the serpent-like master's strikes had landed, and his chest still throbbed from that devastating palm.
He didn't forget a single blow.
Instead, he replayed them in his mind, over and over again. He mimicked their movements in secret courtyards, in abandoned fields, in the stillness of night when the world was asleep. He remembered the way the stocky master had absorbed his strike, how the wiry one moved with liquid precision, how the white-haired man had shattered his breath with just one palm. Jie tried to copy them, twist their skills into his own feral rhythm. His body moved stiffly at first, but little by little he shaped himself, his instincts latching onto fragments of technique like a beast gnawing a bone.
It wasn't mastery. But it was something.
While Jie practiced, the whispers grew. The story of the boy with gray eyes was no longer contained to a single village or even a province. It traveled on the tongues of wandering merchants, in the drunken boasts of gamblers, in the fearful murmurs of townsfolk.
"They say he fought Wei Shen and won."
"No, no. He survived, that's all. Wei Shen let him live."
"Idiot, I heard he broke Wei Shen's nose."
"Forget that — I heard he fought three masters in one night and didn't die. That's not human."
Each version twisted the truth, each exaggeration making him larger, darker, more monstrous. Soon he wasn't just a boy anymore. He was a storm-child, a demon-spawn, a beast with a man's shape.
Some feared him. Others admired him. But all spoke of him.
Jie heard these whispers himself when he slipped through markets or eavesdropped in tea houses. At first, it confused him. He hadn't claimed these titles. He hadn't asked for the rumors. Yet he found that he liked the way people trembled when his name came up, liked the fire it sparked in his chest when men lowered their voices to speak of him.
It was fuel.
One afternoon, as he walked through a crowded market, he caught sight of himself reflected in a bronze mirror on a merchant's stall. His gray eyes glinted back at him, cold and strange. For a moment, he almost didn't recognize himself.
Is this what they see? he wondered. Not a boy. Not even human. A beast.
The thought didn't frighten him. It thrilled him.
It wasn't long before challengers began to seek him out.
The first was a wandering pugilist from the southern provinces, a towering man with fists like boulders and a booming laugh. He cornered Jie outside a blacksmith's shop, grinning as if the whole thing were a game.
"So you're the thunder-eyed brat everyone's been buzzing about," the man said, cracking his knuckles. "Let's see if you're worth the chatter."
The fight was brutal, raw, nothing like the elegance of Wei Shen or the masters. The man's fists tore through the air with killing weight, smashing stone walls and denting wooden beams. Jie slipped, darted, struck, his smaller frame weaving under the giant's attacks. When he finally buried his fist into the man's gut, the sound was like thunder. The pugilist collapsed, gasping and wheezing, blood spilling from his lips.
The crowd that had gathered scattered in panic. Some screamed his name. Others spat on the ground, muttering about demons. But nobody denied what they had seen.
The second challenger came only days later — a swordsman this time, lean and sharp-eyed, blade flashing in the moonlight. He didn't waste words. His steel spoke for him. Jie fought barehanded, closing distance again and again, taking shallow cuts along his arms and chest, his blood streaking the stone beneath his feet. When he finally caught the swordsman's wrist and snapped it with a vicious twist, the blade clattered to the ground. Jie left the man screaming in the dirt.
By the third challenger, Jie stopped wondering why they came. He knew. The whispers had become a beacon, calling warriors, fighters, killers from all walks of life. Some came to test him. Others came to kill him. Each one added fuel to the fire of his name.
But behind every clash, every victory, the memory of those three masters loomed. Jie knew that none of these challengers compared. The pugilist's fists, the swordsman's blade, the other nameless fighters — they were dangerous, yes, but not that. Not the weight that had crushed him in that courtyard. Not the impossible gulf he had felt in their presence.
And so, though Jie relished every fight, every drop of blood and scream of bone, none of it satisfied him. He was growing stronger, yes, but still far below the summit he had glimpsed.
One night, as Jie sat on the roof of a crumbling house overlooking the town, he overheard two travelers whispering below.
"They say the boy heads north next. Toward the mountains."
"Fool. If he goes there, he'll meet the monks. He'll die before he takes a step inside their gates."
"Or maybe he'll kill them all. Who can say with a beast like that?"
The monks.
The word stirred something in Jie. He thought of the white-haired man's voice, calm and cutting. Seek the ones who can shape that storm. Seek the Ryozanpaku.
He didn't know what Ryozanpaku was. He didn't know if the monks were connected. But the thought of men stronger than those he had faced, of techniques deeper than anything he had stolen from street brawls and half-learned imitations, ignited the hunger inside him.
Jie looked to the horizon, the mountains black against the night sky. His bruised body hummed with restless energy.
The whispers were pushing him farther now. The world was no longer enough.
If he was to be the beast they claimed, he would prove it not in alleys or markets, but against the pillars of the martial world itself.
And so he rose, the wind tugging at his ragged clothes, his gray eyes burning with a storm no one could mistake for human.
The whispers of the beast would not stop.
Not until the world itself trembled beneath his fists.