Lee Jin buried Bor under the same rockslide that was meant to be his own grave. It was a crude, heavy task, the scent of upturned earth and blood thick in the air. The Mountain-Crushing Grip knowledge, freshly copied, gave his hands an instinctive understanding of leverage and weight, making the grim work slightly more efficient. The irony was not lost on him.
By the time he finished, his wounded leg was a throbbing column of fire. He used the last of his purified moss to make a poultice, binding it with a strip torn from Bor's tunic. The axe, a far better tool than the one he'd been issued, he kept.
He completed the "Path-Clearing" duty with a grim, mechanical focus. Every cleared branch, every shifted stone, was an act of defiance. He returned to the Silent Moon Sect gates just before dusk, limping, covered in dust and dried blood—some his own, most of it not.
The duty master eyed him with surprise, then a flicker of unease. "You're late. And you look like hell. What happened?"
"Rockslide," Lee Jin said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. "On the Blackpeak switchback. Took hours to clear. Lost my hatchet in the fall." He hefted Bor's axe. "Found this."
The duty master's eyes narrowed, but he couldn't find a flaw in the story. Accidents happened on the mountain. Tools were lost. Others were found. He grunted, marking Lee Jin's slate as duty-complete. "Get that leg seen to."
Lee Jin didn't go to the infirmary. He went to the creek in his ravine. He washed the blood and grime from his skin, the icy water biting into the fresh, ragged scar on his calf. The physical wound would heal. The other mark, the one left by taking a life and stealing the strength of the dead, felt deeper. It was a cold stone settled in his dantian, a new weight he would have to carry.
The following days were a study in silent tension. Bor's absence was noted, but as a brutish, unpopular disciple with no powerful backers, it raised little alarm. A disciple running away from the harsh sect life was not uncommon. Senior Disciple Han, however, watched Lee Jin with a new, simmering intensity. The planned accident had failed. The trash had not only returned, but returned with a harder edge, a sharper look in his eye, and a better axe.
Han couldn't accuse him without implicating himself. The stalemate was fragile, charged with unspoken threats.
Lee Jin threw himself into cultivation with a ruthless new focus. The Mountain-Crushing Grip, while a brutish skill, taught him about anchoring his strength to the earth, about the flow of power from his core through his limbs. He integrated its principles with the Silent Moon Fist, making his punches not just precise, but heavy. He practiced until his knuckles were permanently scabbed and the new scar on his leg ached with a bone-deep throb.
He also began a new, riskier project. Using his Stone-Knapping expertise, he didn't just make mortars. He began, painstakingly, to shape a river stone. Not into a tool, but into a weapon. A crude, heavy throwing stone, perfectly balanced for his hand. It was slow work, done in stolen moments, but it was his. Not copied, not stolen, but crafted.
One evening, as he was finishing the stone's final shaping behind the herb shed, a shadow fell over him. Not Han's. This one was smaller, quieter.
He looked up. It was Disciple Mei, the girl with the flawlessly precise Silent Moon Fist. She looked at the near-finished throwing stone in his hand, then at his eyes.
"You work differently now," she said, her voice quiet. "Before, you were copying. Now you are... adapting."
Lee Jin's blood froze. How much had she seen? How much did she know?
She seemed to read his alarm. "I watch too," she said simply. "It is the only advantage for those of us without prodigal talent. Your fist form. It has the textbook structure, but the weight behind it is new. It has a... foundation it didn't before."
She wasn't accusing. She was observing. Just like him.
"You are precise," Lee Jin said cautiously, stating a fact.
"Precision is a cage if it cannot change," she replied, her gaze dropping to the stone in his hand. "A balanced stone can be thrown. A perfect form can break if the opponent does not follow the script." She paused, then met his eyes again. "Senior Disciple Han has requested a private sparring session with me tomorrow. To 'correct my passive style.'"
The message was clear. Han was moving on another front. Mei, with her perfect but rigid technique, was next on his list to crush or control.
She said nothing more, turning and melting back into the twilight.
Lee Jin looked down at the throwing stone, its surface smooth and cool in his palm. It was a tool of last resort, simple and direct. Mei's words echoed. A perfect form can break.
He had been so focused on acquiring skills, on copying the perfect blueprint. But the fight with Bor, the necessity of hybridizing the Mist-Cutter Palm principle with a desperate strike, had shown him something else. The system gave him perfect information, but real combat was chaos. It demanded improvisation.
The next day, he watched from a distance as Senior Disciple Han and Disciple Mei squared off in a roped-off section of the yard. Han, sleek and confident, used fluid, aggressive forms meant to overwhelm. Mei defended with her mechanically perfect blocks and counters, but she was being pushed back, step by step, her precision becoming a predictable rhythm.
Han was toying with her, demonstrating her limits. A cruel smile played on his lips. "See? Perfect form is useless if it cannot withstand real pressure!"
He feinted high, then swept a leg at her knees, a move outside the standard Silent Moon Fist curriculum. Mei, locked in her textbook defense, was unprepared. She stumbled.
Han didn't let up. He pressed forward, his palm glowing with a concentrated burst of qi—not enough to cripple, but enough to bruise deeply and humiliate. The Lunar Eclipse Palm, the incomplete skill Lee Jin had seen before.
Mei braced, her perfect form rigid, ready to absorb the blow she couldn't avoid.
Lee Jin's mind, a repository of stolen knowledge, worked at lightning speed. He saw Han's stance, the angle of his hip, the flow of his qi. He saw Mei's brittle defense. And in a flash, he cross-referenced it with the flawed attempt at the Rippling Water Palm he'd analyzed weeks before. The principle of sequential power. A wave.
He didn't shout. He didn't move. But from the edge of the crowd, he met Mei's eyes for a fraction of a second and made a small, sharp gesture with his hand—not a fist, but a hand that trembled in a quick, propagating motion from wrist to fingertips.
Not a block. A redirect. Let the wave pass through, but guide its crest.
Mei's eyes widened almost imperceptibly. In the split second before Han's palm struck, she shifted. Instead of bracing to meet the force head-on, she gave way, her own arm moving in a subtle, yielding circle, guiding the thrust of Han's palm just past her shoulder. At the same time, her other hand, formed into a tight fist, snapped forward in a short, sharp Silent Moon Fist strike, not at Han's body, but at the inside of his wrist, precisely where the Lunar Eclipse Palm's qi was most concentrated and vulnerable.
It wasn't in any manual. It was a hybrid of defensive redirection and surgical counter-attack, conceived in an instant by Lee Jin and executed by Mei's flawless control.
Crack.
A sound like a snapping twig. Han's flowing strike jarred to a halt. A flash of pain and shock crossed his face as the feedback from his own disrupted technique lanced up his arm. He stumbled back, clutching his wrist.
The training yard fell utterly silent. Mei stood, breathing heavily, her perfect form finally broken—but into something new, something adaptable. She looked from her own fist to Han's stunned face, then her gaze flickered to the crowd, searching for Lee Jin.
He was already turning away, melting into the background. But a new prompt glowed in his vision, warm and undeniable.
[Analysis: Theoretical Combat Instruction Successful.]
[Skill Synergy Understanding Deepened. 'Silent Moon Fist' and 'Rippling Water Palm' principles show 23% compatibility.]
[New Data: 'Lunar Eclipse Palm' (Incomplete) disruption point identified and logged.]
He hadn't thrown a punch. He hadn't copied a thing. Yet, he had intervened. He had used the system not as a thief, but as a strategist. He had turned his stolen knowledge into a weapon for someone else.
The cold stone in his dantian didn't vanish. The scar on his leg still ached. But as he walked away, the crude, heavy throwing stone a familiar weight in his pocket, Lee Jin felt a new sensation cutting through the constant chill.
It was the faint, fragile warmth of a new kind of strength. Not just taken, but shared. Not just copied, but created.
The path ahead was still dark, and Han's rage would now be a bonfire. But Lee Jin was no longer just a ghost, or a thief. He was becoming something else. A variable. A problem that could not be solved by a simple rockslide.