By the time the city decided he belonged, it had already taken everything else.
Belonging did not feel like acceptance. It felt like being filed into a crack where the wind could not reach, like dust settling into corners no broom bothered to sweep. It felt like the street no longer pausing to notice his shape because it had learned it the way it learned broken stones, by stepping over them often enough that they became part of the path.
He moved before the sky fully changed.
Not because he was disciplined, not because he had a plan, but because dawn was the only hour when hunger hurt less sharply. When the night's cold had not yet lifted and the day's cruelty had not yet warmed up its voice. The city had a rhythm, and he had been beaten into hearing it.
The stones were slick with condensation, and the air carried the stale breath of yesterday: old smoke pressed into mortar, damp refuse, sour beer spilled near tavern doors, and the faint sweet rot of fruit crushed under cart wheels. It all blended into a single taste that coated his tongue, a permanent bitterness that made even clean water feel suspicious.
He kept his remaining hand hidden when he walked.
Not because he was ashamed, shame was a luxury with too much room in it, but because eyes were greedy. People saw absence and turned it into opportunity. A missing arm meant weakness. Weakness meant easy theft. Easy theft meant entertainment.
He had learned this the hard way.
A boy had once tried to tug the coin from his palm while he slept. The boy's fingers were quick, but not quiet. The moment pressure shifted near his ribs, he woke like a startled animal, heart slamming against bone. He did not chase; he couldn't. He simply bit down on the inside of his mouth until the urge to scream turned into something smaller, tighter.
He learned to sleep with his back against stone and his knees drawn up, to keep his hand trapped between his chest and his thigh. He learned to position himself where foot traffic thinned, where laughter sounded distant enough that it could not turn toward him without effort.
Effort mattered in the city.
Most cruelty was lazy.
He drifted toward the market's outer edges because that was where the city shed its scraps. Vendors cleaned their boards and dumped peelings and bones into baskets that would later be thrown into the gutters. On good days he could catch something before it touched the ground, a bruised apple, a crust of bread hardened at the edges, a strip of meat too fatty for the wealthy to bother with.
On bad days, he watched rats eat better than him.
He learned the smell of food the way other children learned lullabies.
Oil and salt meant fried dough, usually sold at corners where workers gathered before labor. A sweet, burnt scent meant cheap sugar pulled thin and stretched over nuts. Meat was rare; when he smelled it, his body reacted before thought. Saliva flooded his mouth, his stomach cramped hard enough to double him over, and his legs threatened to carry him toward danger like a leash.
He trained that out of himself.
Not with willpower. With repetition.
Every time he smelled meat and did not move, something inside him pressed inward, as if a door had closed one more notch. Every time he watched food pass and forced his eyes away, the world sharpened in a strange, uncomfortable way. Sounds grew crisp. Footsteps became distinct. The clink of a coin, the creak of leather, the soft scrape of a blade being adjusted under cloth, these details reached him more clearly than they should have.
It was not a blessing.
It was a consequence.
The city demanded awareness from the weak, because the weak who were unaware did not survive long enough to become part of the scenery.
He reached the edge of a shrine as the first real light seeped between the buildings.
The shrine was nothing grand, just a stone figure worn down by weather and neglect, its features softened until it looked more like a suggestion of a face than a god. Someone had tied faded ribbons to a post beside it. Someone had placed a bowl of water that had long ago turned cloudy.
Even gods, here, were forgotten unless they were useful.
A few beggars were already there, huddled in the lee of the shrine's low wall. They didn't greet him. They didn't chase him away either. That was the closest thing the city offered to permission.
He sat with his back to stone and let his breathing slow.
The ache where his arm used to be pulsed faintly sometimes, like a distant drum. It wasn't pain the way it had been at first, raw and impossible. It was a reminder. A phantom pressure, as if the missing limb still occupied space in the world and the world refused to admit it was gone.
He adjusted his posture so his shoulder didn't rub too much against his shirt. The cloth was thin, rough, and smelled like old rain no matter how many times it dried. The seam near his collar had frayed into a scratchy line that irritated his skin constantly.
He closed his eyes only halfway.
Fully closing them invited memory.
And memory, when it came it did not knock.
A chant, low and distant, drifted through his mind with no warning.
Not a real chant from the street.
A remembered one.
The syllables had no meaning to him, but they carried the same weight they always had: a sinking sensation, like something heavy being lowered into a deep well. The chant was accompanied by the smell of smoke, different from the city's smoke. Cleaner, sharper. Burning wood from open fields. Burning roofs. Burning lives.
His stomach tightened.
His jaw clenched without his permission.
The flashback arrived like a blade slipping under the ribs: silent until it was already inside.
He was smaller then. Two arms then. A body that still believed it belonged to a home.
He remembered the first time his mother's voice had gone quiet.
Not soft. Not calm. Quiet the way a person becomes quiet when they are listening for something that will decide whether they live.
He remembered his father holding him back from the doorway with a hand that trembled.
He remembered the night air tasting wrong, smoke and damp earth, the metallic hint that meant something had already happened somewhere beyond sight.
Then the invaders.
Not screaming. Not celebrating.
Working.
They moved through the village like men who had done this before and would do it again. They carried sacks and bundles and tools wrapped in cloth. They did not treat the villagers as enemies. They treated them as materials.
His mother tried to cover his eyes.
He hated her for it, in that instant, because fear made him desperate for certainty, and certainty meant seeing. But her hand smelled like soap and herbs, like home, and that smell made the memory worse because it reminded him how easily home could be overwritten.
He heard the first plea.
A man begging for his child.
A woman begging for her husband.
Then the chant began again, and the begging changed, turning into a different kind of sound broken, involuntary, the voice of someone realizing the rules had changed and there would be no mercy negotiated.
The invaders spoke among themselves in clipped tones. Practical. Measured.
They weren't drunk on cruelty. They were committed to it.
And they kept looking upward between their actions, as if expecting an answer from above—some sign, some approval, some invisible witness that would sanctify what they were doing.
Immortals.
Demons.
Devils.
He didn't know which.
He only knew they were asking something that did not care about human suffering, and they were paying in pieces of people.
A sharp sound like metal on stone , snapped him back to the present.
His eyes opened wider.
A vendor had dropped a knife while setting up his stall. The blade clattered and then went still. No one reacted. The city did not react to small violence; it saved its attention for the kind that entertained crowds.
He exhaled slowly, breath scraping the back of his throat.
His chest felt dense again, the familiar pressure settling deeper as if compressing itself into a smaller point. He did not understand it, but he recognized the pattern: memory triggered the weight; endurance shaped it.
Cultivation novels spoke of foundations, of tempered bones, of forged meridians.
He had none of those words.
But he understood forging.
He had been forged by hunger.
He had been tempered by cold.
He had been hammered by fear until fear no longer made him run, it made him watch.
A beggar nearby coughed wetly. Another scratched at his ribs through his shirt, skin raw beneath the nails. A woman with hair like straw stared blankly at the street as if she had already left her body behind and only forgot to take it with her.
This was what the city produced.
Not heroes.
Survivors that had been scraped thin.
He stood and moved again.
The market was waking. Laborers began to appear, faces dull with resignation. Their boots were sturdier than his entire life. Their belts held pouches that jingled softly when they walked. His eyes tracked those pouches automatically.
Not to steal.
He didn't have the speed, and he didn't have the courage for that kind of gamble. He tracked them to understand distance, to understand risk. To understand where attention would be.
He slipped behind a cart as a merchant shouted at an apprentice. The apprentice flinched, shoulders tightening, and the flinch echoed something inside him a flash of his father again, turning back toward the smoke, eyes full of terror and love tangled together so tightly they could not be separated.
His throat tightened.
He kept moving.
A splash of dirty water struck the stones near his feet. He recoiled automatically, then forced himself to stop. Recoil was weakness. Weakness made others notice.
He steadied his breathing.
In.
Out.
Slow.
The pressure in his chest settled.
For a moment, in that stillness, he felt something he had never been able to describe properly: as if the world had a skin, thin and taut, and his breath brushed against it. The city noises did not vanish, but they organized themselves. The nearest sounds became distinct. The far sounds softened.
He could almost sense where people were without looking.
Almost.
Then it faded.
His body trembled slightly, not from cold, but from effort. Holding that kind of awareness felt like carrying a bucket of water with arms already tired. He could do it for a short time, and then his body demanded he let it spill.
He did not panic.
In cultivation stories, the first step was often a revelation, a technique, a master.
His first step was learning to hold himself together for three breaths longer than yesterday.
He found a discarded bun near a trash basket.
Half eaten. Stale. But real.
He took it quickly and stepped away, tucking himself into the shadow of a wall. He tore a small piece off with his teeth, then chewed slowly, forcing himself not to devour it like an animal.
The taste was bland, heavy with old flour.
But it was food.
His stomach clenched, then eased slightly. The relief was so sharp it almost hurt.
He closed his eyes for a second not to sleep, not to escape but just to taste without seeing the city that had reduced him to this.
Flour. A hint of salt. A faint sourness from age.
He swallowed.
The city continued.
A group of men passed carrying planks. Their conversation drifted: a complaint about wages, a crude joke, a mention of someone who had been found dead in an alley two streets over. The words did not change their pace. Death was news, but not interruption.
He finished the bun in three more bites and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Grease lingered on his lips.
He wanted more.
Want was dangerous.
He stood again and walked, letting the crowd hide him.
As he moved, the flashback returned in pieces but not the worst moments, but the lead-up, the way doom often arrived quietly before it arrived loudly.
He remembered a neighbor mentioning strange travelers seen on the ridge days earlier.
He remembered his mother tightening the latch at night.
He remembered the village dogs going silent.
He remembered waking once to the sound of something heavy being dragged across the ground and thinking, briefly, that someone was moving a cart too late.
Then he remembered the smell that followed.
Not smoke.
Something darker.
Something iron.
He stumbled slightly.
A passerby shoved him with a shoulder and kept going without looking back.
He caught himself against the wall, fingertips scraping stone.
He stared at his own frail hand... thin, dirty, real.
The missing arm was not visible, but it was present in every movement, in every balance correction, in every moment of fatigue. The city had taught him to compensate, to angle his body differently, to use his legs more, to keep his shoulder tucked. He had learned the mathematics of absence.
And somewhere in that learning, something inside him had become stubborn.
Not hopeful.
Not righteous.
Stubborn.
The kind of stubbornness that survived because it refused to give the world the satisfaction of finishing the job.
He pushed off the wall and continued walking.
The city was awake now. Fully awake. The smell of food grew stronger. The voices grew louder. The day began grinding.
He did not have a destination.
Beggars rarely did.
But as he moved, he realized something with a clarity that felt like cold water over a wound:
The invaders had taken the village because they believed the village was weak.
The city kept him because it believed the same.
Weakness was a currency here.
People spent it.
They traded it.
They consumed it.
And if you survived long enough, the city stopped trying to kill you directly—not out of mercy, but because it grew bored and moved on to fresher prey.
That was what belonging meant.
Not safety.
Not community.
Just… persistence.
He drew his breath in slowly, felt the pressure in his chest settle, and kept walking into the noise as if he had always been part of it.
Because now, in this place of stone and smoke, survival was no longer a beginning.
It was a practice.