Dawn came through the window in thin gold bars, and Ling Hao sat in the middle of them with a needle in his hand.
The birds outside were doing something he hadn't heard in longer than he wanted to calculate — an ordinary, unremarkable morning song, the kind that didn't require anyone to have survived anything to earn it. He listened without looking up. His hands were damp. Small blisters had formed where the needle had bitten through his guard more times than he'd admit to, and he flexed his fingers once before threading the next stitch.
The rabbit on the table was almost finished. One ear was still flat, unstuffed, waiting.
He kept working.
---
Bai knocked a little past noon.
Ling Hao heard him standing there for a moment before the door opened — the specific pause of someone who had knocked and then reconsidered knocking. When the door finally opened, Bai stood with his hands loose at his sides and an expression arranged into something carefully unremarkable.
"Morning." Awkward. A beat too late to actually qualify.
"Yeah. Morning too."
Neither of them moved out of the doorway. The silence had a texture it hadn't had in the forest — heavier, more deliberate, the quiet of something about to be said with both parties already aware of it.
Bai broke it first.
"I'm leaving."
Two words. They landed somewhere behind Ling Hao's sternum before his face decided what to do about it, his composure slipping half a step out of alignment — not visibly, not in any way Bai would have caught if he hadn't been watching for exactly that.
"Leaving. Why?"
Bai's expression didn't change. That was the tell, if you knew what to look for — the specific blankness of a man working hard to keep his face doing nothing at all. Ling Hao had spent years reading boardrooms full of people who smiled while lying to him. The tells here weren't so different. The held breath. The eyes that wouldn't quite land. The stillness that costs more than movement would.
Fear. Worry. Underneath both, guilt, worn thin from being carried too long.
Then Bai said the rest of it, flat, with the deliberate honesty of a man who had decided the truth was kinder than a softer lie.
"I don't trust you. And I don't want you following the path I'm walking."
Ling Hao had seen this coming — the questions that circled but never landed, the careful distance Bai kept even while walking a foot away. He'd made his peace with it before it arrived, or told himself he had.
Looking at the determination in Bai's eyes now, the peace held less than he'd expected.
They weren't close. Not by any measure that would count in a normal life. But Ling Hao had died more times than he could count chasing a foothold in this world, and somewhere in all of it, this stubborn, paranoid, ice-wielding stranger had become the only thing that felt entirely honest.
"Good luck," he said.
Two words back. He didn't have more available.
Bai looked at him a second longer than the moment required. Something that might have been a smile crossed his mouth and left just as fast. Then he turned and walked down the corridor, and the doorway was just a doorway, and the hall beyond it was empty in the way halls become empty after someone stops being in them.
Ling Hao shut the door.
His hands closed into fists before he'd decided to let them.
---
He sat back down at the table. Cotton. Thread. The unfinished rabbit, one ear still waiting. Small shapes lined the table's edge — a bird, something probably meant to be a fox, a second rabbit further along than the first.
Dammit.
He dropped into the chair. Looked at the ceiling for a long moment, jaw tight — the stillness of a man giving himself exactly one moment before filing it away.
Then something in him sharpened.
So you're walking a road of revenge.
Fine. I'll walk mine paved in gold.
He picked the needle back up.
---
Five days passed the same way.
Mornings into afternoons, meals alone at a corner table, the rhythm of needle and thread filling the hours the way walking through a forest once had. The innkeeper noticed.
"Mister. You need something?"
Ling Hao looked up. "Do you know anyone in Jadewood who makes shop signs?"
The innkeeper considered this with the theatrical gravity of a man who enjoyed being asked things. "North side. Uncle Jiang's Workshop." Then, eyes narrowing: "You planning to open an inn? Trying to put me out of business?"
Ling Hao's hands came up before his mouth caught up.
"No — no, no. I'm selling toys."
The innkeeper's eyebrows climbed considerably higher than the statement warranted.
That came out wrong. Ling Hao thought, watching the man's face rearrange itself around several new and entertaining conclusions.
"I mean —" He gave up on the sentence and reached for his coin purse instead, which resolved the conversation more efficiently than words had.
---
Jadewood in the afternoon was loud in the way that meant it was thriving — vendors calling prices, children weaving between cart wheels, spice smoke drifting from somewhere he couldn't place. He let it carry him north, past stalls of dyed fabric and stacked pottery, until the crowd thinned and a wide wooden building came into view with a sign clearly made by someone who took his own craft seriously.
Uncle Jiang's Workshop.
Inside, the space opened into sections — a Weapons wall lined with blades and half-finished hilts, an Artifacts corner crowded with things that hummed faintly even at a distance, and past both, a smaller room marked only Rune Path, dark and quiet in a way that made him want to look twice.
He didn't get the chance.
The shout came first — sharp, panicked, from the Weapons section.
Ling Hao moved before the thought caught up with the motion. The same reflex from the grass field with the merchant woman. The same part of him that didn't consult the calm, calculating half before committing his whole body to a decision.
A man was on the ground, arms up, shielding his face.
The sword wasn't held by anyone. It floated a foot above the ground, spinning in short violent arcs, a single carved eye set into the flat of the blade tracking its target with an attention that had no business belonging to a piece of wood and steel.
"Watch out for that sword!" the man shouted. Too late.
Ling Hao's hands closed around the hilt.
The world tipped sideways.
The blade didn't resist so much as *retaliate* — spinning hard against his grip, dragging him off balance, his feet leaving the floor as it whipped him through the air in a short vicious arc. He held on because letting go felt like the worse option, and the eye on the blade rolled toward him with an attention that was, unmistakably, considering him now instead of the man on the ground.
"Aaaaahh—!"
This thing is alive. He thought, gripping the handle with both hands as the shop blurred around him.
This sword is actually, genuinely alive.