The cohort arrived on the twelth day of frostfall.
The lead rider dismounted first and introduced herself as Shu Lian before her feet hit the ground. She appeared to have been around Commander Xu’s age, late twenties with a solid build and her hair was cut short. She shook road dust from her sleeve, looked at the training ground, and made a hum of approval.
The next two riders ca down without fanfare. One had a scar across his chin, the other looked at the river path toward zone two.
Then the fourth rider ca down and he launched himself off the horse with an acrobatic vault and landed lightly on his feet.
"This is bigger than I thought," The young man said. He appeared to have a little older than , maybe he was around Hao’s age, and he wore an everpresent grin on his face. "The garrison said it was a village school,”" He turned to Shu Lian. "Did you know it was this big?"
"Dian Lu…” Shu Lian said in a warning tone.
The boy seemingly ignored the tone and turned to face . "Are you the instructor?"
"I am one of them. My nam is Pei Liang," I introduced myself with a courteous bow.
"I'm Dian Lu." He said it like I might have been waiting for the information. "I'm ready to start!"
Shu Lian closed her eyes briefly. "He has been like this for the entire journey. I apologize."
"Three weeks of unimagineable torture," said the man with the chin scar.
"I was just enthusiastic," Dian Lu said. "The roads are long and soone has to keep the morale up." He looked at the impact walls again. "So where do we learn how to punch holes through fences?”
I looked at him and gave a heavy sigh. Of course there was going to be one over zealous student.
"Zone one," I said.
He followed my gaze to classroom that had been set up, the building with the seats arranged inside in clean rows.
"You're redirecting ," he said.
"I'm answering the question you asked. Zone one produces the foundation that makes everything else possible. Which makes it the strongest." I kept my voice level. "You can test that conclusion if you want."
He looked at , perhaps sizing up to see if I was even qualified to tell him what to do.
There is only one way that a person like this will understand, I thought.
I turned toward the house and raised my voice. "Pei Hao."
Hao appeared in the doorway. He read the scene in one look and made his way over to with a hospitable smile gracing his face.
"Zone three demonstration," I said.
Hao walked to the center of the zone three ground, turned to face them, and pressed his palms together in front of his chest.
He stomped.
His foot generated a deep concussive thud that carried through the ground and up through the soles of every foot standing on the training ground. The packed earth under Hao's foot cratered inward, dismantling under the weight of his strength.
The cohort went quiet. Shu Lian had both hands down at her sides, her mouth agape in shock. The man with the chin scar uncrossed his arms and his eyes were wide. The man that was still mounted on the horse had to steady his steed, and Dian Lu had his mouth open.
Hao stepped back from the crater and put his hands behind his back.
I turned to the cohort.
"My brother has been training under zone one principles for three years," I said. "He has also been a cultivator since he was fifteen, which ans his capacity is considerably higher than any of yours." I looked at each of them in turn. "If any one of you attempted that technique in the state you are currently in, your leg would be severed from your body.”
Nobody spoke.
"Zone one," I said, "is where we fix that. It is not optional.”
I looked at Dian Lu. "Zone one starts in the classroom, I'll be with you in a mont."
Dian Lu walked to zone one without looking back, as did everyone else.
The first session ran smoothly.
I started with nas and self-assessnt, which told more than any intake docunt.
The man with the chin scar was Chen Wei, thirty-one, eight years in the garrison's eastern company. His cultivation habits were conservative, controlled, and consistent. His restriction was in the gallbladder pathway, left side, which he hadn't noticed because the compensation had beco second nature. He would be the hardest to retrain because he was the most convinced he already knew what he was doing.
The next practitioner was a young man nad Lu Li, he was twenty-three years old and he’d joined the garrison two years ago from a contracted farming settlent north of Lanyu. He was the quietest of the four and the most precise in his self-assessnt, which suggested either good training or good instincts. His foundation was the cleanest in the cohort, but his weakness was that he had never been taught to push past his own caution.
Shu Lian's assessnt confird what her bearing had already suggested. Her technical developnt was genuine, well-structured ridian flow, and good output control. What she was missing was the layer underneath precision: the awareness of what the body was doing when she wasn't actively directing it. Her cultivation was all intention, no listening. The danger with that was she could have pushing herself beyond her limits and end up with a terrible backlash without knowing it.
Dian Lu was last.
His foundation was a problem and a promise simultaneously. The raw capacity was the highest in the cohort, possibly the highest I had assessed outside of Hao, with the dense qi volu and channel width of soone whose body had been preparing for cultivation before his mind caught up to it. What he had done with that capacity was build entirely in one direction, output, all the qualities that made soone dangerous in a fight and catastrophic in an unsupported application. His awareness of his own channels was almost nonexistent. He knew what he could produce. He had no idea what it was costing.
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"Your large intestine pathway," I said. "Feel the right side of your abdon below the ribcage."
He put his hand there and winced at the pain. "It feels tight."
"Every ti you push force output past a certain threshold, the pathway backs up." I looked at him. "Where does it go?"
He thought about it. "My right shoulder. After a hard day of work it aches for days."
"In the long term it will cause damage to your shoulder that no amount of training will fix." I kept my voice even. I didn’t want to sound like I was lecturing or talking down on him, I just wanted him to cultivate safely.
He took that in. When he spoke, the eagerness had narrowed. "How long to clear the restriction?"
"One week, maybe two." I looked at the chalk lines. "Which is why zone one is not optional."
He nodded.
I ran them through the five principles twice, then had each of them trace their own primary ridian loop with two fingers and describe what they felt.
Chen Wei gave a competent answer and missed the gallbladder issue entirely, which confird it was invisible to him.
Lu Ling described his loop in more detail than I had asked for, which told he had been wanting soone to ask.
Shu Lian gave an accurate description and watched afterward to see if she'd gotten it right.
Dian Lu described his loop and then stopped mid-sentence when he hit the restriction, looking at his own hand as if it had done sothing unexpected.
By the second hour, Shu Lian had stopped waiting for to confirm she was correct and started genuinely listening to what her own body was telling her.
Dian Lu had found the large intestine restriction and was sitting with his hand on his abdon, working through the kinks of his pathways.
Chen Wei was doing the work correctly. That was as much as I could ask of him in the first session.
By midday the cohort was settled into the eastern dormitory building, eating the al Luan i had organized, and developing opinions about Hekou. I had a reasonable picture of who would progress quickly, who would plateau, and who I needed to watch.
I was reviewing the session notes in the curriculum room when Wei Bolin appeared in the doorway.
"There's a woman at the outer gate asking for the Pei brothers," he said. "She ca alone. She looks like she’s been on the road for a long ti."
I looked at the dormitory building, then up at the sun, realizing that we were moving past midday.
"Where's Wei Suyin?" I asked.
"She’s doing dical intake for the new Luan arrivals. She'll be another hour at least."
I stood. "Take the afternoon session. Five principles review, then self-directed ridian tracing. Nobody works above zone one today." I looked at him. "Dian Lu will ask about zone three. Tell him the answer is the sa as this morning."
Bolin had been running sessions for awhile now, and I had belief that he could run a class just as good as I could, even better. He took the instructions without comnt and was already moving toward the training ground.
I approached the woman that was standing just inside the gate when I reached it.
She was a middle aged woman who carried nothing on her back except a small bundle of torn cloths.
She turned when she heard approach her.
"Oh my, you must be the younger one!" she exclaid. "Pei Liang, right? You have her eyes."
I raised a brow at her. "You knew my mother?"
"Forgive , let introduce myself," She put her hand to her chest and gave a polite bow.
"My na is Pei Yan, and your father’s eldest sister was my mother, which makes us cousins. I attended your father’s wedding.”
I smiled and bowed back to her. “It is a pleasure to et you.”
I brought her inside.
Hao was in the main room reviewing the construction accounts when we ca through the door. He looked up, read my face, and stood.
I said: "This is Pei Yan, she is father's niece and she attended our parent’s wedding."
Hao looked at her and gave her a warm smile and offered her so tea. He ushered the kids outside to go play and help their mothers in the fields.
We sat, and Pei Yan’s face turned grave, as if a shadow had passed over her.
She told us that Lord Shen Yang of Qinghe had been calling mobilization orders the past four years, each wave being larger than the last. The eastern settlents under his prefecture had been contributing n, and what was now infamously known as the Defection of Hekou Village had beco a legend all onto itself, the tale stating of a Mother and her two wolves turning back a tax collector, soldiers, and a cultivator. The tale reached the eastern territories which was how Pei Yan had begun looking for us.
“The Mother of Two Wolves,” Pei Yan said the term somberly, “Your father always said that your mother would give birth to children as fierce as wolves, so I was desperate to believe that Hekou was where his family was residing in, and I had nothing more to go off of.”
She then went on to ntion that her brothers went in the second wave of recruitnt and never returned.
Her sons went in pieces over the following years. The oldest first, then the middle, then the youngest, who had been sixteen and whom she had argued with Lord Shen Yang's collectors about for weeks before they took him anyway. She nad them: Wu Jun, Wu Chen, and Wu Bao. She said the nas in the order that they left.
Hao had his hands on the table. I watched him absorb it the way he absorbed hard things, with barely restrained anger born from righteousness.
"How did you get here?" I asked.
"A rhcant nad Wang Su. He had a contact who knew the na Hekou and knew it was the village that had turned back the tax collector." She looked at the table. "I walked the last four days. The roads past the second checkpoint are watched, so I ca through the ridge path."
So, Wang Su had really ca through for us. But if she had to walk along the ridge path, then according to my map she had to wander through the dangerous southern territories and loop back up to the Western Reaches territory. That sounded very difficult.
Then she said without preamble: "I want to learn to fight, and I want to learn to cultivate. Whatever it takes, I'll do it."
I held her gaze without flinching, matching her determination with my own. She did not falter nor flinch, and I realized that, in the end, we would need all the help that we could get.
"You will," I said.
Then Pei Yan added hurriedly, "I'm on Lord Shen Yang's administrative rolls. My departure will eventually be noticed and it may create a liability for the village if I’m caught.”
I nodded.
"You'll enter the records as a Luan cousin through the Chenjia intake. The window closed six weeks ago on paper, but the docuntation date is what the docuntation date says it is. The Luan cousins will confirm the family connection." I looked back at her. "By tomorrow morning you will have been in Hekou for two months."
Pei Yan studied for a long mont.
"Wang Su talked very highly of you," she said. “And now I can see why.”
I nodded my head. "Wang Su is generous."
The docuntation took most of the evening. Suyin sat with through it, cross-referencing the Luan family records against the intake register, writing in the dates and the family connections and the settlent history in the compressed notation that would satisfy a review.
The Luan cousins confird Pei Yan's family connection across three docunts without being told why. Luan i added a note in her grandmother's handwriting style, which she had been practicing since the first intake.
Managing two intake systems simultaneously with no margin for error.
By the ninth hour Pei Yan existed in Hekou's records in an official capacity. Her past had been given the shape the present required.
I brought the completed docunts to her room. She was sitting on the sleeping mat, her bundle open beside her, looking at sothing she'd taken out of it. She put it away when I ca in. She took the docunts and read them through completely.
"The date is two months ago, as you said it would be,” She observed.
"Your grandmother's mother and the Luan family's line share a village origin in Chenjia. That's docuntable if anyone checks far enough back." I had double checked my own work and realized that they did in fact, trace lineages to docunt family migrations. "We've simply formalized the connection for you."
She looked at the docunts for another mont, then folded them and set them with her bundle.
"Thank you. Truly, thank you so much," she gave a deep bow of gratitude and I waved her off.
"You're family, that's enough reason."
She looked up at that. The grief was present in her face, then it hardened into a determined edge that belied her pleasent eyes.
"I want to start with Lu Duan tomorrow," she said.
I nodded. "He runs the dawn session, so he'll be at the militia ground before sunrise."
"Good," she said. "I'll be there first."
I went back to the curriculum room. Outside, the training ground was quiet under the autumn dark, the cultivation hall's new walls holding the day's warmth.
The River Fork Academy had its first day behind it.
There will be many more days to co.
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