Chapter 2: The First Life Begins

Three days passed before Wei Mao attempted the first breathing technique.

He was not, by nature, an impulsive person. Caution had kept him alive and intact through four years of life at the margins of cultivation society, where the wrong word, the wrong look, the wrong move could result in anything from a beating to a formal accusation that would bring sect enforcers down on his head. He was keenly aware that possessing a hidden jade tablet with ancient scripture carved into it, while being a servant of unknown origin with a demonic bloodline, was precisely the kind of situation that ended badly without careful management.

So he spent three days simply observing. He paid attention to the patrol routes of the outer disciples who occasionally passed through the northern hall. He noted which of the senior servants reported to the steward each morning and which were slack enough to be skipped. He learned the rhythms of the cleaning schedules well enough to identify a two-hour window every fourth day when the northern outer hall would be completely unvisited.

On the morning of the fourth day, during that window, Wei Mao climbed to the ceiling of the hall's deepest alcove, tucked himself into the corner where two walls met the roof in a space barely large enough for a person, and began to breathe.

The Nine Lives Immortal Scripture's foundation technique was called the Hollow Bone Breath. It was, the text explained, an imitation of the way a cat compresses itself — how a creature that seems too large to fit through a gap will make itself small, not by changing its size but by changing its relationship to space. The cultivator was meant to breathe in a slow, rhythmic pattern — four counts in, hold for two, eight counts out, hold for three — while focusing not on drawing qi into themselves but on making themselves acceptable to qi, the way a dark corner is acceptable to a cat.

It sounded almost poetic. In practice, it was extremely uncomfortable.

Qi, Wei Mao had been told countless times, did not flow naturally toward people with demonic constitutions. The spirit energy of heaven and earth had an opinion about what it wanted to nourish, and Ghost Cat Constitution put a cultivator firmly in the category of not that. Every sect had confirmed this. His own unsuccessful attempts at cultivation before coming to Crescent Moon had confirmed this. He had always felt the qi in the air — his constitution made him sensitive to it, ironically — but feeling it and drawing it in were different things, like smelling rain through a sealed window.

The Hollow Bone Breath didn't try to break the window.

It took the window off its hinges entirely.

Twenty minutes into the technique, Wei Mao felt something shift in his chest — not painfully, not dramatically, but with the soft irreversibility of a lock turning over. The qi in the alcove, the thin ambient spiritual energy that collected in corners and old stone, stopped veering away from him. It hung in the air, uncertain. Then, tentatively, the way a wild animal approaches an outstretched hand for the first time, it came close.

By the end of the hour, a thread of qi thinner than sewing silk had entered his meridians.

For most people, this would have been nothing — the absolute baseline of the baseline, the first fraction of the first step of the Foundation Establishment realm. For Wei Mao, who had never successfully drawn a single mote of external qi in nineteen years of life, it felt like being struck by lightning and surviving.

He came down from the ceiling trembling, sat on the floor with his back against the wall, and spent another twenty minutes simply breathing and not embarrassing himself by making any kind of noise.

Then he went back to work scrubbing the floor, because the northern outer hall's stone was going to stay dirty whether or not his life had just fundamentally changed.

Over the following weeks, he progressed slowly. Deliberately. He was aware that the First Life — the scripture's term for the first stage of cultivation — was not only about accumulating qi but about tempering the body. The Shadowcat Demon Sovereign's technique did something unusual here: where most cultivation methods stored spiritual energy in the dantian and gradually refined it, the Nine Lives Immortal Scripture distributed it through the body's skeletal structure first. Bones before meridians. Foundation before function.

The effect was that Wei Mao's already unusual physical capabilities began to quietly improve.

He had always been able to stick to walls. Now he could do it longer, with less effort, in worse conditions — wet stone, smooth marble, surfaces that should have offered no grip at all. The tingling in his fingertips that had been with him since childhood deepened into something more substantial: a genuine, controllable adhesion, the way a gecko's feet worked but amplified tenfold.

His night vision, already sharp, became something else. In the complete darkness of his cell with the gap stuffed against the cold, he could read fine print. He could distinguish colours that had no business being visible in the absence of light. He began to see, faintly, the residual heat signatures of people who had passed through a room up to an hour before, their ghosts traced in the warmth they'd left on stone and wood.

He could hear heartbeats, if he tried.

That last ability he discovered by accident when the head servant, a sour woman named Matron Guo, came to inspect the northern hall for the first time in six months and he had to hide himself so quickly that he ended up pressed into a gap between two storage shelves in a small side room, not breathing, listening. He'd expected to hear footsteps and voices. He'd heard those, but also — underneath, with the quality of sound heard through water — the steady thud-thud of her heart. Fast, he noted. She was nervous about something. Not about him — her steps were careless and her voice, complaining to the junior servant trailing her, was bored. Something else was troubling her.

He filed it away and forgot about it. He had enough of his own problems.

At the end of the fifth week, during the Hollow Bone Breath session in his alcove, the qi thread in his meridians did something new: it split. One thread became two, running parallel down his arms, and the pressure in his chest shifted into a feeling that the scripture had warned him about in specific terms.

When the First Life quickens, the Shadowcat Demon Sovereign had written, you will feel as though you swallowed a star and are only now beginning to digest it. This is correct. Do not panic. Stay still. Let the constitution remember what it is.

Wei Mao stayed very still on his ceiling.

The sensation spread from his chest outward in a slow wave, like warmth from a fire gradually reaching the far edges of a large room. It reached his hands last — and when it did, the tingling in his fingertips that had been his constant companion for nineteen years suddenly, for one brilliant moment, became something he could actually see: pale golden light, the amber-gold of his own eyes, tracing along the lines of his palms.

It lasted perhaps three seconds.

When it faded, he was in the First Life of the Nine Lives Immortal Scripture.

He pressed his palm flat against the ceiling stone and pushed, gently.

The stone cracked.

He stared at the crack for a long, silent moment.

I should patch that, he thought, and went to get his paint.