Mira’s panel breathed once and the kaomoji blinked out. The corners crisped into indigo. When her voice came back it carried the weight of a real list incoming.

[ Reforging Path: Plain Steel ]

[ Current tier: Yellow low ]

[ Stable ceiling under your realm: Yellow mid ]

[ Required components: 3 ]

[ Component one. Iron Vein Marrow. This one’s the foundation, Xuan. The base of the whole upgrade. Get this wrong and the rest won’t hold. ]

’Walk me through it.’

[ Mineral marrow that forms inside deep iron veins when the stone has gone undisturbed for decades. The longer the wait, the better the cord. It oozes out of cracks in the mountain face like thick black sap, and the second it hits open air it stiffens into a flexible metal thread. Catch it before it solidifies fully and it bonds to anything steel-like with the right hammer pressure. ]

[ Function for Plain Steel: reinforces the spine of the blade. Lets you push more intent through the steel without the steel crying about it. ]

’Where?’

[ Western range. Three vein outcrops in the old Lin Xuan’s memory cache. All three sit in the cliffs, not down on the slopes. You’ll have to climb. ]

He huffed and dragged a thumb along Plain Steel’s flat.

’Alright, that’s doable, fine.’

[ And before you start picturing a nice afternoon of bouldering, the veins are rich. Which means they’re attractive. Anything that lives in the mountain and likes mineral density tends to set up shop near them. Cinder Hawks nest on the higher cliffs. There are usually two or three rock-burrowing things squatting on the lower veins like they own the building. ]

’So I’m climbing a wall with one hand and stabbing whatever’s on it with the other.’

[ Mining 101. ]

[ You did say you had a degree in that, didn’t you? ]

He pinched the bridge of his nose. The corner of his mouth moved without permission.

’I said I knew enough to get sarcastic about it. There’s a difference.’

[ I’ll mark the difference in the report. ]

He looked back at the panel. There was something companionable about the way Mira ran tactical briefings now. She’d dropped the formal Host-Host-Host months ago and lost most of the rest of it somewhere between the Override and the ambush. The panel had been calling him by name ever since. He hadn’t asked her to. He hadn’t asked her not to. He kind of liked it more than he was willing to admit.

’Next one.’

[ Component two. Spine Plate of a Stoneshell Tusker. ]

’The boars with the rock backs.’

[ The ones the locals call mountain altars, yes. Big, slow, miserable. Rank E high, occasional D low when they get old enough to grow a second shell. ]

[ You want the central plate down the spine, the one between the shoulder blades. Not the side plates. Side plates are decorative armor for the boar and decorative waste for you. ]

’How fresh?’

[ Plate has to come out of a live specimen within the hour, or the resonance fades. If it’s been dead overnight, the alchemical lattice in the bone collapses and you’ve carved yourself a paperweight. ]

’So I can’t bag one and bring it back?’ 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

[ You could. But you’d have to butcher it on the spot, clean the plate, seal it, and have me run a stasis ward over it. The simpler option is to hunt one near where we’ll already be camping. Drop it. Carve it. Move on the same hour. ]

’Function?’

[ Density. Lateral resilience. If you’d had this in the blade against Yan Wuji’s Pavilion, the notch near the tip wouldn’t have happened. Plain Steel cried at lateral force; the spine plate teaches it not to. ]

’Good.’

[ One thing. ]

The panel held a beat.

[ Stoneshell Tuskers have a back of stone. The first instinct of every cultivator who fights one is to hit the back. The back is useless. The plates are designed to redirect blade force into the ground. You can hammer a Tusker’s spine for ten minutes and it will keep eating. ]

[ The belly is what kills them. Soft. Under the shell line, just behind the front legs. One cut there opens the abdominal cavity and the boar drops. ]

’So the obvious target is the wrong one.’

[ Welcome to xianxia, Xuan. ]

He laughed under his breath.

’I’m taking notes.’

[ Please do. The number of dead cultivators on those slopes who went for the back is genuinely embarrassing. ]

’Third.’

[ Crimson Feather Quill. This one’s the prettiest. Also the one most likely to put a hole through you if you mishandle it. ]

’Cinder Hawks.’

[ The good plumage. Not the molt feathers they shed from their breast when they’re old; those go to fan-makers in Yuncheng and aren’t worth the postage. What we want is a quill the bird drops after a successful hunt. Those still carry the Qi of whatever it just killed, vibrating through the shaft. Hold one up to good light and you can see the resonance line ripple. ]

’And to get one I have to...?’

[ Climb a cliff. Approach the nest. Take the quill without the bird noticing. ]

He waited.

[ ...or with the bird noticing, but at that point you’re not collecting a quill, you’re collecting a Hawk. Which would be a different conversation. ]

’I’d rather not have that conversation halfway up a cliff face.’

[ Smart man. Cinder Hawks attack in dive. They fold the wings, drop from above, and the leading-edge feathers cut like blades. They’ve taken cultivators at Foundation in the first stoop because the target never looked up. Fighting one in open air is a vertical problem, not a horizontal one, and you don’t have wings yet. ]

’So the move is stealth.’

[ Yup. Approach quiet, take the quill, leave quieter. ]

’How quiet are we talking?’

[ Quiet enough that something in a nest, with hearing built to track wind-shifts at fifty paces, doesn’t register you. ]

[ Which means you’ll have to practice. ]

She let that one sit before adding:

[ Which is actually convenient. ]

’Convenient how?’

[ Because the next job after this one is a scouting run on Blood Fang’s mine, and a man who can sneak up on a Cinder Hawk’s nest can also sneak past a watch tower. The two skills are the same skill. The Hawk just costs less than the mine when you fail. ]