Lu Qingxue was still a day away, and Chen Yuan intended to enjoy every hour of it.
He knelt in the corner of his room, palms pressed against the rough egg rock, and closed his eyes. The rock itself was just an anchor — a piece of the outside world his mind could hold onto while he looked inward. The real work was happening somewhere else entirely.
Behind his closed eyes, the small cave took shape again, the way it always did now. Yesterday it had been little more than a crack in bare stone, damp and grey, with one stubborn sapling pushing through the rock floor. Today the walls looked less like broken stone and more like something that had always meant to be a cave — smoother in places, veined faintly with what might have been mineral or might have been root. The sapling had grown a finger's width taller, and the air around it felt thicker. Realer.
"Look at you," he murmured. "Redecorating already."
The Beast Space didn't answer, obviously. But the warmth against his palms pulsed once, lazy and content, like a cat rolling over in sunlight.
"Don't get comfortable," he said. "Comfortable is how clans end up like mine. We're going to be the annoying kind of ambitious."
He spent an hour like that most mornings now — not really training, just sitting with it, feeding it thin threads of his own vitality the way the healer had grudgingly explained. It wasn't much. A trickle. But water still carved canyons if you gave it enough time, and Chen Yuan had nothing left except time.
By midmorning, hunger got the better of philosophy, and he wandered toward the kitchens.
That was where he found Old Bao arguing with a merchant over a crate of frost-touched herbs.
"Half price," the merchant was saying, not unkindly, "because half of them are already wilting."
"They wilted because you left them outside my gate for two days," Old Bao snapped back. "That's not my problem to discount."
Chen Yuan leaned against the doorway and watched for a moment. Then he strolled over, picked up one of the herbs, sniffed it, and made a small, thoughtful noise.
"Frostroot," he said. "Grown at high altitude, picked early, meant for Qi-nourishing broths." He turned it over. "Except this one's been picked late and dried wrong, which is why half the batch looks tired. You didn't leave these outside two days, friend. You've been sitting on this crate for two weeks trying to find a buyer who doesn't know the difference."
The merchant's smile faltered.
Old Bao blinked at him like he'd grown a second head.
"I'm not accusing you of lying," Chen Yuan added pleasantly. "I'm just saying — since we both know what this actually is, maybe we skip the part where you pretend it's fresher than it is, and I get you a fair price plus a standing order for next season. Everyone walks away happy."
There was a pause.
Then the merchant, looking equal parts annoyed and relieved, named a number that was, in fact, fair.
Old Bao didn't say anything until the merchant had left with his cart. Then he squinted at Chen Yuan the way old servants squint at young masters who suddenly stop being predictable.
"Since when do you know herbs?"
"Since I got bored enough to read every scroll in this clan that wasn't nailed down." Chen Yuan shrugged, already walking off with a piece of dried frostroot in his mouth like a toothpick. "Turns out being useless at bonding leaves a lot of free time for being useful at everything else."
Old Bao stared after him a long moment, then went back to sorting the crate, muttering something about the young master finally growing a spine.
Chen Yuan didn't hear the rest. He was already back in the training yard, wrapping fresh linen over knuckles that hadn't fully healed from yesterday.
The Iron Skin Method didn't care about excuses.
He started the same way he had the day before — fists into wood, vitality answering the impact with slow, aching reinforcement. But halfway through the first hour, he noticed something.
The pain came a half-second later than it used to. Not gone. Just delayed, softened at the edges, like the message had to travel further before his nerves believed it.
He stopped mid-strike and stared at his own hand.
"Well, look at that," he said. "Someone's been doing their job."
Inside him, the Beast Space answered with a slow, satisfied hum.
"Don't let it go to your head," he told it. "You're still a rock with a plant growing out of it. I'm still the clan joke. We have a long way to go before either of us gets to be smug."
He kept training until the sun dipped low and his shadow stretched long across the yard. By the end, his knuckles were a mess, his shoulders ached in ways he didn't know shoulders could ache, and the wooden post had a visible dent it hadn't had that morning.
He pressed a thumb into it, testing.
"Small victories," he muttered. "But I'll take them."
That night, lying in bed with linen-wrapped hands folded over his chest, Chen Yuan stared at the egg rock resting on the table beside him and let himself grin properly for the first time all day.
Tomorrow, Lu Qingxue would arrive with her proposal, her mutual technique, her polite noble poison wrapped in a bow.
She'd expect a broken tool waiting to be used.
She had no idea the tool had been sharpening itself.