The transformation began not with a grand flare of immortal sorcery, but with a gentle, soothing itch beneath old bandages.
In the southern guard post town of Linyuan, three hundred leagues south of the Floating Mountain, the Provincial Hall of Benevolent Care had stood for two hundred years as a place of quiet, lingering despair. It was where the broken wreckage of mortal dynastic warfare was sent to be forgotten. Amputees whose legs had been cut by cursed cavalry sabers, veterans whose lungs were blackened by potion-made siege smoke, and aging farmhands whose joints were hardened into unbending knots of agony.
Old Sergeant Wu sat upon a low wooden bench on the clinic porch, his rough back resting against the weathered cedar siding.
He was sixty-two years old. Even so, sixty years of mortal hardship had carved lines into his face that made him look eighty. His left trouser leg was pinned up at the knee with an iron safety needle. The remainder of the limb had been left behind in a muddy trench thirty years ago during the Third Border Conflict, cut by the toxic blood-fire of a royal array.
For three decades, the stump had remained a raw, purple knot of agony that ached with every shift in the mountain weather.
