Dawn had barely begun to paint the sky when Li Hua emerged from her room, dressed in her plain training clothes. The coarse linen looked ordinary enough, but she could feel the subtle spiritual threads her mother had carefully woven through the fabric during her weekly mending sessions.
It was their parents' clever compromise—clothes that looked appropriately humble while still offering their children extra protection. These enhanced training clothes had saved them from more than a few scrapes during their daily forest excursions beneath Great White Mountain.
She found her brothers already in the courtyard, stifling yawns as they adjusted their own similarly enhanced training clothes. Li Wei was particularly careful with his, having learned the hard way that their mother's protective weaving could only handle so many close encounters with cranky spirit beasts. With the festival not until evening, they had their entire rest day free for exploring the forest's mysteries.
