After Rin earns admission to Sinegard, Tikany’s officials react with embarrassment rather than celebration. Proctors detain Rin and try to force a cheating confession, but Rin shows her burn scars, insists she mutilated herself to study, and turns their accusation back on them by pointing out that voiding her score would expose their own incompetence. A week later she is cleared, though the magistrate publicly calls the result a mistake and pressures Rin to leave quietly.

Rin’s departure from the Fangs is cold except for Kesegi, who clings to Rin and begs her not to leave him with Auntie Fang. Rin feels guilty but forces herself away, knowing Sinegard is her only escape from a forced marriage and servitude. With travel money supplied by the magistrate, Rin and Tutor Feyrik join a caravan north, where Feyrik lectures her about the dangers of the road, the Red Junk Opera, and the capital’s scams, thieves, bad food, fake currency, and predatory strangers.

During the three-week journey, Rin’s excitement grows despite Feyrik’s warnings. She cuts off her long braids to avoid becoming an easy target in Sinegard and discards them on the road. When the caravan reaches the East Gate, Rin briefly glimpses the presence of Federation soldiers, and Feyrik warns her that Nikan barely survived the last war and that Sinegard’s military training is shaped by fear of the next one.

Sinegard overwhelms Rin with its crowds, wealth, pale northerners, harsh dialect, and aggressive sellers. The city’s cruelty becomes concrete when Rin sees a carriage hit a child and then turn back to kill the child rather than pay lifelong disability fees. Shaken by the city, Rin finds the Academy itself breathtaking: a mountain complex of tiered pagodas, old monastery grounds, and training spaces that seems almost divine.

An older student named Tobi gives Rin, Tutor Feyrik, and another new student’s family a dismissive tour, mocking Rin’s southern ignorance when she mistakes an outhouse for an important building. After registration, Tutor Feyrik prepares to leave. Rin breaks down, admitting she hates the city and feels she does not belong, but Feyrik tells her that the Academy will be cruel because she is a poor southern war orphan who defied a system meant to exclude her. He urges her to survive, remember what she endured, and never return south.

After Feyrik leaves, Rin steels herself by remembering the forced marriage she escaped and decides Sinegard is still far better than Tikany. In the registration line, the handsome boy from the tour loudly mocks Rin’s clothes and insults Feyrik. Rin punches him in the face. A dark-robed apprentice breaks up the fight, identifies the boy as Yin Nezha of the House of Yin, and dryly warns both students to save their attempts to kill each other for after orientation.