The selection did not happen every year.
Not like this.
If a family had coin, connections, and the nerve to gamble on travel, they could try their luck during the routine yearly examinations held closer to the cities. People talked about those tests the way starving men talked about banquets—possible in theory, unreachable in practice.
This one was different.
This one was an imperial decree, carried by a rider who didn't ask permission and didn't wait for gratitude. A provincial-scale intake. Rare enough that old men who had seen three decades of bad harvests and small wars still went quiet when the words were read aloud.
The Great Sect of the Plains of Dawn was hosting it—everyone knew that. Rank Three. Nascent Soul. The kind of name that made magistrates suddenly remember how to be polite.
The kingdom was piggybacking, too.
Not out of charity. Out of hunger.
A province-frontier needed fresh talent the way it needed grain: to refill gaps, to stabilize the border, to staff garrisons, to feed the bureaucracy with sharper minds and stronger bodies. The empire couldn't compete with a Rank Three sect, not openly, not with force.
But it could compete on the margins.
Paperwork. Quotas. "Local allocation." Offers of service, titles, stipends. A tug-of-war conducted with seals and ink rather than swords—especially with Rank Two sects, who had leverage but not dominance.
That was the reality humming under the road.
And the road was already full.
---
The village didn't leave all at once.
It bled into the path in clusters—tight knots of families and neighbors, each one carrying its own food, its own water, its own arguments. The clusters formed naturally because adults understood something children didn't:
A crowd could be safer than a lone traveler, but only if you didn't let it swallow your own.
Li Heng set their pace and their shape without turning it into a speech.
Their small unit wasn't just the Li household.
It was a responsibility cluster: Li Heng and Li Shen, the Qian family with Qian Mei, and the Luo woman with her son—Luo Ning—small enough to slip between bodies, old enough to walk, young enough to vanish if no one watched him.
They weren't the only ones heading to Haoyang. They were just one bead in a long string.
Ahead, two carts from a neighboring hamlet creaked under bundled cloth and dried reeds. Behind them, a group of boys walked with a village elder who carried a cane more for authority than for balance. Off to the side, merchant wagons traveled with a painted mark that promised paid protection—no sect crest, no glory, just a practical declaration that someone somewhere had done the math.
Li Shen noticed details the way he'd learned to notice numbers:
Who carried water versus who carried food. Which children were watched and which were ignored. Which adults spoke loudly and which adults were listened to.
Zhou Liang traveled somewhere in the larger flow—near enough that Li Shen caught fragments of his voice, far enough that he wasn't part of Li Heng's cluster.
Zhou Liang was still trying to talk the road into being kind.
"The city walls are taller than trees," he said to anyone who would listen. "My uncle swears the stone they use is—"
No one corrected him. No one encouraged him either. Not because they didn't care, but because hope was expensive, and most people couldn't afford to spend it loudly.
Qian Mei walked close to her mother.
She didn't waste water. She didn't waste words. When Luo Ning's pace faltered, she didn't fuss—she simply shifted closer and adjusted, the way a person adjusted a load before it slid.
The Luo woman thanked her once in a low voice. No drama. No gratitude performances. Just a practical acknowledgement between two people who knew the road didn't reward softness.
Li Shen watched that too.
He filed it away under the same ledger in his head where he kept everything else:
Kindness that costs nothing is decoration. Kindness that costs something is a choice.
---
By the second day, the landscape began to change.
The fields grew wider and more orderly. Stone markers appeared at intervals, etched with characters Li Shen couldn't read but recognized as official. The path hardened into a road that had been measured and maintained—the kind of road built for tax wagons, troop movement, and the economy of people who mattered.
A small unit of soldiers passed them in the afternoon.
Not cultivators. Mortals with steel, dust, and discipline. They carried themselves like men who had been hungry in different places and survived anyway.
The children stared.
Some with awe. Some with fear. Some—like Luo Ning—with a quiet focus that looked almost too steady for six years old.
The soldiers didn't look at the children like hope.
They looked at them like a burden the province was choosing to shoulder because the alternative was worse.
Their captain spoke briefly with a magistrate runner at the roadside—short, clipped words. A hand sliced toward the hills.
Beasts.
Not wolves. Not bandits.
The kind of beast that made patrols disappear and made villages bolt their doors even in summer.
The unit moved on. The road swallowed them. The clusters flowed forward again, quieter for a time, because the presence of armed men reminded everyone that the world beyond their fields had teeth long before the sects ever arrived.
Li Heng didn't comment.
He just shifted their cluster a little tighter, a little more controlled, without turning it into panic.
Li Shen understood the message anyway.
Protection wasn't a feeling. It was positioning.
---
The crowd thickened as they approached the main artery leading to Haoyang.
More clusters joined. Some organized by village elders. Some organized by fear. Some organized by opportunism—families who had not been named in any decree, but who had decided that if the road was open, they would walk it.
Arguments flared in predictable patterns.
A man insisted his son should be allowed ahead because he was "already strong." Someone muttered that the province should prioritize "good blood." A woman accused another of stepping too close to her daughter, as if proximity could steal fate.
Li Heng shut down one argument without raising his voice.
A man began shouting that the clusters were spaced wrong, that slow families were "dragging everyone down," that they would all be late because of fools.
Li Heng glanced at him once—flat, heavy, uninterested in ego.
The man's words died.
Not because Li Heng was bigger.
Because Li Heng looked like someone who would keep walking even if the man kept barking, and the man would be left behind with nothing but his noise.
Li Shen felt a strange satisfaction at that.
Not triumph.
Order.
Order meant survival.
---
Late on the third day, Haoyang finally appeared.
Not as a city at first.
As a line—pale stone against the horizon where land should have continued.
As they drew closer, the line rose into walls, towers, watch points. The wall looked older than most villages. It looked like it had been built by people who expected war as a season, not an exception.
The clusters slowed as if the road itself had grown heavier.
Conversation changed tone.
Not excitement now. Not even fear.
A careful awe—the sense mortals got when they stepped toward a place where their rules didn't matter and their names didn't protect them.
Luo Ning stopped asking questions. He just stared.
Qian Mei exhaled slowly as if releasing something she'd been holding since the decree was read.
Li Shen didn't stare at the wall.
He stared at the gate.
Because the gate wasn't architecture.
It was function.
It was the point where someone decided what entered and what didn't.
He could already see the control layered around it: lanes being formed by guards, runners carrying seals, scribes with ink-stained hands, officials who looked bored in the specific way that meant they held power over people who couldn't complain.
This wasn't the yearly examination circuit.
This was a rare intake. A provincial siphon.
The kind that turned villages into a river and poured them into the mouth of a city.
Li Heng's hand touched Li Shen's shoulder once—brief, solid.
"Stay close," he said.
Li Shen nodded.
Ahead, their responsibility cluster tightened without discussion—Li, Qian, and Luo moving as one unit inside a sea of other units doing the same thing.
Around them, the mass compressed, drawn toward the gate like water finding the lowest point.
A child cried. A cart jolted. A guard shouted for order.
And over it all, Haoyang waited—patient, indifferent, ready to sort them into lanes, papers, categories, outcomes.
Li Shen tasted smoke on the wind.
Ink.
Stone.
People.
He didn't need to see the test yet.
He could already feel the truth of the city in the air:
This place didn't care about dreams. It cared about classification.
Tomorrow, he would be assigned one.
He walked forward with his cluster, toward the gate that swallowed villages.
And the road behind him—fields, graves, familiar faces—did not follow.