Haoyang's gate did not open for them.
It swallowed them.
The road that had felt wide for three days—wide enough for carts to pass, for children to run ahead and be dragged back, for arguments to bloom and die—narrowed into a funnel of bodies, wheels, and breath.
Stone walls rose on either side, old and pitted, patched in places where weather and time had tried to eat them. A line of banners snapped above the gatehouse—imperial cloth, not sect cloth—dyed in disciplined colors meant to be seen from a distance and obeyed up close.
A soldier's shout cracked across the front.
"Clusters stay together! One adult per cluster to the marker line! Papers out! Tokens in hand!"
The word cluster hit Li Shen like a cold tool.
Not families. Not villagers. Not travelers. Clusters—units of throughput.
Ahead, the first layers of the crowd were being turned into lanes by rope and spearpoints. Some lanes were for carts. Some for foot traffic. Some were simply for people who looked like they had money and people who didn't.
Li Heng kept his hand on Li Shen's shoulder without squeezing. The touch wasn't comfort. It was anchoring—stay here, don't drift.
To their left, Qian Mei walked with her mother close behind her, her father slightly to the side where his eyes could track movement. Qian Mei's face was composed, but her gaze kept flicking upward, measuring the wall and the men on it, as if her mind needed proof that this was real stone and real authority.
Behind them, the young woman Luo—quiet, sharp-faced, the kind of tired that had settled into the bones—held her son's hand like it was a lifeline. Luo Ning was small, but his posture was oddly steady for a child who should have been overwhelmed by noise. He stared at the gatehouse without flinching.
Li Shen noticed. Filed it away.
Some children don't leak fear.
The line lurched forward.
A cart's wheel hit a rut and jolted. A sack thumped. Someone swore. Somewhere ahead, a child cried once—sharp, startled—not from pain, but from the simple fact of being pressed too close to too many strangers.
A guard snapped his head toward the sound like a hawk tracking movement.
"Quiet. Keep moving."
The crying stopped as if the air itself had been clenched.
Li Shen tasted smoke on the wind again. Not cooking smoke—this was oil, lamp-black, and hot metal. Ink, too, and the faint sour bite of sweat trapped in wool.
Haoyang didn't smell like a place where people lived.
It smelled like a place where people were processed.
---
At the gate, the world became a series of stations.
Station one: a rope line and a block of chalked ground.
A clerk in plain imperial gray sat behind a narrow table and did not look up. His brush moved in short, efficient strokes. Beside him sat a shallow tray of wooden tokens, each marked with a number and a stamped character.
Station two: a pair of soldiers, both with spears leveled not as weapons but as barriers. One watched hands. One watched faces.
Station three: a man in a dark robe with a metal seal at his belt. Not a sect robe. A magistrate's assistant. His eyes were the kind that didn't get tired.
The crowd moved in pulses: advance, stop, advance, stop. Like breathing controlled by someone else.
When their cluster reached the chalked ground, the clerk finally lifted his eyes.
"Village?"
Li Heng answered. The village name sounded too small in this place. Like saying "puddle" in front of an ocean.
"How many?"
"Three households traveling together," Li Heng said. "One child each. One adult each."
The clerk's brush paused for the first time. Not surprise—calculation.
"Names."
Li Heng gave them, steady and clear. Li Shen watched the brush turn people into marks. Qian Mei's mother stepped forward when prompted, voice careful. Luo answered last, tight around the edges.
The clerk slid three tokens across the table—one per child—then tapped the chalked ground with the handle of his brush.
"These are your child tokens. Lose them and you will not be seen. Adults do not enter the test grounds. Adults do not crowd the lanes. Adults wait where you are told."
He didn't say it as a warning.
He said it like physics.
Li Shen took the token when Li Heng handed it to him. The wood was warm from other hands. The stamped character felt slightly raised under his thumb.
Not a promise.
A label.
A soldier leaned in, eyes narrowed on Li Shen's face.
"How old?"
Li Shen's throat tightened. Not fear—instinct. This was the first time his age had felt like a weapon held against him.
Li Heng answered before Li Shen could.
"He is ten. Within the window."
The soldier's gaze shifted to the next child.
"Ten," Qian Mei's father said, and his voice dared the city to challenge him.
"Six," Luo said, and Luo Ning's token was lifted and checked twice before it was returned.
The soldier grunted, satisfied, and pointed with the butt of his spear toward the inner lane—then stopped.
"Not inside," he corrected, and jerked the spear toward a side passage instead. "Holding grounds. Outer fields. Follow the rope. Don't break it. Don't step off the marked path."
Holding grounds.
Li Shen heard the phrase and understood immediately: Haoyang was too full to swallow them all at once. So it stored them. Like grain. Like tools.
They moved again, guided along the wall. The rope line turned the press of bodies into a managed stream, channeled through a gap between storage sheds and a low barracks where soldiers stood in rotating pairs.
Beyond the gap, the city's outer fields had been converted into a temporary settlement.
Not tents, exactly—some were tents. Some were lean-tos built from wagon canvas and rope. Some were simply families huddled under carts, using sacks and blankets as walls.
Smoke rose in thin threads everywhere. Fires were spaced with grudging discipline, watched by soldiers who had clearly been instructed on what happened when panic met flame.
Posts had been driven into the ground in rows. On each post hung a placard with inked characters.
Li Shen couldn't read them all, but he recognized the structure.
Zone. Batch. Time.
He felt something in his chest tighten—not fear this time.
Recognition.
This was a ledger made of people.
---
They were pushed into a section marked with a red cord and a wooden sign. A soldier stood at the entrance like a door that could speak.
"Token numbers?" the soldier barked.
Li Heng held up the three child tokens. The soldier checked the numbers against a strip of paper, then waved them through.
"Stay in your corded section. Your batch is not today. You will be called. If you miss your call, your child is forfeited."
Forfeited.
Not disqualified. Not delayed. Not rescheduled.
Forfeited—like goods abandoned at market.
Li Shen watched Li Heng's jaw tighten, just once.
They found a patch of ground near the edge of the corded section. Dry dirt, trampled flat. Better than mud.
Li Heng dropped their bundle and immediately began doing what he always did when the world got sharp.
He made structure.
He set their water where it couldn't be kicked over. He placed their small food sack under the cart cloth for shade. He checked the cord boundary twice, then stood with his back half-turned so he could watch both the section entrance and the flow of people outside.
Qian Mei's father mirrored him without speaking. Luo sat with her son and did not relax her grip on his hand.
Li Shen stood still, token in his fist, and tried to understand how the city had managed to take something that should have felt like destiny—the test—and turn it into waiting.
All around them, other clusters were doing the same.
Some were loud, arguing about lanes and rumors, about which sects were present and which weren't. Some were silent, conserving their voices like water.
In one corner, a group that didn't look like villagers had formed a cleaner perimeter: servants in decent cloth, a small brazier, and a man with rings on his fingers who spoke with the slow confidence of someone used to being heard.
Clans.
Li Shen didn't need anyone to tell him. The differences weren't subtle.
Their children weren't wide-eyed. They were rehearsed.
Some already carried the posture of discipline—backs straight, hands folded, breathing measured in a way that looked almost like imitation of meditation. A few had faint, hard edges around them, the kind that made people unconsciously leave space.
Not power like stories.
But something.
A man nearby—older, weathered, with a scar under one eye and the voice of someone who had served on roads and in camps—noticed Li Shen staring.
"You're looking at the little lords," the man said, amused without warmth.
Li Shen glanced up. The man was sitting on a sack of grain with his legs stretched out, chewing on something tough. An adult without a cluster, or perhaps a cluster that had scattered. His clothes were plain but maintained. His hands were calloused in a way that suggested weapons, not plows.
Li Heng's eyes flicked toward him—brief assessment.
The man raised his free hand, palm out, a gesture that meant I'm not here to start trouble.
Li Shen answered anyway, careful.
"They're here to take the test," he said. "But… why? If they're already above us, shouldn't they already be chosen?"
The man's mouth tugged.
"You think the world is clean," he said. "It isn't."
He spat to the side, away from the cord.
"Some clans keep their young ones in-house until a selection like this. They don't swear them to a sect early. They train them just enough to look promising, then they bring them here when the big nets are thrown."
Li Shen frowned. "So it's… bargaining."
The man's eyes sharpened at the word, as if pleased someone small had named it.
"Exactly. A clan with coin and connections can pre-polish their child. They can buy a low-grade breathing method. They can hire a washed-out instructor. They can feed them better than you ever could." He nodded toward the inner wall. "Then they show up and say: Look what we raised. Want it? Pay us in favor, in protection, in status."
Li Shen's fist tightened around the token.
"But the sects—" he began.
"The sects still take what they want," the man cut in. "Don't misunderstand. A sect doesn't miss a real talent because it was 'made.' They don't care if you crawled out of a ditch or out of a lacquered hall. They care if your bones and meridians can carry their investment."
He leaned closer, voice lower.
"And don't confuse these little lords with true monsters. The true monsters? They're already inside sect walls. They were taken years ago. You won't see them in a field like this unless someone's desperate or someone's making a statement."
Li Shen absorbed that, piece by piece.
It made sense in the same brutal way Han's lessons had made sense.
If something was valuable, it didn't sit unattended.
The man tipped his chin toward the far end of the holding grounds, where a separate corded section had been marked with darker posts and twice as many soldiers.
"And that's the other part," he added. "This isn't the yearly trickle where a few villages send a few kids. This is a rare sweep. The kind where the big sect throws weight around, and the kingdom's offices scramble to keep the roads from turning into blood."
Li Shen followed the man's gaze.
At the edge of that darker section, a small group passed under escort—adults in fine cloth, a child in the center, and a man with a seal at his belt. Their movement created a pocket of silence as they passed.
Not sect robes.
Imperial.
The kingdom's class, then. Its own cultivated stream, smaller than a sect's river, but not nonexistent.
Li Shen remembered what he had been told, quietly, over years: the empire mattered to mortals… until it didn't.
Here, he could see the boundary.
The empire could organize lanes.
It could build holding grounds.
But it could not define what happened inside the test.
That belonged to the sect that owned Haoyang.
---
Li Shen's breath felt shallow.
He stepped away from the bundles and firelines and found himself near the cord boundary, staring at the city wall as if it might reveal something through stone.
The noise pressed in. The smell of smoke and bodies. The low chant of argument. The occasional bark of a soldier.
And under it all, the same sensation he'd tasted at the gate:
classification.
He reached into their bundle without thinking.
His fingers found cloth.
A small sachet, tightly stitched, the fabric worn soft from handling. It used to reek of boiled herbs—bitter enough to stain the air, enough to make his stomach twist even now. That smell had thinned with time, reduced to a faint ghost that lived in the seams.
He kept the sachet even after the herbs were gone. For a while it still smelled like her—bitter and warm. When the scent thinned, he used it to keep her needle case safe, wrapped tight inside.
He didn't open it here. He didn't need to.
The weight of it in his palm was enough.
Not a charm. Not a blessing. Not a storybook relic.
Just proof that people tried to repair what broke—hands, cloth, days—even when repair was only a delaying action against the inevitable.
He pressed the sachet once, hard, and the old resentment rose like a blade.
Medicine bought time. It didn't buy survival.
He tucked it back into the bundle carefully, like putting a knife away.
When he turned, Li Heng was watching him.
Not intruding.
Just tracking.
Li Shen walked back and sat beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.
They didn't speak for a moment.
Around them, Haoyang's holding grounds continued to churn.
Finally, Li Heng spoke, voice low.
"Do not wander."
"I won't," Li Shen said.
Li Heng's gaze stayed on the flow of people beyond the cord. "They will call batches. It will take days."
Li Shen nodded. "I heard."
Li Heng's hand shifted, not to touch him, but to adjust the bundle's edge so it covered the sachet. A small, unconscious protection.
Then he said the thing that mattered.
"When they call your number," Li Heng said, "you walk forward. You do not look for me. You do not look back."
Li Shen's throat tightened again.
"Even if it takes days?"
"Especially if it takes days," Li Heng said. "Waiting makes people stupid. Stupid gets children crushed."
Li Shen exhaled slowly.
His father wasn't dramatic.
He was operational.
And that, in Haoyang, felt like the only kind of love that could survive.
---
That evening, the holding grounds shifted into a different mode.
Fires brightened. People cooked what they could. Some prayed. Some argued in low voices about whether praying helped at all.
A small group near the center started telling stories of cultivators—loud on purpose, as if volume could turn rumor into protection. They spoke about flying swords and glowing palms and elders who could look at a child and see their destiny.
Li Shen didn't join in.
He watched the clan children instead.
One boy, maybe twelve, sat with his eyes half-closed and his breath moving in a deliberate rhythm. His family sat around him like guards around a resource.
A girl nearby practiced a hand motion—slow, precise—again and again, not martial but meditative, as if trying to fit her body into a shape the world would accept.
And in the darker corded section, the kingdom's people ate from better bowls and did not look at anyone else.
Li Shen tried to feel jealousy.
It didn't take.
What he felt was something colder.
A map forming in his head.
There were layers to the world—village, bourgade, city, sect, heaven. He had known that in theory.
Now he could see the seams.
He understood why sects were bigger than clans.
Clans could hoard and polish.
Sects could absorb and institutionalize.
Clans could dominate a county.
Sects could dominate a region and make an empire negotiate without drawing a blade.
If he wanted power that could keep someone alive when winter decided to be cruel, he wasn't chasing a romance.
He was chasing an institution's monopoly on survival.
He looked at his token again, then closed his fist around it until the edges bit.
This was not a ceremony.
This was a filter.
And tomorrow—or the next day, or the day after—he would be pushed through it.
Not because anyone cared about him.
Because Haoyang cared about sorting.
He lay down under the cart cloth with his father nearby, the holding grounds buzzing like a hive that never slept.
His last thought before sleep wasn't about winning.
It was about not being erased.
Not being one more child who came to Haoyang, waited in dirt, and returned home with nothing but a story no one wanted to hear.
Outside the wall, the city's lamps burned.
Inside the holding grounds, the ropes held.
And somewhere beyond stone and ink, the test waited—patient, mechanical, and hungry for categories.