Dawn didn't arrive in Haoyang's holding grounds like it did in the village.
There was no soft brightening of sky that gave people permission to breathe again. There was only a thin, gray lift to the air—and then sound, immediate and organizational: boots, barked orders, the clack of a spear butt on hard earth.
Li Shen woke with the token already in his fist.
He hadn't fallen asleep holding it. He knew that. He remembered tucking it into the fold of cloth under his head, the way his father had taught him to protect small valuables from theft and panic.
And yet his hand had found it in the night anyway, fingers closing around the stamped wood as if it could keep him anchored to a single fact:
He was here. He hadn't been erased in the dark.
Beside him, Li Heng was already awake—sitting, back straight, eyes scanning the corded section the way a man watched weather when weather had learned how to steal people.
"You're up," Li Heng said quietly.
Li Shen nodded and sat, careful not to jolt the bundle or knock over their water.
The holding grounds were shifting into a new configuration. Fires were being kicked apart or stamped out. Families rolled blankets, packed sacks, tied loose ends. Somewhere to their left, a woman hissed at her child to stop rubbing sleep from his eyes like a village boy and start standing like someone who wanted a future.
Soldiers moved along the perimeter like they owned the air.
A clerk walked with them—ink box at his belt, brush tucked behind one ear, a strip of paper in his hand covered in names and numbers that didn't care about faces.
A spear butt struck a post.
"Batches will be called by token range!" a soldier shouted. "Children only. Adults behind the cord. Do not cross unless ordered. Do not crowd the lanes. Do not lose your token."
He didn't say please.
He didn't need to.
The word token was enough to make half the holding grounds go quiet.
Li Shen slid his token into the inner pocket of his shirt and pressed it flat against his chest. The stamped character felt like a bruise waiting to happen.
Across from them, Qian Mei was already awake too. Her mother adjusted the collar of her tunic with hands that tried to look steady and failed on the third attempt. Qian Mei caught Li Shen's eye and gave the smallest nod—acknowledgment, not comfort.
Luo sat with her son close. Luo Ning looked as if he'd slept with his eyes half open. When the soldiers passed, he didn't flinch. He watched them with the calm focus of a child who didn't waste fear on noise.
Li Shen had seen plenty of children in the village who could stare down dogs, or older boys, or hunger.
This was different.
This was stability under a predator's shadow.
It didn't make Luo Ning brave.
It made him built wrong in a useful way.
Li Shen filed that away too.
In this city, the difference between "wrong" and "useful" was the difference between being discarded and being claimed.
A shout snapped across the grounds again, sharper this time.
"Tokens 721 through 810!"
The range hit the air like a net thrown over a school of fish.
For half a heartbeat nothing moved—because everyone was doing the same calculation in their heads at once.
Then the section detonated into motion.
Children clutched tokens. Mothers grabbed shoulders. Fathers stepped forward out of instinct and were shoved back by rope and spearpoints. A soldier barked Back. Another barked Move. The flow started—messy for a moment, then forced into shape as bodies were guided into a single stream toward the marked lane.
Li Heng's hand landed on Li Shen's shoulder.
Not a squeeze.
A placement.
"Token," Li Heng said.
Li Shen pulled it out and showed it.
Li Heng looked at the number once and nodded. "You're in."
Qian Mei was in too. Luo Ning—after a quick, double-checking glance by the clerk—was also in.
Three children.
Three tokens.
Three bodies being pushed toward a machinery that had been built to process tens of thousands without ever once feeling sorry.
Li Heng leaned down so only Li Shen could hear him.
"No hero work," he said. "No wandering. No arguing. You walk where you are told."
Li Shen swallowed. "I know."
Li Heng's eyes did not soften. Not because he didn't care.
Because softness here was a liability he refused to hand his son.
"Do not look for me," Li Heng continued. "If you lose the lane, you stop. You call for a guard. You do not chase your own fear into the crowd."
Li Shen nodded again.
Then Li Heng did something that surprised him: he reached into the bundle, pulled out the small stitched sachet, and pressed it into Li Shen's palm for the briefest moment—just long enough for Li Shen to feel the worn fabric, the seam his mother had once stitched straight, the faint ghost of bitterness locked into the cloth.
Not a blessing.
A reminder.
Proof that the family had existed before this city tried to reduce them to numbers.
Li Heng took it back immediately and tucked it under the cloth again.
Operational love.
It lasted one breath, but it hit harder than any speech.
A soldier's shout cut through the lane.
"Children forward! Adults back!"
The rope line shifted.
Li Shen stepped into the stream with Qian Mei on one side and Luo Ning on the other, the three of them pulled forward by momentum that didn't care if they were ready.
He didn't look back.
Not because it didn't hurt.
Because his father had been right: waiting made people stupid, and stupid got children crushed.
---
The walk from the holding grounds to the outer staging area was short in distance and long in pressure.
The city wall loomed to their right—stone that had learned to be indifferent to pleading. The lane to their left was packed with other ranges moving at the same time, other batches called and swallowed, each child holding a token like a claim on a future that might not be honored.
Li Shen heard snippets as they moved.
"…six to fourteen, they said—"
"…rare sweep, not the yearly—"
"…Aurora Plain Sect's rules, not ours—"
"…kingdom's clerks can only keep order, they don't decide—"
The language was the same everywhere: rules, windows, ranges, authority.
No one spoke about dreams without sounding foolish.
Ahead, the lane widened into a staging field ringed with temporary fencing and soldiers.
And beyond that—further in, past a second line of rope and an elevated platform where clerks sat with ink and ledgers—Li Shen saw the first real architecture of the selection.
A stone stele, tall as a man and twice as cold. Its surface was etched with characters too clean to be mortal work.
A second structure nearby: an arched frame of dark wood reinforced with metal, hung with thin plaques that caught light wrong, as if they reflected more than they should.
And behind them, a distant line of raised awnings and platforms where people stood watching the incoming children.
Not peasants.
Not families.
People who had come to purchase outcomes.
Some wore sect robes. Some wore clan colors. Some wore nothing but expensive fabric and the kind of posture that announced connections.
The dominant class wasn't hiding in Haoyang.
It was supervising.
Qian Mei slowed for a half step as she saw it. Her breath caught.
Li Shen understood why.
In the village, the strongest person was the one who could lift more grain, or stand longer in the cold, or scare people into backing down.
Here, strength was institutional.
It wore ink and seals and robes.
It had a budget.
A boy ahead of them glanced sideways—clean tunic, soft boots, hair tied with a strip of cloth that had never seen mud. He walked like he'd been taught to take up space without apologizing for it.
A clan child.
He looked at Li Shen the way someone looked at a tool that had washed up on the road: curious, dismissive, already moving on.
Li Shen felt the sting.
Then he crushed it into something usable.
So that's the baseline here.
Not talent.
Entitlement.
A clerk on the platform shouted down, voice amplified by training and repetition.
"Tokens presented. Names confirmed. Ages verified. No sect registration. No forged seals. No private testers. Any child found registered under a sect or carrying a concealed sect mark will be removed and the sponsoring household fined."
That last word—fined—wasn't for the peasants.
It was a threat aimed upward.
A way for the city to claim it still had teeth.
Li Shen heard a man behind the fence mutter, amused. "As if the real families can't pay."
Another voice answered, lower. "Paying isn't the problem. Being remembered is."
That shut the first man up fast.
Because in Haoyang, there were consequences worse than losing coin.
---
They reached the first checkpoint.
A soldier held out a hand.
"Token."
Li Shen placed the wooden piece in the soldier's palm. The man turned it over, checked the stamped range, and held it out again.
"How old?"
Li Shen opened his mouth.
Qian Mei answered first, because her voice was steadier than her mother's had been. "Ten."
Li Shen forced his own voice into place. "Ten."
Luo Ning's answer came last, simple and flat. "Six."
The soldier looked at Luo Ning for a beat too long, then gave a small nod—as if confirming something he'd already noticed the moment the child walked into the lane without leaking fear.
He handed the token back.
"Next station."
They moved.
Second station: a clerk with ink-stained fingers and a face that had learned to forget people.
He didn't ask Li Shen about his mother, or his village, or what he wanted.
He asked him to state his name clearly, and then he wrote it down.
Ink became identity.
Third station: a second rope line that split the incoming children into smaller internal lanes—ten at a time, then fifty, then a hundred, like a sieve refining grain.
Li Shen's lane widened just enough for him to see faces he recognized.
A boy with hair too neatly cut and eyes too bright.
Zhou Liang.
He was two lanes over, standing with his father behind the fence, face lit with a feverish kind of excitement that looked like courage until you realized it was built on not understanding risk.
When Zhou Liang spotted Li Shen, his expression snapped into relief—like finding a familiar plank in deep water.
"Li Shen!" Zhou Liang hissed, too loud.
A soldier's head turned. Zhou Liang clamped his mouth shut instantly, cheeks flushing.
Li Shen didn't wave.
He didn't smile.
He gave Zhou Liang a small, sharp nod—I see you. Stay in your lane.
Zhou Liang nodded back, swallowing hard, excitement turning into something tighter.
Reality was catching up.
Good.
Reality was safer than illusions.
Li Shen scanned further.
He saw other village children too—faces he didn't know well, but recognized in the way you recognized anyone from the same dust and wind. Some looked terrified. Some looked hungry. Some looked as if they had been forced into this by parents who could barely hold hope without shaking.
And then—near the far edge of the next staging group—he saw a family from the bourgade.
Not Old Han's people.
A different cluster, better clothed, quieter, organized around a merchant's posture rather than a farmer's.
The father's face was familiar. The mother's scarf. The way their cart sat at the edge like they understood traffic and leverage.
The Lin family.
Li Shen didn't know the girl's given name. He'd never heard it spoken cleanly. In his memory she was "the Lin girl," silent behind an account table, eyes that watched more than they performed.
Now she stood among the children with her hands folded neatly in front of her, posture calm, face composed.
Not arrogance.
Control.
And even from this distance, Li Shen could see it: not beauty like a storybook immortal, not yet—but the bones were there, the symmetry, the early signs that time and cultivation would sharpen into something that would change how rooms treated her.
She glanced once toward the stele, eyes steady, then back down at her token like it was a fact she had already accepted.
Li Shen's chest tightened for reasons he didn't fully name.
Because she was proof of something he hated and needed:
The world sorted people.
And some people were built in ways that made sorting easy.
A shout rang across the staging field.
"First internal lanes forward! Stele sequence begins! Pressure module follows! Keep order!"
The crowd surged. The fences held.
Li Shen's lane tightened into movement again.
Ahead, the stone stele waited—blank, patient, built to turn children into categories that would follow them for the rest of their lives.
Qian Mei walked at his side, lips pressed thin.
Luo Ning walked like he was going to a lesson.
Zhou Liang—two lanes over—looked like someone about to bet his entire future on a single roll, convinced the world owed him a good result.
Li Shen touched his token one last time, then tucked it away as they reached the final rope line before the stele.
He didn't pray.
He didn't bargain with Heaven.
He did what he always did when the world got sharp.
He narrowed his focus to the next step.
One breath.
One foot.
One station.
Because that was how you survived systems that didn't care whether you deserved to.
And if the stele told him he was nothing—
He would still walk out of this place with his name intact.
Even if that was all he was allowed to keep.