(Luo Yao POV)
Luo Yao learned, on the sixth day, that grief had a pace.
Not the dramatic kind from stories—no collapsing knees, no screaming at the sky. A slower thing. A measured drag. The kind that made you walk while your mind stayed behind, turning around again and again as if the road might refund what it had taken.
Three days after the convoy left Haoyang, the village would already have swallowed most of the returning families. The noise. The explanations. The relief that sounded too close to celebration. The shame that tried to hide under practicality.
Luo Yao was not in that stream.
She arrived three days later, with dust in her teeth, rope burn on her palms, and a mule that did not belong to her by any village logic.
The mule walked steady.
Not stubborn. Not skittish. Steady in a way that felt trained into bone.
Its coat was plain, its eyes calm, and the harness was new enough to still look wrong against the Pale Wind dirt. A small tag hung near the throat strap—wood, stamped with a stylized beast-mark and a line of ink she could not fully read, but could recognize as official.
A receipt in the language of institutions.
An investment.
At the Haoyang exit lines, a handler in rough sect cloth had offered her more: a small pouch of coin she couldn't count, vouchers for grain, a promise that sounded like protection and smelled like obligation.
Luo Yao had refused without raising her voice.
The handler had watched her the way a butcher watched a buyer who didn't understand value.
"You will need support," he had said.
"I will need my son," she had answered, and hated herself for how thin that sounded in a city that sorted humans like inventory.
The mule had been the only thing she accepted. Not because it was generous, but because it was practical—because the mule meant she could return to the village without borrowing a cart, without owing a neighbor, without handing her throat to the first person who decided she was now "important."
A thin kind of control.
She held the lead rope, and her hand kept tightening every time the wind shifted behind her.
Not because she expected to see him.
Because her body still wanted one last proof that he had existed in front of her eyes.
The last time she had seen Luo Ning, it had not been on this road.
It had been inside fences.
Inside procedures.
Walking away with a metal token stamped with a beast-mark, steady as a child walking to a lesson.
That steadiness had been the cruelest part.
It meant he had not begged.
It meant she had not been allowed to save him with suffering.
He had simply been taken.
And she had simply been left.
When the village finally appeared—low roofs, familiar fences, a line of trees that bent the same way every winter—Luo Yao's throat tightened hard enough to hurt.
This was the only place she knew that was real.
Haoyang was real too, but it was not human.
The village was human.
Which meant it would have opinions.
She reached the first outer path and saw people before they saw her: two women at the well, an older man carrying a bundle of reeds, a boy chasing a chicken with more energy than purpose.
The boy spotted the mule first.
Then he spotted her.
His steps slowed. His grin thinned. He stared like she had returned wearing someone else's skin.
One of the women followed his gaze, and her face changed.
Not hostility.
Calculation.
A glance that said: That's her. That's the one. Her child was taken by a beast sect.
The word would not be spoken out loud in the open, not in a village that knew what "sect" meant the way a body knew what a knife meant.
But it lived in the space between breaths.
Luo Yao kept walking.
She did not bow. Not yet. She did not apologize. Not to a village that had helped her once and then left her alone with its polite distance.
The mule's hooves made a quiet, patient sound in the dirt.
Someone called her name, halfway—then stopped, as if the caller had realized that saying her name too loudly might invite attention from the wrong direction.
Luo Yao did not look around for comfort.
There wasn't any to collect.
She turned down the lane toward her small house, the one the village had allowed her to build years ago at the edge where outsiders were tolerated as long as they stayed useful and quiet.
The door was still there.
The roof had not collapsed.
That should have been relief.
It landed like nothing.
Because the thing that mattered was not inside those walls.
A voice came from behind her.
"Keep walking," it said, dry as old bark. "If you stop in the lane, they'll stare harder. You'll start to believe you deserve it."
Luo Yao exhaled.
Old He.
She had not heard the old woman's steps approach. Old He moved like someone who had survived by not announcing herself.
Old He's eyes flicked once to the mule. Once to the stamped tag. Then back to Luo Yao's face.
No surprise. No congratulations.
Just the familiar, ugly form of care.
"You're late," Old He said. "I told you not to drag your road behind you like a dead tail."
Luo Yao's mouth twitched—not quite a smile, not quite permission.
"I had… things," she said.
Old He snorted. "You had a mind that kept turning around. Don't lie to me. Lie to the village if you want. They like stories."
Luo Yao's throat worked. The words wanted to come out sharp. They came out small.
"I wanted to see him one more time."
Old He did not soften.
That was her gift.
Softness made you drown. Old He had never been generous with drowning.
"You saw him," Old He said. "You just didn't get to keep him. That's the difference between wanting and owning."
Luo Yao's fingers tightened on the rope. The mule stood, patient, like it had been trained not to react to human weakness.
Old He stepped closer, low voice now, not for the village to drink.
"That animal—did you accept more?"
"No," Luo Yao said, immediate. "Only this."
Old He's gaze moved over the harness again. A grunt.
"Good. Coin makes people talk. Grain makes people visit. An animal just makes them stare, and you were going to get that anyway."
They walked together. Not side by side like friends. Old He walked half a step behind, angled like a guard who pretended not to be a guard.
At the corner where the lane opened toward the Li household, Old He paused and tilted her chin toward the sound of an axe.
A steady rhythm. Wood splitting. The kind of labor that existed before grief and continued after it.
Old He's mouth curled.
"That one," she said, meaning Li Heng, "even if the sky fell and the ground opened, he'd still be out there cutting wood."
A beat.
Then, darker, quieter—affection hidden inside cruelty like medicine hidden inside bitterness:
"Probably because if he stops, he'll have to remember he's a man and not a tool."
Luo Yao's eyes shifted toward the Li yard.
Li Heng was there. Axe rising. Axe falling. Shirt sleeves rolled, body doing what it knew how to do when the world offered no bargaining.
Li Shen was near the woodpile, not helping so much as existing in the radius—quiet, contained, like a boy trying to figure out what to do with an outcome that didn't kill him but still cut.
Luo Yao's chest tightened.
She did not go in yet.
Not because she feared Li Heng.
Because she feared what it meant to be seen by someone who had watched her son walk away.
Old He nudged her forward with nothing but presence.
"Go," Old He said. "You'll rot if you hide in your house. Rot smells. The village will pretend it's your fault."
Luo Yao stepped into the Li yard.
The axe paused.
Li Heng looked up.
His face did not change into pity. It did not change into distance.
He simply looked at her the way he looked at any neighbor who had walked into his space: direct, assessing, accepting that the world had brought them another problem and they would handle it because there was no alternative.
"Luo Yao," he said.
Her name, clean. No titles. No "sister." No performance.
It hit her harder than sympathy would have.
Old He spoke before Luo Yao could decide what to do with her own throat.
"She's back," Old He said, as if announcing weather. "Late. As usual."
Li Heng's gaze flicked to the mule, to the stamped tag, then back to Luo Yao.
He did not ask.
He already knew the shape of it.
"Come in," he said. "If you need water, draw it. If you need to leave the animal, tie it by the fence. It won't be stolen in my yard."
Not generosity.
A statement of control.
In a world where control was rare, it was almost intimate.
Luo Yao swallowed. Managed a shallow bow.
"Thank you," she said. The words sounded wrong in her mouth, too polite for a village that had once fed her in silence, but she said them anyway.
Li Shen's eyes met hers.
He did not stare at the mule. He did not ask questions. He looked at her the way he looked at ledgers and outcomes—observing, filing, already learning what this would mean later.
He was still a child.
But he had the gaze of someone who had been processed and survived the stamp.
Old He clicked her tongue at him.
"Don't look like that," she told Li Shen. "You'll wrinkle early. Then you'll be ugly and unclaimed forever."
Li Shen's mouth twitched—almost a smile.
Almost.
Luo Yao felt something inside her shift at that. Not relief. Not yet.
But a thread of warmth in a chest that had been scraped hollow by distance.
Because Luo Ning had played with the village children once.
He had not been rejected.
Even now, after the beast-mark, that mattered.
It meant her son was not a ghost to this place.
Not yet.
Li Heng picked up the axe again, not because he dismissed her, but because stopping would make the moment heavier than it needed to be.
He split another log. Clean crack.
Old He turned toward Luo Yao.
"Go to your house," she said. "Wash. Eat. Then come by later. If you stay alone tonight, you'll start bargaining with silence, and silence always wins."
Luo Yao nodded once.
She took the mule's rope again and backed out of the yard, careful, controlled. She did not look back at Li Heng for permission. She did not look at Li Shen for comfort.
She walked toward her own door like a woman returning to a place that remembered her body but not her life.
The village watched.
Not with hatred.
With the simplest poison: interest.
By nightfall, every tongue would have the same line in it, polished and repeated until it sounded like truth:
Her son was taken by the Thousand Beasts Sect.
As if that sentence explained anything.
Inside her house, she would lay down and feel the space where a child should have been.
And the missing would not scream.
It would just sit there.
Patient.
Like Haoyang.
Like institutions.
Like the future she had just traded her son into.
Luo Yao untied the mule, set its feed, and closed her door.
Outside, the Pale Wind moved through fences and roofs the way it always had.
Inside, the quiet was different.
Not death-quiet.
Not yet.
A quieter kind of threat:
the quiet that asked whether she could keep living without turning herself into a hollow thing that only waited for visits that might take years.
She sat with her back against the wall and pressed her fingers to her mouth, hard enough to leave marks.
No tears fell.
Not because she was strong.
Because her body was saving them for later—when the village stopped watching, when Old He went home, when the world stopped demanding she perform stability.
In the dark, she whispered one sentence, not to Heaven, not to sects, not to fate.
To the one person who might still hear her in some distant place where beasts learned discipline and children learned to stop being children.
"Live," she said. "Live well."
Then she swallowed the rest.
Because the rest would have broken her.
And breaking would not bring him back.