By the time the village stopped talking about Haoyang, Li Shen still hadn't.
Not out loud.
Out loud, he worked. He carried water. He split kindling. He answered when spoken to. He nodded in the right places. From the outside, he looked like a boy who had returned and resumed the shape of his life.
Inside, everything snagged.
He kept replaying the moment the attendant had said it—flat, procedural, almost bored.
Unclaimed.
Not an insult. Not a verdict on his worth.
A verdict on his price.
That was what made it poisonous. Poison you couldn't argue with.
On the third morning back, Li Heng told him to stack the fresh split logs by the shed.
Li Shen stacked them.
Then restacked them.
Then tore the line apart and started again because one edge wasn't straight and the crookedness felt like an accusation.
Li Heng watched without commenting.
That silence—patient, unreactive—should have been a relief.
Instead it made Li Shen feel even smaller, as if the world had already moved on and only he was still bleeding in place.
When the line was finally clean enough to stop his hands from shaking, Li Shen reached for the next log—and realized his palms hurt.
Not the normal ache from work.
The sharp, thin kind. The kind that meant his skin had split.
He stared down. Two shallow cracks, red at the edges. A boy's hands trying too hard to become a man's hands overnight.
Li Shen closed his fingers until the pain went dull.
He did not tell his father.
He didn't trust his own voice yet. If he opened his mouth, something uncontrolled might come out—resentment, shame, a plea he would hate himself for.
So he kept quiet. He kept working. He kept pretending the village could be assembled back into place if he moved the right pieces.
It couldn't.
He learned that every time he passed the children near the river.
There were fewer shouts now. Fewer collisions. The games still happened—because children were stubborn life, because hunger didn't pause for grief—but the games had gaps.
A space where Da Niu should have been, loud and invasive.
A space where Zhou Liang would have been, talking too fast, trying to turn everything into a story.
A smaller space where Luo Ning would have stood, steady and silent, absorbing attention like stone absorbed heat.
The other children didn't step into those gaps by accident.
They circled them.
Li Shen caught himself circling them too.
He started taking longer routes to the well, not because the well was dangerous, but because he didn't want to be seen seeing the absence. He didn't want to be reminded that the village had produced three "claimed" boys and a handful of "unclaimed" ones—and the world had filed them accordingly.
The village didn't say it to his face. Not cleanly.
It didn't need to.
People looked at him the way they looked at a pot with a crack—still useful, still present, but already filed under not what we hoped.
He didn't hate them for it.
That was the worst part.
He understood it.
Haoyang had done the same thing—just with better ink.
---
He tried to return to what he knew would stabilize him: structure.
Han had taught him that numbers mattered. That if you couldn't hold your situation in your hands, you held it in a ledger instead. Grain in. Grain out. Debts. Promises. Costs.
Control wasn't magic.
Control was accounting.
So Li Shen took a scrap of paper and a charcoal nub and sat on the threshold where the light was steady.
He wrote:
Water: two trips
Firewood: one stack
Grain: check storage
Repair: bucket seam
Then he stared at the list until the words stopped being instructions and started being evidence.
Evidence that he could do everything right and still be unclaimed.
His fingers tightened. The charcoal snapped in half with a small, humiliating sound.
He stared at the broken pieces like they'd betrayed him.
A laugh tried to climb out of his throat—sharp and ugly—and he swallowed it down hard enough to make his eyes sting.
He crumpled the paper and shoved it into his pocket as if hiding it would erase the fact that he'd needed it.
Li Heng stepped out of the house a moment later with the axe balanced on his shoulder.
"After midday," Li Heng said, as if nothing inside their son had changed, "we'll check the fence line. The posts near the east edge are leaning."
Li Shen nodded. "Yes."
Li Heng looked at him for half a breath—long enough to register the split skin, the tightness around the eyes, the way the boy's posture was contained rather than relaxed.
Then Li Heng did what he always did when faced with pain he couldn't fix by force.
He made a task.
"Bring the rope," Li Heng said.
Li Shen went inside and brought it.
Operational love, again.
No speeches. No reassurance that felt like pity.
Just we continue.
It should have helped.
It made Li Shen feel worse.
Because continuing was what you did when you had something left to protect.
And Li Shen couldn't stop thinking:
If I can be sorted and discarded at ten… what does that make my father?
A mortal man with a strong back and no sect seal.
A man the world could erase without even bothering with ink.
---
That afternoon, Li Shen saw Luo Yao from a distance.
Not as an event. Not as a return. Just as a fact in the village now—walking past the well, head lowered, posture holding itself together by force.
People's eyes followed her, then slid away.
Not open cruelty.
Something more effective: distance dressed as caution.
Li Shen understood that too. People didn't know how to position themselves near someone connected to a Rank Two sect. Not because they wanted to worship her. Because they didn't want to be remembered incorrectly.
Luo Yao didn't look at them.
She didn't look at him either.
Or maybe she did and he didn't notice, because he was busy trying not to feel the ache that came with seeing her move alone.
Li Shen's mind tried to make it about him—about his own failure, his own unclaimed label—and he forced it away.
This wasn't about him.
This was about a mother who had watched her son walk away with a beast-mark token stamped into metal.
And the village didn't know whether to treat her like a widow, a threat, or an investment.
Li Shen turned back to the fence posts with his father and pulled the rope tight until his hands burned.
---
Night came, and with it the part of the day he couldn't outsource to work.
In the village, night was usually simple: tired bodies, food that tasted like survival, sleep that came fast.
Now, night felt like an empty bowl he had to hold without spilling.
He lay under the roof that still carried his mother's absence in its beams.
The house didn't go quiet anymore—not like it had the first days after Li Mei died. They had filled it again with chopping, boiling, footsteps. Life had returned in the only form mortals could afford: repetition.
But Li Shen heard the city inside the repetition.
He heard ropes tightening into lanes.
He heard the bell.
He heard the attendant's voice saying unclaimed like it was reading weather.
And behind that, he heard something older and worse:
his own mind looking for a reason that would let him hate himself cleanly.
If I had trained earlier.
If I had been born different.
If I had been claimed by a family with coin.
If I had been less… ordinary.
Ordinary had killed his mother.
Not directly. Not with a blade.
But with the slow brutality of a world where survival was expensive and medicine was a delaying action.
Li Shen squeezed his eyes shut.
His chest felt tight. Not panic. Not the suffocation of illness.
A pressure built out of thought.
He rolled onto his side and stared at the wall until the darkness blurred.
At some point, he realized he wasn't going to sleep.
So he got up quietly.
Li Heng was awake too—sitting near the cold hearth, not moving much, not staring at anything in particular. Like a man who had learned that sleep didn't always come when ordered.
Li Shen hesitated.
He wanted to speak.
He wanted to say: I failed. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do now.
Instead, what came out was smaller. Thinner.
"Father," Li Shen said.
Li Heng's eyes lifted. "Mm?"
Li Shen's mouth dried.
He had nothing clean to offer. Nothing that would make the shape of his shame less pathetic.
So he said the first true thing he could reach.
"I'm going out."
Li Heng didn't ask where. Didn't ask why. Didn't demand to know what storm was happening inside his ten-year-old son.
He only nodded once.
"Don't take the river path," Li Heng said. "The stones are slick at night."
Li Shen swallowed.
"Yes."
And that was it.
A father's care expressed as terrain management.
Li Shen stepped outside into the night air and felt the village's wind press against his face—dry, cold, carrying dust like the land couldn't let go of itself.
He walked toward the slope where the graves lay, feet finding the familiar path without conscious direction.
He had gone there before.
Every time he left the village, or made a decision that felt like a cut.
The first time after Li Mei died had been the worst. He'd stood over the fresh earth with his throat closed and the sick certainty that visiting meant abandonment.
Now, he walked there with a different kind of guilt.
Not I'm leaving you.
But I came back empty.
---
The grave was a simple mound, stones set around it, a piece of wood carved with her name.
No sect marker. No protective formation. Just mortal memory arranged into shape.
Li Shen knelt.
He didn't bow dramatically. He didn't press his forehead into the dirt.
He just… settled into the position his body remembered from all the times he'd come here to keep himself from unraveling in front of other people.
For a while, he didn't speak.
The wind moved through the grass with a sound that reminded him of the house before it went quiet—soft, constant, ordinary.
Then Li Shen reached into his sleeve and pulled out the small stitched sachet.
He had taken it before leaving.
Not stolen.
Borrowed from the bundle where Li Heng kept their valuables wrapped tight.
The fabric was worn. The seams were clean. The shape still held, even though the bitter herbs inside were long gone and only a faint ghost of that smell clung to the threads.
Li Mei's hands had made it.
Li Shen turned it over slowly, thumb tracing the stitching as if he could read it like writing.
His voice came out low.
"Mother."
The word sounded wrong in the open air. Too exposed.
He swallowed.
"I went," Li Shen said, and hated how childish it sounded—like reporting a chore. "I went to Haoyang."
He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
"I wasn't chosen."
He waited for something to happen when he said it.
For the air to change. For the grave to reject him. For some invisible law to say: then you don't deserve to stand here.
Nothing happened.
The grave stayed a grave.
The wind stayed the wind.
That indifference hurt more than any imagined condemnation.
Li Shen's fingers tightened around the sachet until the fabric bit into his skin.
"They called it unclaimed," he said, and his voice sharpened. "Like I was grain left at market. Like I was a tool no one wanted to pay for."
His throat tightened again.
He blinked hard and felt wetness gather, not as a flood, but as small, stubborn betrayal at the corners of his eyes.
He didn't wipe it away. He didn't allow himself to cry freely either.
He just let a couple of tears fall and be taken by the dirt, like an offering he couldn't afford to make bigger.
"I thought…" Li Shen started, then stopped.
Thought what?
That if he passed the test, the world would make sense? That if he became a cultivator, death would negotiate? That strength would retroactively justify everything he'd lost?
Li Mei would have laughed at him for that.
Not cruelly.
With the sharp affection she used when she wanted to cut nonsense out of him before it grew teeth.
Li Shen closed his eyes and forced a memory into place—concrete, specific, not a fantasy.
He saw her hands.
Not dying hands. Not shaking hands.
Hands in the warm light by the stove, holding a needle as if it were ordinary and therefore powerful.
He had been younger then—small enough that the table edge reached his chest. He'd been frowning at the needle like it was an enemy.
"Stop looking at it like it owes you money," Li Mei had said, lips twitching. "It's metal. It doesn't have feelings."
"It's going to stab me," Li Shen had muttered.
"It's supposed to stab," she'd said. "That's the entire point. You just need to make sure it stabs what you want, not what you don't."
He'd tried anyway, tongue between his teeth in concentration, and of course he'd pricked his finger.
He'd hissed, offended at the universe.
Li Mei had taken his hand, inspected the tiny bead of blood, and—without ceremony—put his finger in her mouth for half a second, then pulled it out and pressed a clean cloth against it.
"See?" she'd said. "The world stabs. You don't get to whine every time it does."
"I didn't whine."
"You did it internally," she'd replied. "I could see it on your face."
He'd glared at her, and she'd laughed—soft, warm, the sound that used to fill the house like smoke from cooking.
Then she'd guided his hand back to the cloth.
"Again," she'd said. "Slower. You want control? You earn it."
Li Shen's eyes opened.
The memory didn't make the pain vanish.
It made the pain useful.
He stared at the grave and felt his mouth twist into something that almost resembled a smile and almost resembled a snarl.
"I'm trying," he said quietly. "I'm trying to earn it."
He swallowed again.
"Do you know what's worse?" Li Shen said, and his voice cracked, just slightly. "It's not that I failed. It's that… it didn't feel personal."
He stared down at the sachet.
"They didn't hate me. They didn't even reject me like I mattered. They just—sorted."
He breathed in. The air tasted like dry grass and dirt.
"I can't fight a person," Li Shen whispered. "I can't even fight a sect. Not yet."
His fingers tightened.
"But I can fight being… nothing."
He didn't say it as a vow. Not like a storybook hero.
He said it like a boy naming the only target he could reach.
For a while he just knelt there, letting the wind scrape against him until the tightness in his chest softened into something duller.
Then he heard footsteps behind him.
Light. Familiar. Controlled.
Li Shen didn't turn right away.
He didn't want to break the moment by making it social.
But the footsteps came closer, and a shadow fell across the grave—long and calm, not threatening.
Li Heng.
His father stopped on the other side of the mound, set down a small bundle of tools—nothing grand, just a short hoe and a cloth—and knelt.
He didn't speak at first.
He didn't look surprised to find Li Shen there.
Maybe he'd expected it.
Maybe he'd come here often enough himself that the grave felt like part of his route through the world.
Li Heng began to work.
He pulled weeds from the edges. He straightened one of the stones that had shifted. He brushed dirt from the wooden marker with slow care, as if tidiness could be a form of respect.
Li Shen watched his father's hands—big, rough, steady.
Hands that had held Li Mei's body when it went cold.
Hands that had held Li Shen up when Li Shen had tried to let himself die afterward.
Li Heng wasn't dramatic.
Li Heng didn't collapse under grief.
Li Heng maintained.
And suddenly, without any words being spoken, Li Shen felt it:
Not a message from Heaven. Not a ghost voice from the grave.
Just a brutal, quiet truth that arrived fully formed in his chest.
You still have him.
Li Shen's throat tightened.
It wasn't comfort.
It was obligation.
It was a new shape of purpose.
Li Heng finished straightening the last stone and sat back on his heels.
For a moment, father and son and grave existed in the same pocket of silence.
Li Heng's voice, when it came, was low.
"She would complain about the weeds," Li Heng said. "She hated things looking neglected."
Li Shen let out a breath that trembled.
"She'd complain about how you stack the stones," Li Shen said, and the words came out rough, but real.
Li Heng's mouth moved in something that wasn't quite a smile. Not warmth. Not happiness.
A ghost of familiarity.
"She'd say I'm doing it wrong," Li Heng murmured. "Then she'd do it herself."
Li Shen stared down at his hands.
"I wasn't chosen," he said again, because he needed his father to hear it here, in front of the only witness that mattered.
Li Heng didn't flinch.
"I know," Li Heng said, simple.
No pity. No disappointment.
Just acknowledgment.
Li Shen's eyes burned.
He wanted to ask: What now?
He wanted his father to give him a plan the way Han gave him numbers.
But Li Heng didn't build futures out of words.
He built them out of days.
Li Heng reached out, not touching Li Shen, but placing the cloth over the tool bundle so the dew wouldn't soak it.
"We'll go back," Li Heng said. "It's late."
Li Shen nodded.
He stayed kneeling for half a second longer, looking at the grave.
His mother was gone.
That fact would never change.
But his father was here.
And if Li Shen kept chasing power with no anchor, he'd become the kind of person his mother would have insulted into better behavior.
He didn't hear her voice.
He didn't need to.
He could imagine the shape of what she would have said, with that sharp affection that never let him drown:
Stop staring at what you lost. Look at what's still breathing.
Li Shen stood.
He tucked the sachet back into his sleeve carefully, like placing a blade in a sheath.
He didn't announce a vow.
He didn't promise Heaven anything it didn't care to enforce.
But as he followed his father down the slope toward the village lights, something in him aligned.
Not hope.
Direction.
Tomorrow, he would start counting again.
Not the way Haoyang counted him.
The way he would count himself—days, breaths, strength earned in small increments—until "unclaimed" stopped being a label and became fuel.