He didn't wake up with a plan.
He woke up with the aftertaste of earth in his mouth and the pressure of a decision that had already happened somewhere inside him.
The village looked the same through the crack in the door: pale light, dust, a fence leaning the way it always leaned. A rooster angry at nothing. Smoke from someone's breakfast that never smelled rich.
But Li Shen's body didn't feel the same.
Yesterday—at the grave—he had let something loosen. Not enough to break. Enough to prove it was there. Enough to make the return home feel wrong, like walking into a room that remembered a person who was no longer living in it.
He sat up quietly so he wouldn't wake his father.
Then he remembered he wasn't alone.
Li Heng was already awake.
Not moving. Just sitting in the dim, elbows on knees, hands hanging the way they did when a man was awake too early for work and too late for sleep.
His eyes flicked toward Li Shen once.
"You're up," Li Heng said.
Li Shen nodded. He didn't trust his voice yet.
Li Heng didn't ask why. He didn't ask how he felt. He didn't look toward the back of the house where the air still held a shape that used to be Li Mei's.
He stood.
He reached for the axe.
The first log split with a clean crack, sharp enough to feel like punctuation.
Li Shen watched one more swing.
Then he turned away.
Because if he kept watching his father pretend routine was armor, something inside him would either collapse or harden into something ugly. And he didn't have the luxury of either.
He pulled on his clothes and stepped outside.
The morning air had teeth. Not winter teeth—just that thin bite that came when the wind ran over dry fields and carried grit with it.
He walked behind the house where the woodpile sat in a neat line Li Heng had built, and beyond that, where nobody would see him unless they tried.
He crouched by a flat stone and scratched at the dirt until he found what he wanted: a piece of charcoal from an old fire, brittle but usable.
Then he went back inside.
He didn't reach for ink.
Ink was expensive. Ink was for contracts, notices, names written in ledgers by people who had the authority to turn those marks into consequences.
He reached for scraps.
Paper that had wrapped salted vegetables. A torn corner of a notice someone had used to seal a jar. The back of an old village tally sheet that no longer mattered.
He stacked them carefully.
Li Heng glanced over once, saw what his son was doing, and went back to splitting wood.
No questions.
No permission.
Li Shen took that for what it was.
Approval, in Li Heng's language.
He spread the scraps on the table, picked up the charcoal, and stared at the blankness.
This was the moment where most boys would write something dramatic. A vow. A promise. A curse at Heaven.
He didn't.
He had tried drama already, in his head, for three days after Haoyang. It hadn't changed a single fact.
Haoyang didn't care about vows.
Haoyang cared about inputs and outputs.
The stele had looked at him and returned a result that meant: not worth it.
Fine.
Then he would become worth it.
Not by wishing.
By building proof.
He lowered the charcoal and wrote two words at the top of the first scrap.
WORK. TRAIN.
He paused, then added a third.
RECORD.
He stared at that last one until it stopped feeling like a word and started feeling like a tool.
In Han's bourgade, he'd learned what numbers did to chaos.
Numbers didn't make people kinder.
They made people honest.
When grain vanished, a ledger didn't cry. It pointed.
When debts piled up, a ledger didn't pity. It counted.
If he couldn't buy a cultivation method, if he couldn't buy pills, if he couldn't buy a teacher—
He could at least stop lying to himself about effort.
He drew a line.
Then another.
He made columns.
Not neat like a clerk. Not elegant like a scholar. Functional.
Day.
Work.
Breath.
Body.
Food.
Sleep.
He stopped and looked at it.
It wasn't a cultivation manual.
It wasn't even a real ledger.
It was a child's attempt to hold the world still long enough to measure it.
Good.
He needed that.
He started with yesterday, because yesterday was the pivot.
Day: After the grave.
Work: carried water / chopped kindling.
Breath: shallow all day. (angry chest)
Body: tired arms. no pain.
Food: rice thin.
Sleep: unknown.
He looked at the last line and frowned.
Unknown meant useless.
Unknown meant he wasn't watching the right things.
He scratched it out and wrote something else.
Sleep: woke before dawn.
True. Useful.
Then he added something he didn't want to write, but did anyway because the page didn't care about pride.
Mind: shame. (not permanent)
The word sat there like a bruise.
He didn't like it.
He didn't erase it.
Because shame was real, and pretending it wasn't would make it fester.
His father's axe split another log outside.
Li Shen wrote the next entry.
Day: 1.
Work: woodpile / water / patch fence.
Train: carry stones after work.
Breath: count.
Body: note hands.
He hesitated at "count."
Counting breath felt ridiculous and childish and too small to matter.
Then he remembered the stele—cold, patient, built to measure.
It hadn't asked him how much he wanted it.
It had measured what he was.
If measurement was the language of power, then he would learn to speak it.
He stood, went outside, and walked to the edge of the yard where the path dipped toward the fields.
There was a flat stretch of packed earth, hard from years of feet and carts.
He planted his feet, shoulders down, and inhaled.
The wind carried grit. It scratched at the throat.
He exhaled slowly.
Inhaled again.
He tried to do what Old He had once told his mother in a different context, back when Li Mei still had sharp edges: breathe low, not high. Don't panic from the chest.
Li Shen didn't know the meridians. Didn't know the dantian beyond stories and half-heard words.
But he knew something basic.
When you were scared, your breath rose.
When you wanted control, you forced it down.
So he forced it down.
He counted.
One inhale. One exhale.
Again.
At ten breaths, his shoulders wanted to lift. At twenty, his mind started wandering. At thirty, he felt the ache of impatience.
He kept going.
At fifty, the urge to stop hit him hard, like a wall.
He didn't stop.
He went to a hundred.
When he finished, he didn't feel enlightened.
He felt stupid.
And then—beneath the stupid—he felt something else.
A faint, thin steadiness.
Not power.
Not cultivation.
Just the sensation that his body could be made to obey if he insisted long enough.
He walked back inside, grabbed the charcoal, and wrote it down.
Breath: 100 slow. shoulders tried to rise at 30. urge to stop at 50.
He stared at that sentence.
It looked like nothing.
But it was data.
Data could be improved.
He tucked the scrap stack into a folded cloth, the way his father stored small tools so they didn't get ruined. Then he looked around the house for somewhere to keep it where it wouldn't be seen by every visitor.
His eyes went to the bundle.
The one with the stitched sachet.
The one that smelled faintly of bitterness and old boiled herbs if you pressed your face close enough and tried hard enough to imagine the scent back into existence.
He hesitated, then pulled it out.
The fabric was worn at the seam. The stitching was straight in a way only Li Mei's hands had ever managed—neat and slightly mocking, like she was proving she could fix a crooked world one line at a time.
Inside was nothing useful now. No medicine. No cure. No miracle.
But it was the last object in the house that had been made by her hands for him.
He opened it.
Not to smell. Not to mourn.
To use it.
He slid the scraps inside and tied the string.
Not as a charm.
As storage.
As if he was telling the object: if you're going to stay with me, you're going to work too.
He set it down and stared at it for a long moment, waiting for the guilt to rise.
It did.
Not as a wave.
As a slow pressure.
Because using something that belonged to her felt like stealing what little remained.
Then Li Heng stepped in from outside, axe in hand, and spoke like a man stating weather.
"Breakfast."
Li Shen blinked.
He hadn't even smelled it.
Li Heng set a bowl down. Rice, thin. Salted vegetables, small.
Li Shen ate because his body needed it, not because he tasted it.
Halfway through, Li Heng's eyes shifted to the sachet.
"What is that?" he asked.
Li Shen's grip tightened on his chopsticks.
He almost lied.
Not maliciously. Automatically. The way people lied when something felt too personal to exist in the open.
Then he remembered the word on the page.
RECORD.
So he said the truth. Just not the whole truth.
"Paper," he said. "Notes."
Li Heng didn't react the way Li Shen expected.
No annoyance. No fear. No lecture.
He only asked, "Why?"
Li Shen opened his mouth and realized he didn't have a clean answer.
Because I failed. Because I'm ashamed. Because I want to become someone Haoyang can't dismiss. Because I want to save you. Because I couldn't save her.
All of it was true and none of it fit into one sentence without sounding like a child playing hero.
So what came out was smaller.
"Because I don't want to waste days," Li Shen said.
Li Heng watched him for a long moment.
Then he nodded once, slow.
"That's a better reason than most," he said.
And then—because Li Heng didn't do comfort but he did practicality—he added, "Don't burn yourself out."
Li Shen almost laughed, sharp and humorless.
As if burn-out was the danger.
As if the real danger wasn't rotting in the same village forever with strong arms and a weak future.
He swallowed the laugh and said, "I won't."
It wasn't a promise.
It was a lie that might become true if he forced it hard enough.
Li Heng stood, took his bowl, and moved back toward the door.
At the threshold, he paused.
Not turning. Not softening.
Just pausing like a man who realized he was about to leave a tool unattended in the rain.
"Write down what you eat too," Li Heng said.
Li Shen's head snapped up.
Li Heng's gaze stayed forward, not meeting his eyes.
"You can't build a strong body on empty," Li Heng continued. "If you're going to turn work into training, you'll need more than stubbornness."
Li Shen felt something strange in his chest.
Not warmth.
A kind of clean shock.
Because his father—who didn't talk about cultivation, who didn't sell dreams—was treating this like it mattered.
Like Li Shen's obsession wasn't a childish phase to be slapped out of him.
Like it was a project.
Li Heng stepped outside again.
The axe resumed its rhythm.
Li Shen sat very still, bowl empty, and let that sink in.
His father had not said: give up.
He had said: if you're doing this, do it correctly.
Operational love again.
No speeches.
Just infrastructure.
Li Shen picked up the charcoal.
He wrote one new line on the page.
Food: too little. Need more. Find way.
Then, because the page didn't care and he was tired of pretending he didn't, he added one more note.
Goal: power to keep people alive. Not for pride.
He stared at it until his eyes stung.
Then he folded the scrap, slid it into the sachet, and tied it tight.
Outside, the village continued being a village.
Children ran. Chickens complained. Old men argued about nothing. The world pretended it hadn't sorted three boys into absence.
Li Shen stood, stepped back out into the yard, and walked to the woodpile.
He didn't pick up the axe.
Not yet.
His arms were still too small. His wrists would tire. He'd slow his father down.
So he did what was available.
He grabbed split logs, one by one, and carried them to the stack.
Work.
Then he shifted the movement—made it harder on purpose. Squatted lower. Carried two at a time. Controlled his breath on the lift. Forced the exhale on the set-down.
Training inside work.
He didn't need a sect to do that.
Not yet.
Li Heng didn't speak.
He didn't stop him.
But when Li Shen's posture started to slip, when the second log made his spine curve—
Li Heng's voice cut through the rhythm like an axe strike.
"Back straight."
Li Shen corrected.
The correction hurt.
He did it anyway.
Because this time he wasn't training for a story.
He was training for the next gate.
The next system.
The next set of eyes that would measure him and decide if he was worth the cost.
He carried wood until his hands stung.
Then he carried water.
Then he ate again.
Then he wrote it down.
Not pretty.
Not poetic.
But real.
And as the day bled out into evening, Li Shen realized something that made his stomach settle into a colder kind of calm:
Haoyang had stamped him unclaimed.
But Haoyang had also taught him the truth of the world.
If you wanted a different outcome, you didn't pray harder.
You built different inputs.
He tied the sachet again and placed it under his bedding like a tool he would need in the morning.
When he lay down, he didn't feel hope.
He felt structure.
It wasn't comforting.
It was better.
Because comfort didn't keep people alive.
Structure sometimes did.
And tomorrow, he would add another line.