The sachet gained weight without gaining anything new.
Not real weight—no coins, no pills, no hidden miracle stitched into the lining. Just paper. More scraps, folded and refolded until the fabric started to remember corners.
Li Shen treated it like a tool now.
Morning: untie.
Night: tie.
He didn't like how quickly that rhythm made the grief quieter.
He liked even less how much he needed that quiet to function.
On the fourth day after he started writing, he realized something unpleasant:
Recording didn't make effort easier.
It made excuses impossible.
He sat at the table with a charcoal stub worn to a fingernail and looked at what he had written the day before.
Breath: 120. urge to stop at 60.
Work: water / wood carry / fence.
Train: stone carries (2 rounds).
Food: thin rice. 1 egg (Old Wu).
Sleep: woke twice.
He stared at the line about the egg.
He'd gotten it by helping Old Wu fix a broken hinge and not asking for payment until the end. Old Wu had cursed, pretended it was a nuisance, then shoved the egg into Li Shen's hand like he was insulting him with generosity.
Li Shen had eaten it in three bites and felt his body light up like it recognized the concept of fuel.
He wrote it down because it mattered.
He hated that it mattered.
He hated that one egg felt like a strategic resource.
He dragged the charcoal across the next scrap and wrote:
Problem: food limits training.
Then he stopped.
Problem was too clean a word. Too polite.
He scratched it out and wrote what it actually was.
Constraint.
Constraints could be worked around. Constraints were mechanical. Constraints didn't care if you deserved better.
He tucked the sachet into his shirt and stepped outside.
Li Heng was already at the woodpile. Always. The axe rose, fell, split, stacked. A man building warmth one clean fracture at a time.
Li Shen didn't pick up the axe.
He picked up water buckets.
Because if he tried to swing metal all morning, he'd tear his wrists and spend the rest of the day useless. He wasn't training for a single heroic moment. He was training for repeatability.
He carried the first two buckets down to the well at a controlled pace, breathing low, shoulders down, forcing the exhale to match the step.
On the way back, his arms started to shake.
He didn't stop.
He made himself finish the route.
Then he put the buckets down carefully—no slosh, no wasted water—and went straight to the flat stretch of packed dirt behind the house.
He marked a line in the soil with his toe.
A start point.
A finish point.
He walked it once.
Then he loaded stones into his shirt—small, rounded river stones that wouldn't cut him—and tied the cloth tight with a strip of rope like a crude weight vest.
It wasn't clever.
It was heavy.
Good.
He jogged the distance between the lines. Not fast. Controlled. Breath counted. Eyes forward.
At the end of the first round his lungs burned.
At the end of the second, his legs started to feel stupid—clumsy, as if they belonged to someone else.
He stopped, bent over, and almost let the old frustration speak.
Almost.
He swallowed it and forced himself upright.
He had written the truth down too many times to indulge the lie that stopping early didn't matter.
He walked inside, grabbed the charcoal, and wrote the update while the pain was still fresh.
Train: stones in shirt. 2 rounds. lungs burned at end. legs heavy.
Note: don't sprint. keep pace.
He paused, then wrote a second line.
Mind: wanted to quit. didn't.
That line felt better than it should have.
It wasn't pride.
It was evidence.
Evidence was the only kind of confidence that survived a world that measured you.
He tied the sachet again and stepped out.
The village lane was already awake—too awake. Not because of festivals or harvest.
Because the village had learned a new habit after Haoyang:
watching.
Not just for strangers. For each other.
Li Shen saw it in the way eyes slid off him faster than they used to.
He saw it in the way people glanced toward Luo Yao's house and then pretended they hadn't.
Luo Yao existed in the village the way a knife existed on a table: no one denied it, but no one wanted to touch it without a reason.
She came out that morning leading the animal she'd accepted—sturdy, ordinary, patient-eyed. The rope in her hand wasn't charity.
It was a tether.
A line that said: Thousand Beasts Sect has a stake here.
She didn't look up. She didn't scan for sympathy. She walked like someone who had decided that surviving people's stares was a kind of labor.
Li Shen's gaze followed her for a heartbeat too long.
Not pity.
Recognition.
Haoyang had stamped him unclaimed.
Haoyang had stamped her as the mother of a sect child.
Different labels.
Same mechanism.
He turned away before his face could betray anything and went back inside to write.
Observation: village stares. not loud. worse.
He didn't add names.
He didn't need to.
He knew who was being stared at.
He knew why.
And he knew what that did to a person over time: it changed the way you stood. The way you spoke. The way you trusted.
He tied the sachet again and forced his hands back into work.
Work.
Train inside work.
Record.
Repeat.
It wasn't glorious.
It wasn't fast.
But it was something Haoyang couldn't argue with later.
Because if the world wanted to classify him, he would give it new data—one line at a time.
---
In the afternoon he went to the well again.
Not because the household needed more water—Li Heng was careful with water like a man who had seen drought. Because the well was where you learned the village's temperature.
And because Qian Mei would be there.
He didn't go for comfort.
He told himself that, and it was mostly true.
But when he saw her standing by the bucket line, sleeves rolled, hair tied back, face composed in the same way she had held herself during the sorting—chin level, mouth neutral—something in his chest loosened by a fraction.
Not relief.
Recognition.
She was still here.
She hadn't been erased.
Qian Mei saw him approach and didn't wave. She just shifted half a step to make space at the rope line.
Li Shen took the space without thanking her.
Gratitude would make it sentimental. They didn't need sentimental. They needed functional.
They lowered buckets together, rope burning palms, water cold and heavy as it rose.
When their buckets hit the ground, Qian Mei spoke first, voice low.
"People are saying Zhou Liang cried when they stamped him."
Li Shen kept his eyes on the water's surface.
"Did he?" he asked.
Qian Mei exhaled. "My aunt heard it from someone who heard it from someone else."
So: rumor.
Li Shen nodded once. "He would."
Not as an insult. As a fact.
Zhou Liang had always cried loudly. When he scraped his knee. When he got caught stealing persimmons. When he got praised in front of other boys.
Zhou Liang didn't regulate emotion. He broadcast it. It was how he survived.
Qian Mei's fingers tightened on the bucket handle. "They also say Da Niu already got in a fight before he even reached the gate."
Li Shen almost smiled and didn't. "He would."
Qian Mei's mouth twitched—half amusement, half bitterness. "And Luo Ning…"
She stopped.
Because everyone stopped at that name now.
Because the Thousand Beasts Sect had turned a village child into a story with fangs.
Li Shen answered, careful. "He didn't look afraid."
Qian Mei looked at him sharply. "Did you watch him?"
Li Shen didn't deny it. "Yes."
Qian Mei stared for a moment, then looked away. "Aunt Luo doesn't come to the well much."
Li Shen's throat tightened at the respectful title. It sounded correct. It sounded like distance disguised as manners.
"She comes out," Li Shen said. "Just not for people."
Qian Mei didn't argue. She didn't need to.
Then she said the thing that wasn't about anyone else.
"They looked at me differently."
Li Shen didn't pretend not to understand.
At Haoyang, she had stood straight. At home, the village didn't need procedure to sort people. It used eyes and silence.
"They looked at all of us differently," Li Shen said.
Qian Mei's jaw tightened. "Not the ones who stayed. Not the ones who didn't go."
"They didn't get stamped," Li Shen said.
Qian Mei glanced at him. "And you did."
The words weren't cruel.
They were precise.
Li Shen's fingers flexed once around the bucket handle. "Yes."
Qian Mei's gaze flicked down to his hands.
She noticed the blisters.
She noticed the way his shoulders held tension even while standing still.
"You're training," she said.
It wasn't a question.
Li Shen didn't lie. "Yes."
"Why?" Qian Mei asked, and there was no mockery in her voice, only the blunt curiosity of someone who needed a reason not to fall apart.
Li Shen opened his mouth and realized he still didn't have the clean answer.
So he gave her the operational one.
"Because if I don't," he said, "then Haoyang was the end."
Qian Mei stared at him, then nodded once.
Not approval.
Understanding.
"Be careful," she said. "People will start talking."
Li Shen's eyes narrowed. "Let them."
Qian Mei's voice stayed even. "They talk until it costs them something. Then they stop. Don't give them an easy reason."
Li Shen held her gaze.
He realized she wasn't warning him like a child.
She was warning him like someone who had already learned that a village could be kind and still be dangerous.
"Fine," he said. "No performances."
Qian Mei's mouth tightened in something close to satisfaction.
Then she picked up her buckets.
"So," she said, like she was switching topics to avoid being seen as soft, "what do you write?"
Li Shen hesitated.
The sachet under his shirt felt suddenly warm.
He could tell her. He could show her. He could make it a shared thing, like a secret alliance against the village's sorting.
He didn't.
Not because he didn't trust Qian Mei.
Because the moment he spoke it out loud, it stopped being his.
It became another story other people could misunderstand.
His answers were still too small. Still too unfinished.
"It's not good," he said.
Qian Mei tilted her head. "That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have," Li Shen replied.
Qian Mei studied him for a long moment, then gave a small nod.
"Fine," she said, and her tone said she would remember and ask again later.
They walked back up the path with water sloshing heavy in buckets.
Not side by side like children.
Parallel like survivors.
At the split in the path, Qian Mei stopped.
She didn't say goodbye like a friend.
She said, "Don't break your hands."
Li Shen blinked.
Then, because he understood the language, he answered in kind.
"You too."
Qian Mei walked off without looking back.
---
That night, Li Shen couldn't sleep.
Not because of nightmares.
Because the day had been too full of information that didn't resolve into anything useful.
Rumor of Zhou Liang. Rumor of Da Niu. The Thousand Beasts Sect's name still sitting in the village air like smoke that wouldn't clear.
And beneath all of it, the steady pressure of his own category.
Unclaimed.
He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.
The house was quiet in a familiar way now. Not the raw quiet from the first days after Li Mei died. A quieter quiet. The kind that had learned to live with itself.
Li Heng's breathing came from the other side of the room, slow and even.
Li Shen hated how much that sound anchored him.
He hated it because it meant the trigger from the grave had worked.
He had seen his father at the tomb and something inside him had shifted from "I lost everything" to "I still have one thing left."
That realization hadn't been loud.
It had been mechanical.
And it scared him.
Because it meant his heart was already reorganizing itself around survival.
He rolled onto his side and pulled the sachet out from under his bedding.
He untied it in the dark and fished out a scrap.
The charcoal didn't show well without light, but he didn't need to see the old words. He knew the shape of what he'd written.
He added a new entry by feel, the charcoal scratching softly.
Night: couldn't sleep. mind running.
Fix: write it down.
He paused, then wrote the thing he'd been circling without naming.
Fear: father dies before I can change anything.
His throat tightened.
He didn't cry.
He didn't dramatize it.
He stared into the dark and let the sentence exist.
Then he wrote the next line, because he needed a response to the fear that wasn't prayer.
Action: tomorrow—more wood carry. more breath. find extra food.
He tied the sachet shut again.
He put it back under his head.
He closed his eyes.
And eventually, because bodies obey exhaustion even when minds don't, sleep came.
---
In the morning, Li Heng woke him before dawn.
Not with tenderness.
With a hand on his shoulder, firm.
"Up," Li Heng said.
Li Shen sat up immediately.
Li Heng's eyes flicked over him—checking posture, checking face, reading the boy the way he read weather.
"You didn't sleep," Li Heng said.
Li Shen hesitated. Then he nodded once.
Li Heng didn't ask why.
He walked to the stove, poured water, and set a cup down.
Not hot. Not warm.
Just not freezing.
A small mercy in Li Heng's vocabulary.
Li Shen drank, swallowed, and felt the ache behind his eyes soften.
Li Heng spoke without turning around.
"If you're going to make yourself into something," Li Heng said, "you don't do it by starving."
Li Shen's fingers tightened on the cup.
Li Heng continued, voice flat, like he was discussing tools.
"I can trade labor for food. You can too. But you don't trade pride. Pride buys nothing."
Li Shen stared at the back of his father's shoulders.
Then he said the only honest thing he could manage.
"I'm trying," Li Shen said.
Li Heng nodded once. "Good."
Then he added, quieter, "Try correctly."
Li Shen exhaled.
Outside, the wind scraped the yard and carried grit.
The village woke into another day where nothing magical happened and nothing was fair.
Li Shen put the cup down, tied the sachet under his shirt, and stepped out to work.
Work.
Train inside work.
Record.
Repeat.
It wasn't a prayer.
It was a plan.
And for now, a plan was the only thing that made the future feel like it still existed.