Two winters had passed since Haoyang.
In Pale Wind territory, that wasn't poetry. It was arithmetic—two cycles of cracked hands, two seasons of smoke that never quite left your clothes, two long stretches where the world kept moving and the weak pretended they weren't being counted down.
Li Shen was twelve now.
His body had changed the way tools changed: not taller in any dramatic sense, just denser—cords of work wrapped under skin. His palms were rough enough to catch on cloth. The softness that belonged to childhood had been planed away by repetition.
Every morning started the same. Not because routine was comforting, but because winter respected discipline more than hope.
Breath count. Cold air. A slow build to heat. A deliberate refusal to rush.
Then work: water, wood, fence repair when frost loosened nails. Then the stones—two rounds when food allowed it, one when it didn't.
And at night, when the house was quiet and the last light was nothing but ember, he wrote.
Not stories.
Records.
Charcoal on scraps—backs of torn notices, the blank margins of old receipts, brown paper that used to wrap salt. Each piece folded and flattened, stacked like he was building something that could survive memory.
Most of it went into the cloth sachet stitched from his mother's old fabric.
The sachet had been meant as a memory.
It had become storage.
Too full.
He could feel the strain in the seam when his wrist flexed. He could feel the risk the way you felt a roof beam starting to crack—quietly, before it made a sound.
He hadn't said it out loud.
His father didn't ask.
Li Heng didn't ask questions the way other men did. He watched, and when something became a problem, he treated it like a problem—not like a tragedy.
That morning, the village shifted before anyone spoke.
The dogs near the entrance stopped.
Not barking. Not growling.
Just… stopping—as if their throats had been tied shut by a hand that didn't care if they understood.
The air itself seemed drafted, pulled tight into a shape that didn't belong to villagers.
Li Heng didn't announce anything.
He didn't need to.
He kept splitting wood, steady and indifferent, as if the axe could carve order into the world if he struck enough times.
Then he pointed.
Woodpile.
Then a wrapped bowl sitting by the stove.
Then toward the front of the village.
A task, not a discussion.
Li Shen took a small bundle of dry split wood under one arm and the wrapped bowl under the other. Not charity. Not comfort. Not a performance.
Just supply.
The Li house sat farther back, closer to the trees where the village thinned into forest and wood became survival. As Li Shen moved through the lanes, the front of the village felt like another country—one where people kept their doors half-closed and their faces blank.
He passed two neighbors who were "busy" in the open—repairing a fence that didn't need repair, sweeping a patch of dirt already clean. They didn't greet him. They didn't go forward either.
They were doing what villagers did when danger wore a human shape: staying close enough to see, far enough to deny it.
Near the entrance, Luo Yao's small house sat where outsiders first became "inside"—too visible, too exposed. It had been that way since she arrived eight years ago with a belly and a story no one could confirm. The village had tolerated her, watched her, kept her at arm's length.
When her son was taken by a sect, the distance didn't close.
It hardened.
Now it had weight.
In the Luo yard, a figure stood with the quiet authority of something ranked above weather.
A woman in sect robes—clean lines, disciplined cut. On her sleeve, a beast-mark signaled the Thousand Beasts Sect without needing to shout it. That name carried rank, and rank carried consequences.
Beside her, an oversized white goose sat heavy on the packed dirt, neck arched, eyes dark and unblinking. It preened one wing slowly, with the confidence of something that had never been chased in its life.
The goose didn't look like a joke.
It looked like a boundary.
Luo Ning was there.
Eight now.
Two years inside a sect didn't make a child older in a way you could measure by height alone. It made him quieter in specific places. It tightened the loose. It shaved off waste.
He wore the same robe style—smaller, simpler, but unmistakable. The cloth sat on him the way rules sat: correctly.
His posture was controlled. His gaze didn't wander. It assessed.
A small fox padded near his heel, red-brown fur muted by dust, ears sharp. It moved in half-circles, testing angles, then settled where it could see both the door and the road in one line.
The fox's presence wasn't decorative.
It was assignment.
Luo Yao stepped out of her doorway like her body moved before her face could decide what to show.
She stopped three paces from her son.
There were rules in her stillness—rules she hadn't written but had learned the hard way.
Luo Ning bowed.
Not deep. Not dramatic.
Correct.
"Mother," he said.
Luo Yao's breath caught once. She folded her hands into her sleeves, fingers hidden so no one could see them shake.
"You're… you're tall," she managed, and the words sounded like a substitute for everything she wasn't allowed to say.
A flicker—almost softness—passed through Luo Ning's eyes. Then it locked away again, the way a door closes quietly but completely.
"They feed us," he said, like it was a report.
The sect woman—Senior Sister, if the robe and the stillness meant anything—didn't interrupt. She didn't need to. Her presence was already a timer.
Old He arrived without hurry.
Not because she wasn't aware, but because she refused to be ruled by other people's fear. Her coat was old, her hands stained with herbs, her spine slightly bent from years of hauling water and lifting bodies that didn't want to live.
She stopped at the edge of the yard, nodded once—respectful, practical—and then moved to Luo Yao's side without asking permission.
That was how you could tell who had history with who. Old He stood close enough to be counted as kin.
From farther back, a woman—Qian Mei's mother—hovered at the lane's edge with a small bundle of cloth in her hands. Her face wanted to step forward.
Her husband's gaze stopped her.
Not cruel. Not controlling.
Just careful—like a man who understood that attention was a blade and Luo Yao already lived under its edge.
The mother hesitated, then crossed the line anyway. She placed the cloth bundle near the Luo threshold and retreated without lingering, as if even kindness had to obey a limit today.
Li Shen stepped into the yard only as far as he had to.
He set the wood near the wall where it wouldn't soak up damp. He placed the wrapped bowl beside it.
Luo Yao saw him and nodded once—thin gratitude, the kind that didn't dare expand.
Li Shen should have left.
He didn't turn his back immediately. Not because he wanted to watch a mother bleed in silence, but because sect pressure had its own physics, and you didn't pretend not to feel it.
The cloth sachet in his sleeve pressed against his wrist.
Too full.
He adjusted the bundle in his arm.
The string slipped.
A few scraps of paper slid free and fluttered down near his boot.
Not loud.
Just enough.
Li Shen froze on instinct, then crouched to gather them before the wind could steal the ink of his days.
The Senior Sister's gaze snapped to the motion like a blade turning toward light.
She didn't move fast. She didn't need to.
She stepped once into range of the fallen page and picked it up with two fingers, unfolding it with the same calm you used for something either valuable or dirty—it wasn't always clear which.
Li Shen's throat tightened.
He didn't reach for it.
He wasn't stupid.
The Senior Sister's eyes moved.
No surprise. No mockery. No interest in his village status.
Only the faint tightening at the corner of her mouth—the expression of someone looking at a structure built almost correctly, and feeling irritation at the one beam placed off.
On the scrap, Li Shen's tight handwriting—built from repetition:
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.
Her thumb paused over the line about the urge to stop.
Then she took the charcoal from behind Li Shen's thumb as if it had always belonged to her and wrote three short lines beneath his entry:
Pulse (morning): ___
Lower abdomen: ___
Stop markers: ___
Her handwriting wasn't pretty.
It was absolute.
She handed the page back without looking at his face.
"Good," she said, and the word didn't sound like praise. It sounded like a diagnosis.
Her gaze flicked once to the sachet, once to the other scraps on the ground, then returned to the page.
"Records are easy," she said. "Anyone can write what they ate."
She tapped the paper once.
"Work is noise unless you tie it to recovery."
Another tap.
"And if you don't mark the body, you'll keep mistaking fatigue for progress."
Li Shen didn't answer.
He only nodded once—small, exact—like he was filing the correction where it belonged.
The Senior Sister crouched again, not to gather the scraps, but to pin the idea in place.
"Change one thing at a time," she said. "One. If your breath goes up and your food goes down and your load goes up, you learn nothing except how to break."
Her eyes slid to the line he'd written—urge to stop at 60—then back to him.
"Stop markers," she repeated, as if the concept offended her. "Not pride. Not mood. Mark the moment your body starts lying to you."
She straightened, already done with the conversation.
Only then did Luo Ning glance toward them, and his eyes paused—briefly—on the page in Li Shen's hands. Not recognition, not friendship. Just a calibrated awareness that another boy in the village had started building something.
The Senior Sister addressed Luo Ning without softness.
"Time."
Luo Ning answered like a disciple answering a bell.
"Yes, Senior Sister Wei."
That was the first time her name entered the yard, and it didn't matter whether anyone remembered it. What mattered was that the village heard the title.
Senior Sister Wei didn't look pleased or displeased.
She simply existed at a level where feelings were optional.
Then she dropped one last line—not a promise, not an invitation. A rule dressed as advice:
"Talent gets you noticed," Wei said. "Discipline gets you kept long enough to be tested."
One breath. Clean.
"Keep writing," she added, and her gaze flicked once to the scraps at Li Shen's feet. "But stop letting it scatter."
The goose lifted its head slightly, watching the road like it was the only thing in the world worth tracking.
Inside the Luo house, Luo Yao's voice murmured low. Luo Ning answered in short, measured phrases. The fox didn't move. It listened.
Li Shen gathered the remaining scraps carefully, folding them, stacking them, pressing them into the sachet with a gentleness that didn't belong to paper.
The seam pulled.
He felt it.
A small failure waiting to happen.
He tightened the string anyway, because he had no better container, and he wasn't allowed to pretend that wanting something made it real.
When the visit ended, it ended like a permission expiring.
No shouting. No lingering.
Luo Ning stepped out, bowed once more, and Luo Yao stood very still—as if any motion might count as grabbing.
For a fraction of a second, her face cracked.
Then it sealed again.
She nodded, the way you nodded when you accepted an order you couldn't refuse.
Luo Ning didn't look back more than once.
Not because he didn't care.
Because he'd been trained.
Senior Sister Wei turned as well. The goose rose with a heavy thump and waddled after her, slow and unquestioned.
The fox padded at Luo Ning's heel, tail low, eyes scanning.
And then the sect presence was gone from the entrance lane as if the village had been holding its breath and finally dared to exhale.
The neighbors "busy" in the lane returned to their doors. The woman who had left cloth at the threshold disappeared back into her household. The men who had pretended not to watch suddenly found work elsewhere.
Old He stayed until the last possible moment, just long enough to touch Luo Yao's elbow once—an anchor disguised as a medical check—and then she left too, walking like she was refusing to let the village decide what her steps meant.
Li Shen walked back through the village toward the rear lanes where the trees began.
The farther he got from the entrance, the more the air returned to normal—smoke, cold, the familiar dull weight of hunger.
At the Li house, Li Heng was still at the woodpile.
The axe rose and fell with a rhythm that treated time like a resource and wasted none of it.
Li Shen didn't report what he'd seen.
Li Heng didn't ask.
That was how their household worked: words were used when they changed outcomes. Everything else was carried.
Li Shen stepped inside.
He sat near his sleeping space and pulled out one of the scraps. He smoothed it flat with both palms, careful not to tear it.
He wrote the new headers exactly as Wei had written them:
Pulse (morning):
Lower abdomen:
Stop markers:
Then he paused, looking at the sachet—too full, too strained—at the way it bulged like it was trying to contain more than cloth was meant to hold.
Not just paper.
Days.
A method.
A piece of himself he couldn't afford to lose.
He slid the scrap into the stack he kept wrapped in cloth and set a stone on top so the wind couldn't steal it through a crack.
A small fix.
Not a solution.
Outside, the axe bit into wood again—clean, final, indifferent.
And Li Shen understood something without needing to name it:
If he was building anything that mattered, he would need a container that could survive the years.