By late summer, Old Han's bourgade stopped pretending it was the same place it had been last year.
The roads still existed. The carts still rolled. Men still argued over copper like arguing could change arithmetic.
But everything carried more tension.
You could hear it in the way buyers spoke—shorter sentences, less laughter, more glances toward the door. You could see it in the way escorts stood when they waited: not relaxed, not bored, just alert in the low, permanent way of people who had learned the road could turn on them without warning.
And you could measure it.
Salt. Oil. Cloth. Iron.
Even grain felt heavier, as if the sacks knew their own value now.
Old Han didn't explain any of it. He didn't need to. His decisions did the talking.
He locked more. He stored deeper. He paid later. He argued harder. He took contracts that were either too profitable or too cautious—nothing in between—because the middle was where people got eaten.
Li Shen stayed through it like he always did: as a body the season required.
The shed filled with the same kind of boys each year.
Boys who had learned hunger didn't negotiate.
Boys who slept on straw and woke with their ribs aching from the floor.
Shen Yu was there again.
He always was.
He didn't tell stories. He didn't ask questions. He didn't look for meaning in anything that didn't feed him.
That was why he survived.
That was why Han kept him.
One evening, a new boy whispered about "opportunities" again—about escort work, about how a man could earn more on the road now if he had the stomach for it.
Shen Yu didn't even open his eyes.
"Brave," he said into the straw. "That's what they call it when they need bodies."
No one argued. Not because they agreed, but because everyone understood the shape of the truth.
Li Shen didn't join the conversation.
He took the phrase, filed it away, and wrote his breath count the next morning.
Because whatever happened beyond the bourgade, his leverage wasn't bravery.
It was repeatability.
The clerk stood near the storage shed as if he'd been nailed to the ground.
Thin. Older. Ink-stained. A ledger tucked under his arm like a blade.
He didn't shout like Han. He didn't threaten.
He just recorded.
Han's voice made men move.
The clerk's brush made the movement matter.
That week, a cart came in at dusk with one wheel half-splintered and the driver bleeding from the scalp where a stone had opened him.
Not soldiers. Not officials. Just men and goods, moving on roads that had started charging interest.
The driver didn't tell a story. He just handed Old Han a crumpled toll chit and two dented copper pieces—payment for being allowed to stand in the yard.
Old Han glanced at the chit, face tightening for a heartbeat, then waved two men toward the cart.
"Unload fast," he snapped. "And don't stand in the road like you want to be hit."
The clerk watched the unloading with the same expression he used for everything: neutral, judgmental, bored.
When the cart was empty, the driver leaned close to Han and spoke too low for the yard to hear.
Han's eyes flicked once toward the road, then to the shed.
Not fear.
Calculation.
He turned and barked, "You—Shen Yu. Li. You sleep in the back room tonight. Not the shed."
That was unusual.
Not generous. Unusual.
Shen Yu lifted his head like a dog hearing a new tone.
Li Shen didn't react. He just nodded once and moved when told.
The back room wasn't comfortable. It smelled like rope and old grain and damp that never fully left wood. But it had two advantages:
It didn't leak.
And it was closer to the ledger.
That night, while the yard settled and the shed filled with sweating breath, Li Shen unwrapped his own ledger and opened it by the thin, dying light of a candle stub.
He didn't feel proud about having it.
Pride was a luxury.
He felt relief the way a worker felt relief when he found a tool that didn't break.
The pages were already thickening with use.
Not the kind of thickness that came from pretty writing, but from persistence—charcoal lines pressed into fiber, smudges at the corners where his thumb had turned the same pages a hundred times.
He found the most recent entry.
Breath: 165. urge at 110.
Pulse (morning): fast. steadier after noon.
Lower abdomen: warmth after 70; fades after work.
Stop markers: tongue dry; hands shaking; vision narrowing.
Work: sacks / rope / fence.
Train: stone carries (2 rounds).
Food: thin rice. salt less.
Sleep: shed. woke twice.
He stared at the line about salt.
Not because he cared about taste.
Because salt was the kind of thing that told you what the world was doing.
He wrote one more line beneath it.
Notes: salt down → cramps at night.
It wasn't a complaint. It was data.
Across the room, Shen Yu lay on his side without pretense, eyes half-open.
"You write like a clerk," Shen Yu said quietly.
Li Shen didn't look up. "Clerks don't carry stones."
Shen Yu made a sound that might've been amusement, if he had room for that kind of emotion.
"Clerks live," he muttered, then shut his eyes.
The next day, the contract left the yard.
Two carts. Rope. Grain. Oil sealed in clay jars. Four escorts hired for a price that made the men in the yard whisper.
Not soldiers. Not officials. Just men paid to keep knives away from grain.
Old Han didn't whisper. He stood at the gate, checked knots, checked seals, checked faces.
When one escort tried to joke, Han stared at him until the joke died.
"Bring it back," Han said. "Or don't come back."
Then the carts rolled out.
The yard felt oddly hollow after.
Not calm. Hollow.
Like a mouth missing teeth.
Work didn't stop. It never stopped. But men moved differently when a chunk of money left the yard on wheels. They knew the return would decide whether Old Han was angry for a day or dangerous for a week.
Li Shen carried water.
Stacked sacks.
Tightened rope.
And in the brief pockets of time no one noticed, he trained his breath.
In. Hold. Out.
Again.
He tracked the count with the precision of someone who had learned that the body lied most when you wanted it not to.
He reached one hundred.
His ribs started to ache.
One hundred twenty.
His shoulders tightened.
One hundred forty.
His tongue dried.
He hit one hundred sixty-five.
The urge to stop rose like a hand on his throat.
That was familiar.
But today the urge wasn't the problem.
Something else happened.
A thin heat lit low in his abdomen—not the faint warmth he'd recorded before, but a cleaner sensation, sharper, like an ember that had finally found air.
Li Shen's instinct was to chase it.
To push the count higher.
To force the ember into a flame.
He remembered Wei's words without hearing her voice:
Stop markers.
Not pride.
Not mood.
Mark the moment your body starts lying.
He watched himself the way he watched the yard.
Tongue dry—yes. Hands steady—still. Vision—clear.
The ember held.
He pushed to one hundred seventy.
The heat sharpened.
His pulse spiked.
His vision narrowed at the edges like someone had pulled a cloth over the world.
Stop marker.
He should have stopped.
He didn't.
Not because he wanted glory.
Because the ember felt like a door cracked open, and he couldn't stand the thought of it closing.
One hundred seventy-five.
His ears rang.
A sudden metallic taste flooded his mouth.
His stomach tightened hard enough to fold him.
He dropped to one knee behind the shed as if he'd been struck.
No one looked. Men were busy. Pain was common here. Weakness was ignored unless it cost someone.
Li Shen swallowed and tasted iron.
Blood.
He stared at the ground until the world stopped narrowing.
Then he breathed out—slow, controlled, like he was defusing something that could explode if he moved wrong.
He didn't try again.
Not that day.
When he wrote that night, his charcoal lines were ugly.
He wrote anyway.
Breath: 175 (error). urge at 120.
Pulse (morning): fast.
Lower abdomen: ember at 165; sharpened at 170.
Stop markers: vision narrowing; metal taste; nausea.
Outcome: pushed past marker → blood taste. weakness after.
Then, beneath it, the only line that mattered:
Tomorrow: return to 165. do not cross marker.
One variable.
One change.
Two days later the carts returned.
One escort didn't.
Not a body. Not a story. Just an absence that still had to be paid for.
The men who came back didn't tell stories. They didn't perform bravery. They looked tired in the deep way of people who had watched the road try to kill them and decided not to give it a second chance.
Old Han counted the jars and sacks in silence.
Then he counted the men.
Then he turned to the clerk.
"Write it," Han said.
The clerk's brush moved without hesitation.
A missing man became a missing number.
A missing number became a cost.
When the escorts were paid, the price was lower than promised.
One of the escorts argued.
Old Han didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.
"You got back," he said. "That's the part you're being paid for."
The escort spat and left.
The yard exhaled once the gate closed.
Shen Yu watched the whole exchange with flat eyes, then leaned toward Li Shen.
"That's opportunity," he said. "Tastes like loss."
Li Shen didn't answer.
He wrote the next morning's pulse.
The season rolled on.
Heat broke into rain.
Rain broke into cold nights.
Three days at home. Two weeks in the bourgade. Then back. Then again.
The ledger thickened.
Breath counts climbed—slowly, brutally.
The ember returned more often now, but it still didn't stay.
Li Shen learned to stop at the marker instead of chasing the feeling.
He learned that restraint wasn't weakness.
It was efficiency.
On one short release, back in the village, Li Heng didn't comment on the ledger. He didn't ask what it was. He didn't praise discipline like it was a virtue.
He just noticed that Li Shen wrapped it carefully, kept it away from damp, weighed it like something important.
The next morning, Li Shen found a strip of oiled cloth folded near his sleeping space.
Not a gift with ceremony.
A solution.
A barrier against damp. A way to keep paper alive.
Li Shen looked at it for a long moment, then used it.
Li Heng said nothing. He split wood as if that was the only language that mattered.
By the time the first real cold wind returned, Li Shen had learned something ugly and useful:
Progress didn't come from moments of heat.
It came from refusing to break your own system.
He closed the ledger one night in the back room of Han's place, pressed the cover flat with his palm, and listened to the shed breathing on the other side of the wall.
Boys exhaling exhaustion.
Rain tapping the roof like fingers.
The clerk's brush scratching in the front room, still recording, still turning bodies into costs.
Somewhere far away, kings were killing each other.
Here, the price of salt kept climbing.
Opportunity kept rising with it.
And Li Shen kept doing the only thing he could do that the world couldn't steal:
He kept making himself repeatable.