By the time late summer started to dull into the first edge of autumn, Old Han's bourgade had learned a new habit:
It stopped pretending the road was free.
The yard was the same shape it had always been—packed dirt, rope stacks, grain sacks, oil jars set in the shade like they mattered—but the voices around it had changed.
Men didn't ask what something cost the way they used to.
They asked if it would still be there tomorrow.
A woman in a faded sleeve held up a small bundle of salt and stared at it like it was a piece of metal.
"This is half," she said.
Old Han didn't look offended. He didn't look apologetic.
He looked like a man hearing weather.
"It's what's left," he said. "If you want last month's price, go buy last month's road."
She clicked her tongue, paid anyway, and walked off with the bundle tucked tight against her ribs.
Oil went the same way.
Cloth went thin and dull.
Iron, even in nails, started getting treated like it belonged in a box.
Paper—when it showed—was handled like something you didn't waste on feelings.
Li Shen saw it all because the yard forced him to. He carried water past arguments. He stacked sacks beside men counting copper twice. He watched the clerk's brush move and understood that whatever changed in the world, the ledger would still translate it into numbers.
The shed was fuller than it should have been for this time of year.
Not just boys from nearby villages.
Boys with travel dust in their hair and a look in their eyes that said they'd already learned what it meant to arrive somewhere with less than you left with.
One of them—new, thin, hungry enough to be loud—said it at dusk as if it was a joke meant to make the straw feel warmer.
"Did you hear?" he whispered, grinning too wide. "They say the Gray Pavilion's recruiting by the cartload. Servants. Hundreds."
A few boys snorted.
Someone muttered, "By the cartload, and I'm an Elder by winter."
Shen Yu didn't even open his eyes.
"Hundreds," he echoed, flat. "Sure. And they'll feed you roasted phoenix while they're at it."
Laughter, soft and sour.
The rumor died the way rumors always died in a shed: not disproved, just buried under sleep and hunger and the certainty that dreaming didn't change the morning.
Li Shen didn't laugh.
He didn't lean toward it either.
He filed it where he filed everything he couldn't use yet: in the part of his mind that didn't waste energy.
Across the yard, Old Han had heard it.
Maybe not the words. Maybe only the tone—the way boys chased a fantasy because it hurt less than counting their reality.
Old Han didn't comment. He didn't smile.
He tightened the knot on an oil jar seal and told the clerk to move a line of numbers.
That was his version of belief: adjustment.
The next morning the road sent its bill in flesh.
A carter arrived with dust crusted on his cheeks and a wheel that wobbled like it had taken a stone hard enough to remember it. His sleeve was ripped. His hands shook when he handed over his money.
Not to pay for goods.
To pay for being allowed to stand in the yard without someone deciding he looked easy.
He held out a crumpled tag—cheap paper, smeared ink, nothing official—and two dented copper pieces.
"Fork charged us twice," he said. No drama. Just accounting. "Once on the way in. Once on the way out."
Old Han took the tag and glanced at it like a man reading a bad omen without letting his face change.
"Who?" he asked.
The carter shrugged a fraction, as if naming it was dangerous.
"Men with ropes," he said. "Men with marks."
Old Han didn't ask for a story. He didn't need one.
He waved two workers forward. "Unload fast," he snapped. "And don't stand in the road like you want to be hit."
The clerk watched the unloading without expression, brush scratching when it mattered, silent when it didn't.
Li Shen hauled a sack and felt the grain shift inside it as if it was trying to become something else.
Weight was honest.
The world around it wasn't.
By midday, the answer to the carter's half-words walked into the bourgade like it owned a piece of it.
Stonehide Hall didn't arrive with the swagger of bandits.
They arrived with organization.
Two men in matching rough coats—same cut, same stitching, a patch of dark fabric on the sleeve that made them look uniform without being fine. Behind them, an older handler with a neat beard and ink-stained fingers carried a slim register board.
They didn't spread out like predators.
They set up like a stall.
A plank table. A small pot of ink. A brush. A strip of cloth with a simple mark painted on it. Not a sect banner. Not a threat made into art.
A brand.
The handler laid the cloth down and wrote two neat lines on a board for anyone to see.
Route coverage.
Terms posted.
Payment upfront.
He didn't shout. He didn't promise glory.
He said, clearly, like a merchant selling salt, "Fork to river bend. Fork to north gate. Fork to east bridge. Escort rates by wheel. By weight. By distance."
Men gathered.
Not because they liked Stonehide.
Because the road had started charging interest, and Stonehide was offering a way to pay it in advance instead of in blood.
A merchant with clean hands scoffed. "So you're bandits with a table now."
The handler didn't blink.
"We're a service," he said. "Bandits take everything. We take a fee and leave you alive."
The merchant spat. "That's a pretty sentence for extortion."
The handler's brush paused, tip hovering over ink.
"We don't extort," he said. "We invoice."
A small ripple of laughter, tight and nervous.
Behind the table, one of Stonehide's men shifted his stance—not forward, not aggressive, just enough to remind everyone that the handler's calm rested on a foundation of arms.
The merchant swallowed his next words.
That was Stonehide's trick.
They were trying to become something you could complain about without expecting a knife. Something you could argue with, bargain with, sign with.
Legitimacy, built on disciplined violence.
Old Han watched from his yard without moving.
He didn't admire it.
He understood it.
Stonehide wasn't trying to rule a bourgade. They were trying to climb.
To be seen as more than brutes with spears. To be seen as an institution that could be contracted, that could be counted, that could be tolerated by bigger players.
Li Shen caught a phrase as the handler spoke to a waiting client—casual, almost offhand, but heavy with intent.
"Stonehide is cleaning its lines," the handler said. "We don't want drunk blades. We don't want boys who run. We want men who keep the mark clean."
Cleaning its lines.
Li Shen didn't know what "ranks" meant in the way cultivators meant it, but he knew what it meant in the way the world worked.
When an organization started caring about its image, it was preparing to take more space.
A runner called out from the road, and Stonehide's men turned their heads in the same motion.
No looseness. No waste.
Li Shen felt something cold in his chest—not fear, not awe.
Recognition.
This was what discipline looked like when it wore a uniform.
Old Han didn't go to their table.
They came to him.
The handler crossed the road and stopped at the edge of Han's yard, careful not to step over the invisible line where a merchant's patience ended.
"Old Han," he said, polite. "We're offering winter coverage. Your yard moves volume."
Old Han didn't correct his name. He didn't confirm it either.
"How much?" he asked.
The handler gave him numbers like they were weather.
Old Han's eyes narrowed.
"That's a tax," Old Han said.
"It's a rate," the handler replied.
Old Han's mouth twitched—not a smile, more like a muscle remembering it could.
"You're expensive," Han said.
"You're alive," the handler answered, and the simplicity of it landed like a brick.
Old Han looked past him, toward the road.
He weighed something invisible. Margins. Risk. Pride.
Then he said, "I don't buy long. I buy one run. Dense goods only. If your mark fails, you pay it back."
The handler's brush scratched across his register.
"No refunds," he said automatically.
Old Han leaned in a fraction. His voice dropped, soft and sharp.
"Then don't fail," he said.
For a heartbeat the handler's calm tightened at the edges.
Then he nodded. "One run."
He wrote it down.
Old Han turned without ceremony and barked at the clerk. "Record it."
The clerk did, because a contract was only real when it became ink in the right place.
Li Shen moved sacks for the rest of the day with that exchange sitting in his mind like a stone.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because it was the world revealing its structure.
The road was no longer a path.
It was a market.
And markets didn't care who you were. They cared what you cost and what you returned.
That night, the shed was louder.
More bodies. Less space. Straw packed tight. Breath thick and damp.
A boy coughed until someone told him to shut up. Someone else shifted and got elbowed hard enough to swear under his breath. A small scuffle broke out over a scrap of dried bread and ended the moment Han's voice cut through the boards like a whip.
"Sleep," he snapped. "If you want to bleed, do it on your own time."
Silence returned in pieces.
Shen Yu lay with his arm over his eyes as if the world was too bright even in darkness.
"They're trying to be respectable," the new boy whispered, still half-awake. "Stonehide. Did you see the table?"
Shen Yu's voice was muffled by straw. "Respectable is what you call a knife when it has paperwork."
Li Shen listened and said nothing.
He waited until the shed's breathing thickened, until even hunger started to doze.
Then, in the back room—drier, less watched—he unwrapped his ledger and opened to the newest page.
He didn't write stories.
He wrote leverage.
Breath: 165. urge at 110.
Stop markers: vision narrowing; metal taste; nausea. (hard stop)
Work: sacks / rope / water.
Food: thin rice. salt less.
Notes: salt down → cramps at night.
Road: "route tax" now private. Stonehide mark = paid safety.
He paused with the charcoal hovering.
Added one more line, smaller.
Paper: rarer. write tighter.
He closed the ledger and rubbed his thumb over the cover.
It was ugly. It was heavy. It was real.
Outside, someone laughed quietly in the shed—too tired to be cruel, too tired to be hopeful.
In the yard, Old Han and Stonehide had put a price on winter.
In the market, people would pay it.
And somewhere far away—far enough to be "not our war," close enough to lift the price of salt—men were killing each other for reasons that didn't matter to a boy carrying sacks.
Li Shen lay down and stared into the dark.
He didn't think about being chosen.
He thought about being repeatable.
And the next morning, the road would charge again.