Eight weeks didn't pass like a story.
They passed like abrasion.
Days ground into each other until time stopped feeling like a line and started feeling like a surface—something you wore down with your own body.
In the probation yard, nothing dramatic happened the way villagers imagined hardship would happen.
No single fight that decided everything.
No heroic collapse.
No miracle.
Just quotas. Points. Slates.
And the quiet mathematics of who stayed profitable.
Li Shen learned the rhythm until his bones could recite it without thought.
Stone haul on odd days.
Support runs on even days.
Tool returns always counted twice.
Waterline repairs when the pipes froze at dawn.
Ash pit duty when wind drove smoke back into the sheds and made men cough until their ribs hurt.
A mistake wasn't punished.
A mistake was priced.
He watched boys lose points for talking.
Watched girls lose points for slipping in mud and spilling a bucket.
Watched a man lose his tag—one careless moment—and get treated like an object without a label.
Gone by dusk.
No goodbye.
The probation yard didn't remove people with anger.
It removed them with efficiency.
Bai Ren nearly got priced out twice.
Once for a joke at the wrong time.
Once for stepping toward a supervisor when someone else was being blamed.
Li Shen didn't lecture him.
He gave him instructions the way you gave a blade a sheath.
"Don't speak first," he said.
Bai Ren clenched his jaw, swallowing pride like it was ash.
"How do you stand it?" Bai Ren whispered one night, voice low enough to survive. "How do you let them treat us like this and not… explode?"
Li Shen's answer was simple.
"I don't give them fuel."
Bai Ren stared at him like that was either wisdom or madness.
Then, slowly, he learned to keep his mouth for eating and his anger for lifting stone.
He didn't become quiet.
He became controlled.
That was the difference between noise and survivability.
Yun Xue became something else entirely.
Not strong.
Not healthy.
But steady.
The drying shed supervisor stopped moving her off rack three. Then he stopped letting other hands touch it. Not because he liked her—he didn't like anyone—but because the rack stayed clean under her care.
Leaves dried without molding.
Stems didn't go sour.
Loss rate dropped in her corner, and the only language the probation yard respected was numbers.
Her "green hand" wasn't a gift she talked about.
It was the way she tied bundles looser so air could pass.
The way she spread thin layers instead of stacking thick.
The way she removed a damp cluster before it contaminated the rest.
A girl beside her tried to copy it once and asked, timid, "How do you know?"
Yun Xue hesitated, then answered with the blunt honesty of someone who hadn't learned to decorate speech.
"I look," she said. "Longer."
And she kept moving.
Li Shen watched it from the edge of his routes, filing it away like everything else: a small advantage made real through repetition.
He used his own points the same way.
Not for comfort.
For leverage.
When his slate finally showed enough surplus to spend, he went to the service counter with the face of someone buying nails.
The attendant didn't smile.
"What?" she asked.
Li Shen placed his tag down and said, "Paper. Oil cloth. Charcoal."
The attendant blinked once, then pushed out a thin stack of rough paper, a small strip of oiled fabric, and a new charcoal stick wrapped in twine.
Not expensive.
But to Li Shen it felt like steel.
His ledger stopped being a fragile secret and became something the yard itself had indirectly funded.
He didn't feel gratitude.
He felt direction.
The weeks kept grinding.
The probation yard thinned.
Not suddenly—steadily.
One mat empty.
Then two.
Then a whole row.
Not because the sect enjoyed cruelty.
Because the probation yard was a filter, and filters only proved their value by what they caught and what they let through.
Then, without announcement, the schedule shifted.
The last week had fewer "random" reassignments. Fewer sudden slates.
Tasks were still hard, still low-tier, still dirty—but the cadence became oddly consistent, as if the yard was preparing a final accounting.
On the eighth week's last night, lanterns were hung in straight lines.
The same sign as the transfer out of the buffer belt.
But different.
Cleaner.
More formal.
No fear-sweat in the air.
Just the cold knowledge that something was about to be decided without asking anyone's opinion.
They were lined up in front of the registry shed at dawn.
Not in chaos.
In rows.
Men on the east side. Women on the south.
Tags up. Eyes down.
A clerk sat at a table with a thick ledger bound in dark cloth. Two attendants stood behind him with a wooden box and a stack of folded uniforms.
The clerk didn't look at faces.
He looked at lists.
He called numbers.
The chosen stepped forward.
The not-chosen stayed still and learned to breathe without being seen.
"Sixteen."
Li Shen stepped forward.
He didn't speed up.
He didn't bow too low.
He didn't perform gratitude.
He offered his probation tag.
The clerk checked the notch, checked the cord, then lifted his brush.
Ink touched paper.
"You are now on the service registry."
The sentence was flat, like a seal pressed into wax.
The clerk made a final mark.
And then he closed the ledger.
Not gently.
Clack.
The sound carried across the yard like a verdict.
Li Shen felt it in his ribs.
Not joy.
Impact.
An ending.
An entry.
An attendant slid a new badge tag into his palm—cleaner cut, heavier, sealed with a stamped mark. Another pushed a folded uniform into his arms. Then a thin brown manual was placed on the table with the same indifference as everything else.
Foundations for Service: Posture, Breath, and Qi Regulation
The clerk didn't explain it.
Explanation was not his job.
He called the next number.
"Twenty-four."
Bai Ren stepped forward.
He tried to grin. It came out crooked. The procedure repeated—ink, sentence, and the ledger shutting like a door.
Clack.
Bai Ren flinched this time, then leaned back as he moved away, whispering to Li Shen like the sound might follow them.
"Why does he close it every time?"
Li Shen didn't look at him. "So it can't be argued with."
Bai Ren swallowed. "So the door stays shut."
"Exactly," Li Shen said.
On the women's side, Yun Xue's number was called.
She stepped forward with her shoulders tight and her hands steady, like she had learned the only survival posture that mattered here: small, controlled, unremarkable.
Ink.
Sentence.
Clack.
She received her badge, her uniform—smaller cut, thinner belt—her manual.
Then she was pulled aside by an attendant with a different slate.
"Assignment," he said. "Herb drying and sorting. South racks. Loss reduction lane."
Yun Xue bowed her head. "Yes."
No I can.
No apology.
Just acceptance.
The line continued until the ledger had eaten enough numbers to be worth the day.
Some were redirected without being named. A quiet "step aside," a slate mark, a different lane. No humiliation. Just reclassification.
When the last seal dried, the clerk stood, lifted the ledger with both hands like it weighed more than wood and ink, and carried it inside.
The door shut behind him.
Not loud.
Final.
Then—only then—another official stepped up to a board and addressed the newly registered batch as a unit.
"Points," he said. "Now you learn what keeps you fed."
He tapped the board with a short stick.
Rates. Deductions. Purchase counters. Infractions.
No poetry.
Just rules sharpened into lines.
"Earned weekly. Spent daily. Damage deducts. Delay deducts. Theft removes. Lose your badge and you don't exist."
A pause, just long enough to make the next part land.
"Official registry means you work where mistakes cost the sect," he said. "So you will not make mistakes for free."
Nobody asked questions.
Because the system had already taught them what questions cost.
By noon, the newly registered were herded toward a ration pavilion.
Not the thin probation ladles.
A real meal.
Still simple—rice, broth, salted greens—but with visible protein and warmth that reached the stomach instead of just filling it.
The food didn't taste like luxury.
It tasted like the sect had decided they were worth feeding properly.
Bai Ren ate like he was afraid it would be taken back mid-bite.
When he finally breathed, he muttered, almost reverent, "This is… food."
Li Shen didn't answer. He just ate slowly, letting heat settle in places that had been hollow too long.
After the meal, they were assigned dorms.
Not rooms.
But less crowded sheds.
Dryer straw.
Rules posted clearly at the entrance.
A schedule that didn't change every hour.
It wasn't comfort.
It was stability.
That evening, Li Shen sat on his new platform and opened the manual.
The first page wasn't a slogan.
It was diagrams.
Spine alignment. Shoulder placement. Hip tilt. Breath depth.
A section titled "Basic Qi Regulation: Sensation, Pressure, Flow" followed—plain warnings about forcing past markers, about false progress, about rest as part of regulation.
Li Shen's charcoal-smudged ledger sat beside it like a rough draft beside an institutional standard.
He didn't smile.
But something in him tightened with purpose.
The sect hadn't handed him a sword.
It had handed him a rulebook.
And Li Shen had always been dangerous with rules.
He wrote one line at the bottom of his own page, simple and cold:
Manual confirms method. Adjust to standard. Continue.
Across the shed, Bai Ren whispered, voice low and careful even in victory.
"So we're in."
Li Shen looked at the badge tag on his wrist.
Official seal.
Braided cord.
A number that now meant he existed inside the sect's permanent machine.
"We're recorded," he said.
Bai Ren exhaled, half laugh, half tremor. "That sounds like a curse."
"It is," Li Shen said. "And it's a door."
On the women's side, Yun Xue's voice floated once, small but steady, to someone in her lane:
"Air matters," she said, as if repeating the rule was the way she anchored herself.
Li Shen closed the manual and listened to the yard outside.
The probation phase was over.
The ledger had shut.
Now the real work began—work where hierarchy was sharper, where points actually meant something, and where the sect's shadow wasn't distant anymore.
It lived here.
In schedules.
In deductions.
In seals.
In a manual that finally gave sanctioned language to posture, breath, and the first controlled understanding of Qi.
Li Shen lay down and pulled one slow breath into his abdomen—low, steady—testing it against the diagrams in his mind.
In. Hold. Out.
Repeatable.
Official.
And finally, dangerous in a way the village could never have afforded.