The night was cold enough that breath turned white and fingers ached after only a few minutes outside the blanket of rags.
Inside the shack the cold was different — slower, heavier, seeping into bones like damp rot.
Yoon Ma-ri had finally cried herself into an exhausted sleep.
She lay curled on her side on the straw mat, one arm draped protectively across little Ah-yul's chest even in her dreams. Her long black hair spilled over both of them like a dark river. Every now and then a small, hiccuping breath still escaped her, the last echoes of earlier sobs.
Yoon Hwiyul — Ah-yul — did not sleep.
He lay perfectly still, eyes open, staring at the spiderweb of cracks in the ceiling.
The child's body was weak, hungry, shivering slightly despite the shared warmth.
The mind inside was razor-sharp and restless.
Thirty years of memories pressed against the fragile skull of a six-year-old.
Battles.
Poisoned letters.
Assassination orders whispered in moonless gardens.
The exact moment he had decided to frame Geom-ryong.
The exact wording of the forged missive that convinced the previous Alliance Leader to lead the final charge himself.
The exact expression on Baek Wol-seong's face when he drove the spear home tonight — no, thirty years from tonight.
Time travel did not feel romantic.
It felt like carrying a second skeleton inside his skin.
He carefully lifted Ma-ri's arm and slid out from beneath it.
She murmured something incoherent and curled tighter into herself, but did not wake.
Ah-yul stood on unsteady legs.
The world looked enormous again.
The door lintel was at eye level.
The hemp sack she had carried home empty now lay crumpled near the wall.
He moved silently — old habit from years of slipping through corridors filled with sleeping guards and paranoid sect leaders.
Outside, the alley was black except for the faint orange glow leaking from a few windows farther down.
The air smelled of night-soil pits, cheap wine, and distant charcoal fires.
Somewhere a dog barked twice and then fell silent.
He walked.
Not far — only three narrow alleys and one crumbling staircase down toward the riverbank where the poorest gathered.
His bare feet slapped against cold, uneven stones.
Each step hurt.
The child's body had almost no calluses yet.
He remembered this place.
The beggar's market that only existed after midnight.
A wretched line of stalls and blankets where people sold — or tried to sell — anything they could scrounge during the day: broken pottery, half-rotten vegetables, stolen hairpins, information, bodies, children.
He had come here many times as a boy.
Sometimes to beg.
Sometimes to steal.
Later, much later, to buy information from desperate men who knew things they should not.
Tonight he was not here to buy.
He was here to begin.
Near the end of the row, half-hidden behind a leaning cart, sat an old man most people avoided.
One eye milky white, the other sharp and restless.
A single crutch lay across his lap.
His right leg ended just below the knee; the stump was wrapped in filthy bandages that never seemed to change.
They called him Old Gam.
No one knew his real name.
Some said he had once been a low-ranking martial artist who lost his leg in a sect skirmish.
Others said he was just a clever cripple who had learned to read people the way normal men read books.
Ah-yul stopped in front of him.
Old Gam looked up slowly.
The good eye narrowed.
"You're the woman's brat," he rasped. "The one with the tits like summer melons. Yoon something."
"Ah-yul," the boy said calmly.
Old Gam snorted.
"Bit young to be wandering alone. Mama finally sell herself tonight?"
Ah-yul did not flinch.
"She didn't."
A dry chuckle.
"Pity. Could've made decent coin. Face is still good. Body's prime. Men been sniffing around her for years."
The boy said nothing for a moment.
Then:
"I want to make a deal."
Old Gam's eyebrow rose.
"A deal? With a starving six-year-old?"
"With someone who will be worth a great deal more than six coppers very soon."
The old man studied him.
Looked past the dirt, the thin arms, the too-large eyes.
Saw something that made the corner of his mouth twitch.
"Talk."
Ah-yul crouched so they were eye-to-eye.
"Tomorrow at noon," he said quietly, "a caravan from the south will arrive at East Gate.
Three wagons.
Guarded by six men wearing gray-green robes with a white heron embroidered on the left breast.
They carry medicinal herbs — mostly low-grade, but one crate is different.
Sealed with black wax and bound with red cord.
Inside are seven stalks of Crimson Heart Lotus, preserved in ice jade boxes."
Old Gam's good eye widened a fraction.
Ah-yul continued.
"The merchant's name is Jo Yang-pil.
He will try to sell the lot to the Golden Crane Pharmacy on the eastern street.
They will offer thirty silver.
He will refuse.
He wants forty-five."
Old Gam licked dry lips.
"And how does a street rat know tomorrow's prices?"
"I don't know tomorrow's prices," Ah-yul said. "I know Jo Yang-pil's greed.
And I know the pharmacy master's temper."
Silence stretched.
Old Gam finally leaned back against the cart.
"And what do you want for this… information?"
"Three things," Ah-yul said.
"First — one silver coin. Tonight.
Second — you never tell anyone where you got the information.
Third — if the deal goes through, you give me one more silver every time you use information I bring you in the future."
Old Gam barked a laugh.
"You want to be my supplier? At six?"
"I want to eat," Ah-yul said simply. "And I want my mother to stop crying herself to sleep."
The old man stared at him for a long time.
Then he reached beneath his ragged coat and drew out a small, tarnished silver coin.
It was chipped at the edge, but real.
He flicked it.
The boy caught it one-handed.
Old Gam spoke low.
"If this is a lie, I'll break your other leg to match mine."
"If it's true," Ah-yul replied, "you'll owe me more than silver."
He turned and walked away without another word.
The silver felt heavy in his small fist.
He did not go straight home.
Instead he went to the very edge of the riverbank where the water was shallow and black.
There he knelt and carefully buried the coin under a flat stone near the roots of a dead willow.
He could not risk Ma-ri finding it tonight.
She would ask questions.
She would worry.
She might even refuse to take it.
Tomorrow, after the market, he would "find" it.
A lucky chance.
A gift from heaven.
She would cry again — happy tears this time.
He returned to the shack just as the sky began to turn the bruised color of pre-dawn.
Ma-ri was still asleep, curled tight.
He slid back under her arm.
She sighed in her sleep and pulled him closer.
For the first time in two lifetimes, Yoon Hwiyul felt something dangerously close to peace.
It lasted exactly seventeen heartbeats.
Then the strategist inside him whispered:
*One silver is nothing.
The Crimson Heart Lotus is nothing.
This is only the first move on a board thirty years wide.*
*Baek Wol-seong sits on the throne now.
He will sit there for decades.
He will grow stronger.
He will root out enemies.
He will marry, produce heirs, build alliances.*
*If I move too fast, he will crush me like an ant.
If I move too slow, I will die old and powerless while he dies peacefully in silk sheets.*
*So I will move like water.
Slow.
Patient.
Inevitable.*
He closed his eyes.
The child's breathing evened out.
But the mind behind those closed lids never stopped calculating.
Tomorrow he would have two silver instead of zero.
In a month — maybe three — he would have enough to buy a single low-grade cultivation manual from a street stall.
In a year he would enter a minor sect as an outer disciple.
In five years he would be strong enough that no one could kill him with a single spear thrust.
And then…
Then he would begin returning every favor Baek Wol-seong had ever given him.
With interest.
Morning came slowly.
Ma-ri woke first.
She blinked in confusion when she felt something hard and cold pressed into her palm.
A silver coin.
She stared at it.
Then at her son, who was pretending — very badly — to still be asleep.
"Ah-yul…?"
He cracked one eye open.
"Found it," he mumbled. "Near the river. Must've dropped from someone's pocket."
She looked from the coin to his face.
Her eyes filled again.
This time she did not cry from despair.
She cried because sometimes — very rarely — the world gave back a little of what it took.
She clutched the coin so tightly her knuckles turned white.
Then she pulled him into her arms and kissed the top of his dirty head.
"Thank you," she whispered, even though she thought *he* was the one who should be thanked.
Ah-yul said nothing.
He simply hugged her back.
And inside, the old strategist smiled a very small, very cold smile.
Step one — completed.
Two silver.
One mother who might sleep without nightmares tonight.
And thirty years to turn that tiny coin into an avalanche.
Outside, the city began to wake.
Caravans rumbled toward the gates.
Merchants sharpened their smiles.
And somewhere far above them all, Baek Wol-seong — still only second-in-command in this timeline — sipped morning tea and planned his next careful move toward the throne.
He did not yet know that the child who would one day orchestrate his rise…
…was already planning his fall.