Concealed in a remote fold between the low-breathing hills of the Fog-Curtain Ridge and the silt-choked waters of the River Fang, Xinhui Village was not concealed so much as discarded.
The great sects avoided pronouncing its name, and the empire's cartographers never found it worthy enough to mark on their maps.
And yet, it lived.
Not by fate nor luck, but habit. A sort of generational obstinacy inherited from barren harvests and vacant gravestones. No one had decided to remain in Xinhui. They just learned to remain.
The land was sterile. The rice was late in coming. The orchard trees bore fruit with white spots. And the spring, which had run sweet with spiritual trace, had turned chalk-bitter.
No longer did children train their breath under the moon. Even the final Spirit Beast—a three-tailed red fox—had passed on, its bones left to whiten near the Crumbling Altar of the Nine Blessings.
They kept whispering about that altar—especially to misbehaving children. "Sleep before the rooster crows twice," or " fox spirit will come and steal your breath for her unborn kits."
Yun'er was born during the Hollow Spring when the river flowed too low and the rice flowers withered grey before they could produce fruit.
Yun'er was six when her father passed away.
He was once a hunter. Not an agriculturalist—no one in Xinhui had been for generations—but a man of strength who understood the old ways through the Xinhui Forest better than any.
The other men were afraid of the beasts that still roamed the borders, but not him. His traps were never bare, and when the winters were harsh and early, he was the one who ensured no child went hungry.
The villagers said that he was carried away by a shadow fox. Others said that he went too far into the hills, hunting an animal with spirit in its blood. But Yun'er remembered only the silence of the returning men. No body. No sword. Only his satchel was left empty and a torn prayer strip was covered with dried blood.
Her mother had not cried. Not even once.
She hadn't screamed, or torn her clothes, or collapsed into the arms of the neighbors like the stories said widows should. She just sat there—on the old floor mat, in the same spot near the hearth where she used to wait for him to return.
The pot of rice had gone cold days ago.
The neighbors came once. Whispered. Left dried herbs for grief. She didn't even look up.
Day and night blurred. The hearth burned down to embers and back again, but she barely noticed. She sat there, murmuring the same words over and over, not as a prayer, but as a lifeline.
"Bones to dust, soul to smoke, return to the river of rest."
A protection sutra. One he had taught her, years ago. He said it before every hunt, smiling like it was just a charm.
Now she said it to the empty air, again and again, as if it could drag him back through the door, sunburned and laughing with a hare over his shoulder.
But the forest had taken him. Everyone knew.
Everyone but her.
Sometimes, when the wind passed through the wooden slats of the hut, it almost sounded like the he came back. But there was no return. Only a wife whose grief had turned to ritual—because tears were for those who still believed something could be changed.
Yun'er, being a child, did not yet understand what loss meant. She waited each day at the gate, thinking her father would come back smiling, knuckles scratched but alive. On the seventh day, she waited under the plum tree. On the fourteenth, she waited without expectation. And by the third week, she understood. Waiting was hoping, and hoping was heartbreak. So she didn't do that.
It was her brother Yongzhi who once more made her laugh. He was four years older and had a crooked tooth he was proud of. He whittled her a flute from river reed and played it with such awful confidence that she laughed just to make it stop.
He gave her piggyback rides through the fields. He taught her how to climb the temple's outer wall, and how to fake sleep when mother checked in on them. When she woke up crying, it was his arms that held her.
And then one spring morning, he too had disappeared.
They had reported that he went to become a nomadic farmer. Others thought that he drowned in the River Fang. The reality was, nobody knew.
She cried only once—beneath the plum tree, where the bark had cracked in the shape of a watchful eye. But even then, she kept her sobs quiet, swallowing each one like bitter medicine.
Yun'er wore shoes two sizes bigger than hers, which had belonged to a cousin who had died from fever. Her hands were always scratched—bramble thorns, stone cuts, splinters from the shrine's broken floorboards.
And yet, Yun'er smiled. Not often. Not generally.
But in that small way that only children in forgotten places do—like a flicker of a lamp that refuses to go out just because no one lights it anymore.
She recalled the tales shared by her grandmother. Tales of flying swords and jade palaces, of immortals roving and benevolent elders who cured the blind and sent orphans soaring to the clouds.
She knew they weren't real.
But occasionally, when the wind threaded through the trees just so, when the moon caught the ruined edges of the shrine in its silver light, she was reckless enough to consider whether the heavens might still take notice of her.
She also made offerings—sweet buns, folded paper cranes, and broken incense sticks salvaged from funerals.
Yun'er thought rice buns left behind at the shrine would bring good dreams. She thought fox spirits still haunted the old orchard at night. She thought thunder was an immortal losing a game in the heavens. And she thought, in that small, quiet faith only a child could summon, that if she bowed deep enough, meant it deep enough—then even the heavens would remember her.
She wore broken talismans in her sleeves. She offered cracked incense and wildflowers. She once tried to imitate a cultivation posture she learned from a scroll, almost breaking her ankle.
Even the elders felt sorry for her. Not cruelly. Just that gentle, pitiful way the old do when they catch sight of hope where they know only silence lies.
"Sweet girl," one of them said once. "But sweetness doesn't fill a stomach."
"She dreams too loud," went another. "The wind will take her away someday."
Yun'er never replied. She just bowed politely, as her mother had taught her.
She wore her mother's old sandals—patched with bark strips, the soles worn soft with age. The string in her hair was knotted from river-ash reeds soaked overnight to darken her locks; a trick her mother once taught her to keep the sun from fading the strands too early, too fast, like everything else in their lives.
Each morning, before even the roosters stirred, Yun'er would climb the worn path behind the temple stones to draw water from the half-dead spring. Its mouth had receded in the drought, but she still dipped her gourd reverently.
Afterward, she'd pick through dew-speckled herbs on the slope—cracked knees in the dirt, fingertips stained green—not because she enjoyed it. But because the rest of the village people had worn themselves out.
She labored with a melody under her breath—old lullabies her mother once hummed at dusk, mingled with ancestral chants learned from the Spirit-Watcher's stories. Her pitch wandered, sometimes drifting into minor notes, sometimes too soft to hear. Still, she sang.
The elder women would watch her pass with their thin eyes and sun-leathered skin, murmuring fondly, calling her "sweet like a spoiled plum." They meant well, even as they clicked their tongues and said she would make a fine wife—if only she didn't chase after ghosts and sky-stories like her brother had.
The implication was always there, like dust in the air—be good, be quiet, be rooted. But Yun'er was still looking upward.
She continued to search for signs.
Her brother had vanished, not died—of that, she was sure. She climbed hills to bind red threads to branches, the fabric fluttering like beckoning hands in the wind, hoping he might glimpse them from wherever he had gone. She whispered his name into the river when it swelled with snowmelt—believing, deep in her bones, that sound could travel farther when carried by water.
And when clouds twisted in odd spirals overhead, curling in ways the sky never taught them, she wondered if the heavens had opened a slit. Just enough for someone to peek through.
Yun'er still believed in all that. Not the way children believe in stories—but the way lost people believe in maps. Quietly. Desperately. Without speaking it aloud.
These days, she let her prayers nestle into actions. She included them on her rice buns when she left them in the shrine. She wrote them on the blackboard in the back of her home, and they would be swept away by rain, as if the sky itself was trying to wipe them clean.
One day, the village leader started calling her to the hall. He'd offer her candied plum and talk softly. He said she was a "little blossom" and that she had "auspicious eyes."
He'd speak about her father, how he had respected him. How she resembled her mother, although she was not certain of that. And then he began to request that she stay longer. Dust the bookshelves. Clean the altar. Get him his tea. Always with that face — as if she were a child and something else.
Yun'er did not understand the feeling it gave her. Only that it tightened something behind her ribs. But he was the village leader. He alone kept the spirit bell, the last holy relic still trusted to ring.
The others bowed to him. Her mother bowed to him. What right did she have to question his smile? So she swept, and she listened, and she smiled back because that's what kind girls did.
Yun'er believed in being kind. That's what she kept telling herself.
So when he touched her shoulder too long, she said nothing. When he offered her a comb of redwood teeth, she smiled and curtsied. When she was instructed by her mother to remain near the shrine on festival evenings, she complied—although she wasn't entirely certain why.
She missed the Spirit-Watcher most on such days.
He had once looked into her eyes and called her a child of clarity. He told her the world would try to blind her, but she would still see. Back then, she'd smiled, thinking it was only poetry. But the words had not left her.
She remembered the boy. The one the elders called "Little Rat" or nothing at all. He was always at the edge of the square, never speaking, never smiling. He didn't cling to pity like the other orphans. He never even reached for discarded bread. He simply… was. His presence was like a stone beneath a stream.
And that day—by the stone and the ants—he had made her world small.
Too small.
She had always believed cruelty made people dangerous. But this boy wasn't. He wasn't cruel to the ants. He didn't laugh and didn't crush them out of curiosity. He just did it. As if it didn't matter.
Like they meant nothing.
The image remained with her. Worse than any nightmare. Not for blood or screams—but for how soundless it had been. The sort of soundlessness, the old Spirit-Watcher would say, preceded disaster.
When she first saw him, she thought that he was lonely. That was her first mistake. She speculated if maybe he was under a curse. Or maybe he didn't have words.
Maybe he needed sympathy.
Yun'er had never known cruelty that did not scream. She had never seen violence without fury. She had not yet learned that there are people born with a void where the heart should have been—and they fill it with lucidity instead.
She whispered a prayer under her breath.
"May the heavens look down on him. May they stop him. Or… may they save him.
And as the words passed her lips, she realized with a quiet horror that she did not know who needed saving more—
Him.
Or the world.