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. There was no map with its ink.

  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. Not 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.

  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 mist forests 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. Sat in front of the shrine for days, repeating the same three lines of a protection sutra that had failed.

  Yun'er had still been a child, not old enough to comprehend the absence. She'd waited a week, thinking he'd come back. Two, she waited outside the gate. But by the third, she realized 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 than her. He whittled her a flute from river reed and sang off-key old songs. He pilfered honey buns from the vendors at the festival and allowed her to ride on his back through the fields. 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 learned not to cry too loudly. Not to expect answers.

  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 sect 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 put on her mother's old sandals, strung together with twine, and her hair, tied with wet river-ash reed string to darken it. She went to fetch water every morning from the half-dead spring behind the temple rocks and gathered herbs on the old slope where dew still lingered. Not because she enjoyed it—although she never grumbled—but because the rest of the village people had worn themselves out.

  She sang to herself as she labored. Old lullabies and songs of the ancestors, blended at times, though the tones were not harmonious. The elder women referred to her as sweet, like a spoiled plum. They told her that she would be a good wife if only she did not pursue cloud and ghost tales like her brother.

  But Yun'er continued to search for signs.

  She bound red thread to branches as she ascended hills, hoping he could see it. She breathed his name softly into the river when it flowed high enough to carry sound. And sometimes, when clouds moved strangely, she believed perhaps the heavens had opened a gap. A small gap. A gap big enough to look through.

  Yun'er still believed in all that.

  She did not voice them aloud anymore. But 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.

  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."

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  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 just did not understand.

  But she knew she didn't enjoy being alone in that hallway. However, he was the leader. The only one who still had a spirit bell. The rest bowed to him. Who was she to question him? So she smiled. She swept.

  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 referred to her as a child of clarity. Told her the world would attempt to blind her eyes, but she would see anyway what other people would rather not. She did not know what he was talking about at the time.

  She was starting to now.

  He was always on the edge. Not like other orphans who grasp for sympathy or leftovers, but as a shadow that didn't require sunlight. He never begged for food. Never answered when called. His eyes were older than they should have been, but not sad.

  Only heavy.

  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 even while she spoke, she did not know who she prayed for more—

  The world.

  Or him.

  ......................

  Old Chief Bao remained quiet as the incense would not burn.

  His knotted hands rested over the broken bowl like a man trying to warm himself with the ghost of a flame. Wind lashed the walls outside, and the crows had started to gather on the gnarled tree at the edge of the hill.

  One of them let out a splintered shriek, dry and metallic, like the groan of a rusty hinge.

  Another dead bird was discovered this morning.

  Sixteen now.

  Bao had tallied. He hadn't meant to. He wasn't the sort of man to find omens and portents in the sky. His life had been measured in rice harvests and dry crop failures, not prophecies. A man who had broken bones built this village from mud huts into stone-wall homes. A man who had lost his son in the Blight Year and stayed standing.

  He was not afraid of birds.

  And yet. His fingers trembled as he struck the flint to ignite the incense. The fire flared, curled into a cloud, and went out.

  Again.

  The shattered bowl, which had been handed down through four generations of village leaders, felt colder nowadays. As if the gods had tired of lending even their silence.

  He gazed over the room to the vacant stool. The seat where the Spirit-Watcher once sat, swathed in patchwork robes and the scent of mountain sage. That chair had been vacant for two winters. The robes still hung there behind it, moth-eaten and stiff with silence.

  Bao had not dared shift them. He recalled the last day the old man had occupied the chair—back straight despite the cough, eyes keen despite the haze over his eyes.

  "This land is thinning," he'd said. "Like a stretched parchment."

  He rubbed the ache in his wrists. The cold seeped deeper with every year.

  His eyes fell to the scroll of the census on the altar. It was ritual now—unroll it, pretend to revise it, and roll it back up in a sigh. Xinhui had not added a new family in almost ten years. Nothing but deaths. One by one. Old age. Fever. Beast attacks in the woods once tame.

  And yet, he did stop this time. He had only one name to consider.

  Not even a real name. Just a placeholder.

  "Little Rat."

  No surname. No clan. No known bloodline.

  Only a mother who passed away before giving him one.

  The widow who had adopted him passed away last winter. The boy has remained alone in the hut behind the shrine since then.

  No complaint. No crying. Never begged for food.

  "Strange thing," Bao complained to himself.

  He went for his ink brush but hesitated.

  The Spirit-Watcher had also warned him earlier.

  That night, three years ago. The boy had appeared on the steps of the shrine one winter's night, hiding frost-nipped fingers in the glow of the fire. The Watcher had stood there in complete silence for a minute.

  And he breathed afterward, "His shadow does not touch the incense smoke."

  Bao did not know what to do with it.

  He still didn't.

  "What does that mean?" he'd asked.

  The old man's voice, rough and worn with age, answered slowly, "Some lives are not carried forward by destiny. They are what destiny forgets. They do not emerge from the will of heaven, but rise beside it, untouched and unbeholden."

  He paused, eyes distant. "They walk the edge of fate, not by its grace, but in defiance of it."

  Bao hadn't thought of it. Then.

  But this year, sixteen birds had dropped from the sky.

  And that boy had never had an illness.

  Not once fallen.

  Not once cried.

  He rolled up the scroll again without writing.

  He did not wish that name on the parchment. He didn't know why. Bao moved away from the shrine window. Below, the village came to life like an old man in bed—slow, reluctant.

  And there, at the old well, stood Yun'er.

  He observed her from behind the cover of the shrine, unnoticed.

  She was nine this spring. Small-boned, bright-eyed, like children should be. Hair tied up in messy knots with frayed red string. A wooden bucket almost too large to hold in her arms, filled with morning water.

  She still smiled when the sun touched her. Still in the same tattered dress her mother had altered the winter before. Still knelt every night before the altar with a bowed dumpling sacrifice, believing it would be eaten by spirits—not rats.

  He had known her all her life. He had cradled her in his arms when she cried in the chill air, still pink from the womb. Her father, Jian, had been Bao's second in the boundary war against the river clans—unobtrusive, loyal, with a sturdy back and a fragile heart.

  He witnessed Yun'er, not yet six years old, cry into her mother's lap. She had asked if the gods would return her father. No one dared to tell her a lie.

  Her mother was alive—Mei, a quiet woman, gaunt with sorrow. She never left the house except to repair linens for bartering.

  And so Yun'er wandered.

  She took wildflowers to the shrine. Created carved bark dolls for the other children. Sat under the bramble tree and hummed when no one was likely to hear her.

  She still believed.

  And Bao… Bao couldn't quite recall when his feelings began to go sour.

  It wasn't lust. Not at first. He wasn't that kind of man. He had daughters. Granddaughters.

  But there was something about Yun'er's gentleness that disturbed him. Her absolute trust in him, her "Grandfather Bao." Her holding on to old tales, to ghosts that no longer replied.

  He attempted to defend her.

  He gave her more rice during the famine, even when others complained.

  He went to see her mother on chilly evenings and placed kindling and herbs on the doorstep.

  But slowly—somewhere in the hollow places of his soul—those kindnesses turned selfish. He began to need her visits to the shrine. Her laughter. Her trust.

  He started lingering when she put up her hair, seeing the red string swing.

  He began to imagine terrible things, then scold himself, then imagine them again. And maybe he hated it in himself.

  Hated that he did not stop.

  He detested that part of him that yearned to be young again—through her laughter, her perfume, her goodness.

  Even if only by proximity.

  He shook his head.

  He was not a monster. Not yet. But he wad frightened of what he would be if the silence in Xinhui ever grew deeper.

  She never knew.

  Or perhaps she did—and didn't get it.

  A child can see shadows but not their form.

  Once, when she scraped her knee on the temple step, he bent down to bandage it.

  Her hand gripped his sleeve firmly.

  He froze.

  Not out of desire. But because then she looked at him as if he were still good. And he understood that he was not a good man for an extremely long period.

  That evening, he dreamed of the Spirit-Watcher.

  The shoeless old man stood in the shrine, tears streaming down his face, and incense filled the air.

  "You're decaying from the inside out," the dream-watcher whispered.

  Bao woke up gasping.

  The following day, Yun'er went back to the shrine. She was clutching something in her hand. A piece of red cloth, with awkward stars embroidered on it.

  "I made this," she murmured, looking down. "For the boy. The one who lives by the willow grove."

  Bao's heart turned cold.

  "The Rat?" he whispered.

  She scowled. "He's not a rat."

  "So what is he?"

  She didn't answer.

  She simply stared out into the bramble tree, where fog clung close.

  "I think he's lonely," she said. "But not bad."

  Bao wanted to call out to her. He wanted to warn her that he was dangerous, that he wasn't like them.

  But Yun'er's eyes were full of conviction.

  The kind of kindness Bao no longer dared believe he was worthy of. He simply nodded in silence, unable to summon words, and watched her descend the hill without looking back.

  Once more, the wind whispered through the trees, disturbing the lingering incense smoke.

  But for the briefest of moments—no longer than a single breath—it rose straight and unwavering into the sky.

  Old Bao's gaze locked onto it. His chest tightened. His heart, frail and weathered, thundered against his ribs.