The village buried the dead in silence.
No funeral rites, no incense carried beyond the household. Just cold shovels and tired hands. Death was no stranger to the people of Xianhua :-plague, winter, war, or bandits, all took their share. But there was something about Li Long and Wu Mei's passing that left a strange stillness in the air. A heaviness not of sorrow, but of endings.
Li yuan tian stood alone as the earth swallowed them. No sobs, no screams-just a boy holding a rusted token in one hand, and a bundle of herbs in the other. No one dared ask what he would do now. Some offered words. Most didn't.
By nightfall, he had returned to the house. The fire had long gone out.
---
The days passed.
Li yuan tian rose before dawn. Tilled the field. Drew water from the well. His hands blistered. His back ached. He ate little, slept less. But he endured. Not like a child learning to survive-more like a blade learning its shape.
There were no tears.
Only silence.
And repetition.
Sometimes, he sat in the field, staring up at the sky. The same clouds drifted above, as if the world had not changed. But something inside him had. His breath came slower now. He could feel the wind more clearly. Hear the distant rustle of trees beyond the village.
He began to notice things.
The way the insects scattered before the rain, how the birds circled once before taking flight. The subtle shifts in soil before it hardened. The scent of metal that lingered around strangers passing through town.
He didn't know why these things mattered.
But he remembered them.
---
One evening, as he gathered water by the river, a traveling merchant passed by. Li yuan tian offered no greeting. Just stepped aside. But the merchant paused, eyeing the boy with curiosity.
"You the Li boy?"
Li yuan tian nodded.
"Heard your old man was a farmer." The merchant squinted. "Funny... met a man once, years back, looked just like you. Not a farmer, though. Was in a border city, near the mountains. Wore plain robes, but his eyes weren't plain. You got those same eyes."
Li yuan tian said nothing.
The merchant chuckled. "Never mind. Just an old man's memory." He moved on, humming to himself.
Li yuan tian returned to the house.
That night, he held the token for the first time in weeks.
There was no glow. No warmth. Just the cold press of metal.
But as he stared at it, the candlelight flickered once.
And for the briefest moment, the shadows on the wall twisted-not toward him, but away.
---
Seasons changed.
Spring returned.
Li Yuan Tian's body hardened with labor. His eyes grew sharper. He spoke less and watched more. The other children avoided him now-not out of cruelty, but instinct. He moved differently. Stood differently.
And sometimes, when he struck the earth with his hoe, the soil cracked deeper than it should.
---
He found a book.
Buried under the floorboards, behind a loose panel in the storage room. Wrapped in oil cloth. Old, the pages faded, but intact. Its title long worn away, but its contents... strange.
Drawings of human figures. Lines tracing paths through the body. Not veins or bones-but something else. Flowing patterns. Notes scribbled in the margins in a hand he almost recognized.
He didn't understand it. Not yet.
But when he traced the first pattern on the page with his finger, a faint heat stirred beneath his skin. Like a memory not his own.
He kept the book.
Hidden.
Like the token.
Like the silence inside him.
---
The boy who once cried when he scraped his knee now sat alone at dusk, watching the moon rise with unreadable eyes.
He did not know what he was becoming.
Only that he was no longer just a farmer's son.
Not really.
And somewhere beneath his ribs, in the quiet where grief had lived... something else had begun to grow.
Not grief.
Not hate.
Not even hope.
Just will.