"The empire does not fall in a day, but you hear it cracking in the silence between footsteps." – Sima Yu, "Chronicles of the Broken Banner"
Autumn had always come gently to Qingyuan. It used to smell of river reeds, rice steam, and mulberry smoke curling from the hearths.
Now it smelled of ash and silence.
Huai Shan stood knee-deep in the brittle stalks of a dying harvest. The sun hung pale and cold in the sky, hidden behind a shroud of smoke drifting from the north. His hands, raw from work, clenched a threshing stick made from a broken chair leg. He struck again—harder than before. The stalks bent and split, but no grain fell.
Just more dust.
Behind him, the creak of wood and a soft cough broke the stillness. Mei, his twelve-year-old sister, sat in their handcart wrapped in patched wool and an old military coat far too big for her. She'd been coughing since the rains failed.
Still, she watched him. Eyes like their mother's—dark, sharp, too old for their age.
"We won't have enough," she said, voice rasping like dry leaves.
"We'll trade," Huai Shan said. But they both knew the truth: there was no one left to trade with. The nearby villages were burned or barren. The merchant roads had fallen silent since midsummer, ever since the warlords in the east began clashing over tax rights and grain levies.
Now even the wind sounded like it was starving.
It began with dust on the horizon.
Huai Shan saw it long before he heard the hooves. A low brown smear rising beyond the edge of the fallow terraces, like a scar across the bones of the earth. He stiffened, stepping in front of Mei without a word.
A rooster cried in the distance—a sound sharp and misplaced in the silence of famine.
Then six riders crested the ridge. Their horses were half-starved and crusted with mud. Their red armbands—tattered, dirty—marked them as conscripts of Lord Gao Wen, Anping's tax governor. A man who hadn't visited his own province in three years, sending his orders through scrolls and swordpoints.
One of the riders—a thick-armed brute with a leather pauldron and a crooked beard—spat into the dirt and pointed his spear.
"You there. Boy."
Huai Shan didn't answer.
The man rode closer, reins loose, eyes scanning him like livestock. "What's your name?"
"Huai Shan."
"You look strong." The man smiled—yellow teeth in a cracked face. "Congratulations. The Empire thanks you for your service."
"What service?"
"You're being conscripted."
Behind them, another soldier laughed. "Tall ones die slower. That's what the captain says."
Huai Shan felt Mei's hand slip into his.
"I'm all she has," he said, voice quiet.
The soldier leaned down from his saddle. "Then I hope she prays to fast gods, peasant."
The other riders dismounted. Two began dragging people from their homes. A child screamed. A pot shattered. The village elder—Bai, nearly blind—ran barefoot into the square, waving a branch and crying for mercy.
Huai Shan stepped forward. "You don't need to take more. Just me."
The captain raised an eyebrow.
"Why volunteer, boy?"
"Because I'd rather die swinging than starving."
They took three more men: Old Bian the carpenter, fifteen-year-old Ning, and a wheezing tailor named Zuo. None could lift a blade. None were trained. But none of that mattered.
"Every village must bleed," the captain said, repeating the decree. "Each ten homes, one body. Each harvest, one hand. The gods must be paid."
As the soldiers bound them with coarse rope, Mei ran to Huai Shan's side. One of the conscripts reached to push her away.
She screamed and bit his arm.
The soldier raised his spear to strike.
Huai Shan moved without thinking. His sickle was already in his hand—small, rusty, but sharp. He buried it in the soldier's thigh.
The man howled. Blood spurted.
Time slowed.
Another soldier lunged. Huai Shan twisted, driving his elbow into the man's jaw. For a moment, he fought like a cornered wolf, all instinct and rage.
Then the butt of a spear slammed into his ribs.
Another struck the side of his head.
Darkness took him.
When he woke, he was bound and alone in the old granary barn.
Outside, he heard voices, fires being lit, metal striking flint. The scent of oil.
They would burn him.
As an example.
He didn't panic.
Not yet.
He tested the rope. Too tight. His ribs screamed. One of them might be cracked. He could taste blood in his mouth. The scent of hay and smoke mingled.
Through a gap in the planks, he saw a sliver of sky—gray, choking, clouded.
Then a face.
Mei.
Her face was streaked with dirt and tears. She held something in her hand—his sickle? No. A larger knife, old and chipped. One of their father's.
She whispered through the slats: "I'll kill them."
"No," he hissed. "Don't."
Her lip trembled. "Then what do I do?"
He looked at her—really looked.
She was shaking.
But she wasn't afraid.
She was angry.
"Live," he said. "Hide. Wait."
Later, when the fires died down and the men began drinking, someone came to the barn.
A figure in gray robes. Face shadowed. Silent.
The lock clicked.
The figure said nothing—just left something scrawled in coal on the dusty floorboards beside him.
Then disappeared like smoke.
Huai Shan crawled forward and read it by moonlight.
"If you want justice, come to the Old Shrine beyond the ridge. Tonight."
He didn't sleep.
When the fires grew low and the guards began to snore, he rolled to his knees. Bit through the gag. Rubbed the rope against a nail for an hour.
And when he finally crawled free into the darkness, broken but alive, he did not look back at Qingyuan.
The past was ash.
The future burned on the mountain.