The village bell rang thin and early, a sound that belonged more to labor than to prayer. Morning fog braided itself through the willow branches surrounding Green Willow, and the fields were silver with dew. Li Tianxuan walked along the dirt path between rows of millet with his palms pressed together to steady a tremor that had nothing to do with cold.
Today was the Spirit Awakening.
The whole village moved toward the temple—a clustered procession of anxious parents and nervous youths, some with eyes bright as coals, others with the heavy resignation of those who had long stopped expecting miracles. The temple's stone steps were worn hollow by generations of feet; today they would swallow another small handful of hope.
Li Tianxuan kept his head low. The world around him was full of other people's futures: boys whose gait already suggested the steadiness of root-born cultivators, girls whose laughter split like glass between certainty and fear. His mother, Mei Lan, walked close enough that the hem of her sleeve brushed his arm. She smelled of herbal steam and the country—remedies and laundry. Her smile was the same when she tucked his hair behind his ear as when she bandaged him after a day of work, but today her fingers trembled the way a leaf trembles before a storm.
"You don't need to prove anything today," she said, the words trying to lay a cloth over the panic in his chest.
He could have gone back to the fields. He could have let the world do as it pleased. Instead he followed the procession because hope, even small and ugly, wanted to be seen.
The test itself had the rough geometry of superstition. An elder in grey robes sat on a low platform, eyes closed and breath measured. He worked the divination stones like a man counting coins. One by one the youths were called.
When it was Li Tianxuan's turn the crowd leaned forward—curiosity more than hope. The elder's fingers brushed his pulse, then his wrists, and the silence that followed felt like winter.
"No root," the elder announced at last, voice flat. "No spirit affinity. The boy… is ordinary."
A dozen sounds became one: disappointment, a relieved whisper from a parent who had feared the opposite, and the sneer from Liu Shan three yards away—coarse as a splinter.
"Ordinary," Liu Shan spat loud enough for half the square to hear. "He joined the spectacle so we could all feel clever. Come on, Tianxuan—won't you at least admit you're useless?"
The laughter that followed wasn't savage; it was habitual cruelty, the kind that grows where people want a small prey. It sank into Li Tianxuan the way winter sinks into a field—slow and sure. His face did not burn; he had learned early that his feelings were private things with no market.
Some children glanced with pity. Others, like Zhao Feng, turned with polite indifference. Zhao's eyes were keen—the sort that had been taught from birth it would look to the sky. He bowed to the recruiting party with all the dignity of breeding; later, he would be a disciple. Already the world had prepared a path for him.
Beyond the temple gate, a delegation from Clear Sky Sect had arrived—a white-laced procession of banners and silk, minor aristocrats in the bright armor of those who wore privilege like a second skin. A woman with moon-pale skin and a carriage as quiet as snowfall sat in its center. Su Qingyue's presence was an argument without words; people parted the way sea parts for a current. Even the wind seemed to hesitate around the pale curve of her sleeves.
Tianxuan glimpsed her as if through a crack: a face like a knife carved from moonlight, a gaze that measured things like stones in a riverbed—sharp, indifferent. She watched the test with a critic's patience, then glanced once in his direction. Their eyes brushed for a second so light it would be nothing to anyone else, a moth's wing. To him it was a cold light—the moon he would later learn to call impossible to reach.
The recruiters filed names, took notes, and left with an air of satisfied commerce. The chosen few whispered among themselves, talk of which sect would accept whom, of potential matches and ranks. The rest—the majority—watched the procession fade like smoke.
Li Tianxuan went home under his mother's hands and the town's composed indifference. Someone threw a stone at him near a back alley; it struck the plaster where no one could see the stain of small, bitter triumph. He would not speak of it to his parents. They were already tired, and the small mercies they gave him were a kind of currency.
That night he sat beneath a dead willow with a small rough stone pressed in his palm—an old habit, a talisman with no power other than reminding him to breathe. The moon was a pale coin above the horizon. He remembered the elder's words—"ordinary"—and let them sit there like a challenge.
He could feel something in his chest from time to time, a dull pressure no one else knew. Years ago he had stumbled into Blackwood Forest and found a black, shriveled thing wrapped in a dead man's rag. He had kept it because it was the only thing that had not explicitly chosen to reject him.
He had tried to make sense of the manual that came with it. The "Heaven-Defying Scripture" was a tangle of torn characters, odd diagrams and instructions that seemed to demand more than the body could give. The pages were full of warnings—lines that said if the practitioner lacked a proper root their meridians would shatter, their lifespan would be eaten, their bones would splinter. The manual should have driven a sane person away. He had kept reading, until the words were ink and rust in his bones.
Tonight the willow made a thin cradle of shadow. He wanted to sleep and let the world be. Instead he pressed his palm to his chest where the seed lay like a remembered bruise. It was only a child's vow at first—a small, crooked thing.
"If I cannot become Heaven's chosen," he whispered to the bark and the stars, "then I will carve a place where Heaven can see me."
The words were foolish and dangerous, the kind that should be buried fast. But they settled into him—the first small seed of a promise. And somewhere, in the deep places where old things sleep, something faint as a breath listened.
Outside the village sleep closed like a hand. The fishing nets hung still. The fields waited for dawn. Li Tianxuan stared at the moon and, for one heartbeat, felt less empty than he had that morning.