Two days passed like a coin turning in the air—slow for those who watched, too fast for those who weren't ready. Pinebrook worked, but every nail driven and loaf baked carried the sound of waiting. The Chen compound stayed quiet, too quiet, which was always its own kind of noise.
The Wu compound did not rest. Wu Feng drilled the younger men in spear lines until their shoulders ached. Wu Ping turned children's slings into real weapons with stones weighed against Old Bai's iron pucks. Wu Liang tied ropes across alleys, grinning like a boy daring the world to trip. Aunt Mei cooked triple the soup and shoved bowls into every hand that looked tired.
And Wu Tian breathed. Foundation Anchor and Rooted Step steadied him; Flowing Strikes and Battle Trance kept his body honest. His new strength wasn't flashy, but when he walked through Pinebrook, people stood a little straighter as if the ground had learned steadiness from him.
On the third morning, the temple bells rang. Not for prayer. For judgement.
Inspector Liang emerged from the temple with Shen Lian at his side, ledger in hand. His robe was still spotless; his expression gave away nothing. Behind him came the magistrate, pale and stiff, and the Chen steward, his jaw set like he'd swallowed something sharp. The square was packed shoulder-to-shoulder, villagers pressed together with faces taut as bowstrings.
Liang raised one hand. Silence fell.
"I have read," he said, his voice even, carrying over the crowd. "I have weighed."
He gestured to the magistrate first. "Your books are false. Levies doubled without law. Tributes demanded without writ. Favors granted for coin. You will remain magistrate only until a replacement arrives from the prefecture. From this day until then, all orders you give will require my countersign. Your clerk will remain under temple observation."
The square exhaled. A few cheers broke out, cut quickly short. Even victory had to be careful.
Liang turned to the Chen steward. "The Chen warehouses," he said, "declared spoiled grain that was not spoiled. You resold it for profit. This is theft from the people under your 'protection.' For one year, no Chen hand will collect levy in Pinebrook. Tribute will go directly to the prefecture storehouse. The Chen will not be compensated."
That time, the cheer couldn't be smothered. It rolled through the square like thunder breaking over hills. Men clapped shoulders. Women laughed into hands. Even children shouted.
The steward's face cracked into fury before he smoothed it again. "Inspector—"
"Silence," Liang said, still calm. "Your words weigh less than the ink in my hand."
Finally, Liang turned toward Wu Tian. For a moment, his eyes stayed there, measuring. "And the Wu," he said. "You raised spear and rope. You wrote on walls and temple stone. You fought and you shouted. This can be rebellion, or it can be truth. I have decided."
The whole square held breath.
"The Wu do not rebel," Liang said. "The Wu resist corruption. They will not be fined. They will not be relocated. They will stand."
It wasn't cheers this time. It was a roar. Pinebrook exploded. Old Bai slammed his hammer on an anvil until sparks flew. Madam Lin waved her bread knife in the air. Children shouted Wu Tian's name until it sounded bigger than it was. Even the monk smiled, which was rarer than rain in drought.
Wu Tian stood still, spear in hand, letting the weight of it wash over him. For the first time since his arrival in this world, he felt the floor tilt a little toward the Wu. It wasn't victory. It was air.
Liang raised his hand again. The noise dimmed, but it didn't die. "But hear this," he said, voice sharper now. "The Chen are wounded, not slain. They will not accept this quietly. They will wait for my back to turn. They will send words farther up the chain. When they return, they will come harder."
His gaze swept the crowd, then settled once more on Wu Tian. "So you must be ready. Not just to fight with spears, but with walls, with trade, with your own order. You wanted to write numbers on stone. Now you must learn to write law."
He turned and walked back into the temple, Shen Lian trailing with her ledger hugged tight. The magistrate slumped. The Chen steward stormed away.
The square surged forward, villagers pressing close to the Wu clan, some clapping backs, some just touching shoulders as if to borrow strength. "You did it," one fisherman whispered, tears wetting his beard. "You made them hear us."
Wu Tian said nothing. His chest felt heavy, not light. He knew truth: this wasn't the end of a fight. It was the beginning of a bigger one.
That night, under the pear tree, he let himself breathe. The lattice shimmered cold in his mind.
Cultivation: Foundation, Layer 2.Talent: Low.Perks: Minor Recovery, Pulse Step, Iron Grip, Steadfast Breath, Flowing Strikes, Battle Trance, Qi Sight, Minor Blood Surge, Foundation Anchor, Rooted Step.Bloodline: None.
He felt the weight of Pinebrook pressing on his shoulders now—not just his clan. He had asked to lead with ink and spear. Now the whole town wanted him to lead with both.
He exhaled slowly, the pear tree's branches framing the stars. "Then we'll learn," he whispered. "Because the Wu do not bow."
Hope made people louder, but it also made them sloppy. Pinebrook woke the day after judgment like a man who had slept too hard: proud, stiff, full of plans he'd never had to make before. The square buzzed, not with fear but with tasks tripping over each other. Merchants argued about prices without watching who was listening. Children practiced sling shots in the alleys with rocks that didn't care who deserved a bruise. A fisherman tried to sell "victory fish" for double and got laughed back into sense.
Wu Tian walked it all with his spear slung and his feet set by habit. Foundation had settled into him; Rooted Step let him stand where others wobbled. He'd won mud and ink and three days, and Liang had given Pinebrook a chance with that verdict. But chance wasn't order. Order had to be built.
He found Old Bai hammering a section of oak plank in front of his stall, sweat shining through iron dust on his forehead.
"You have wood to spare?" Wu Tian asked.
"For coin, I have morals, manners, and wood," Old Bai said. "For you, I have wood and complaints."
"I want a board," Wu Tian said. "Big. Tall enough a man has to look up a little."
"Ah," Old Bai said, eyes lighting. "You want a wall you can carry."
"Something like that."
They dragged a slab out from the lean-to—oak thick enough to suggest it had dreams of being a door. They set it in the square where the temple steps could see it and the pear tree at the Wu compound could throw shade at its pride. Old Bai squared it with a carpenter's eye; Wu Tian squared it with the place in him that liked straight lines he could write across.
"What for?" a woman asked, flour on her sleeves, hands on hips.
"Rules," Wu Tian said.
"Whose?" she said, which was the right question.
"Ours," he said. "Short ones. Ones a person can keep in their mouth without choking."
A small crowd gathered the way crows do when a field starts to look interesting. Aunt Mei arrived, ladle like a marshal's baton. Madam Lin crossed her arms and leaned in. Wu Feng stood behind, body on guard even when his face tried not to be. Wu Ping and Wu Liang appeared like a punchline and its explanation.
"Write slow," Aunt Mei said. "So people see the letters turn into a thing."
Wu Tian dipped the brush in lampblack and held his breath for the first stroke the way he had before a spear thrust. He wrote the first line where everyone could see it and no one could pretend they hadn't:
We weigh honest. Stamped measures in public. Cheats get stamped too.
The murmurs were approval with a little laughter under it. Folks liked seeing a joke sit politely beside a law.
He wrote the second:
We pay fair for work and keep a ledger. Gratitude is written down.
"What's the ledger for?" a dockhand called.
"So we don't spend thanks twice," Wu Tian said. "And so nobody thinks helping is a favor they're owed back with interest."
Third:
We keep water clean. Well lids locked. Buckets checked. Poison gets you hung.
No one laughed. They didn't have to.
Fourth:
No knives at the temple. No fights at the scales. We fight at the river or the training ground, not where Heaven watches.
The monk, who had materialized like he'd been there all along, gave the tiniest nod. The magistrate's clerk, lurking under a stall awning, pretended he liked the wording.
Fifth:
We post prices at dawn and pay at dusk. No surprises unless it rains.
That got a cheer from the baker's corner and a theatrical groan from a spice seller who knew exactly why his trade would survive anyway.
Sixth:
If you see a thing, you say a thing, to a person who can do a thing.
Aunt Mei slapped his shoulder approvingly. "I like your manners," she said. "Direct."
Seventh:
If the Wu take, we write from who and for what. If the Wu give, we write that too.
"You're writing yourself into a corner," Old Bai said, half proud, half warning.
"Good corners make strong rooms," Wu Tian said.
He held the brush for a long breath, considered an eighth, put a dot and let the wood hold it for later. "Seven is enough that people remember," he said. "Eight makes men perform."
Madam Lin stabbed the air with her chin. "We'll make people read it," she said. "If they pretend they can't, we'll read it to them like they're my sister's third boy trying to cheat a festival riddle."
Wu Ping had already begun calling the board names—"The Mouth," "The Short Wall," "Bai's Boss"—and had a running list of which stuck best with which group. The kids liked "The Mouth." The old men liked "The Boss." The merchants liked none of them and would come around when they discovered the board yelled at their competitors more than at them.
"Who keeps it?" the fisherman asked, voice soft like he was bargaining with the idea, not the man.
"We do," Wu Tian said. "All of us. But the Wu will stand near it until people learn to stand near it for themselves."
He left the brush with Old Bai, because the board didn't belong to a clan once the ink dried.
They spent the rest of the morning assigning the most boring parts of order. Boring kept people fed.
Watch schedules went up on the board in chalk: dawn pair to walk the wells; two to stand at the scales during trading hours; two to watch the river mouth where boats liked to argue with laws. Rope lines got tied between rooftops and hooks. Bucket brigades tested with clean water because practicing with fire is a trick reserved for fools.
Wu Liang gave a knot class to anybody with fingers. He named the knots simple: Fish, Pig, Aunt. The Aunt knot held best and was the most forgiving if tied in a hurry. "She's mean but she keeps you alive," he told a boy who wanted to move faster than his brain. The boy fell, swung, didn't hit the ground, and looked at the knot with gratitude usually reserved for gods and good soup.
By noon, the board had collected three disputes that solved themselves when the crowd remembered the first line and weighed a sack under the seal. A woman complained about being jostled at the steps; the boys guarding the scale made the man carry three buckets for the temple and called it even. Someone asked for a new rule—"No lying with prices to out-of-towners"—and Aunt Mei said, "That's covered under 'don't be trash.'" The woman with flour on her sleeves laughed until she scared a pigeon.
Shen Lian came in from the prefecture tent with her little ledger hugged to her ribs. She stopped to read the board, lips moving silently over the numbers the way some people taste soup in their heads before they heat water. When she reached "poison gets you hung," her mouth flattened approvingly.
"You writing law now?" she asked when she reached Wu Tian. No mockery, only curiosity.
"Writing habits," he said. "Law prefers them wet."
"Most law I've seen preferred the opposite," she said. She looked tired in a way the soup wouldn't fix. Her handwriting on today's pages ran smaller than yesterday's, like she'd been trying to fit too much truth into too little paper.
"Liang finished?" he asked.
"Started," she said. "Men don't finish with numbers. They rest near them and pretend it's the same." She tipped her head toward the temple. "He'll file his report at dusk, send the runner at night. In the morning he'll be halfway down the road, and the men who hate you will remember how to smile."
"I'm counting on it," he said. "Smiles are predictable."
"You'll need more than a board to fight a writ," she said.
"We'll have both," he said. "The board shouts. The writ delays. In between, we do work."
She studied him the way a person studies a machine to learn if it lies about being simple. "You aren't clever in the way Scribes like," she decided. "Good. Clever turns into apology too fast."
She slid a folded scrap from inside her sleeve and handed it to him. A sketch, quick lines that had made room for detail in the right places: a wheel with paddles attached to a frame, a rope across water, a pull from current. Beneath it: "Tow ferry using rope and current, for river bend east of town."
"You draw?" he asked.
"I steal," she said. "From a treatise in the prefecture hall on riverworks. The man who wrote it thinks common folk can't read diagrams because they'd get ideas. I got one anyway."
"You want us to build this?" he asked, mind already running a path—ropes, stakes, men, time.
"You want your town fed when the Chen make the river 'unsafe' for boats not paying their tax," she said. "This does it. Not pretty. Efficient. Works even when men with swords stand on the bank pretending water is theirs."
He looked at the drawing, at rope transferring power from a river to a deck that crossed it. It was good. It was better than good. It was Pinebrook in a machine: a line tied between what wanted to flow and what needed to move.
"Thank you," he said.
She shrugged, as if thanks were a tax she wouldn't collect. "Build it fast enough, Inspector Liang writes it down as 'existing local fixture' in his report. The Chen will have to file to remove it. Filing takes time. Time is rope you can use to pull a lot."
"Will you help… explain it to Old Bai?" he asked.
"I will argue with him until he pretends it was his idea," she said. "Bring brackets. Men like Bai get seduced by the right piece of metal. And biscuits. He does his best thinking when he's chewing."
The afternoon bent itself around that drawing. Old Bai squinted and grunted and said, "Paddlewheel? You want to make the river our mule." Shen Lian said, "Yes," and turned the page and showed him where the axle needed to bite. He snorted like a man who pretended he hadn't already built half of it in his head.
Wu Liang found ropes of a length that needed splicing and swore at their previous owners for not understanding what future they had deprived. He taught three boys to lay splice as if they were braiding a girl's hair who'd hit them if they tugged. Wu Ping organized the "don't die" side of the project: three on each bank with hooks; two with poles; one with a loud voice; Aunt Mei with a ladle to hit anyone who forgot to get out of the way of wood.
By the time the sun angled orange, they had stakes sunk at both banks, rope across, a frame assembled on the near side, and a wheel that would turn if a man had breath enough to swear while pushing.
"Tomorrow," Old Bai declared. "If the river doesn't gossip to the mountain about us and get jealous."
They ate on their feet. The soup tasted like patience. Shen Lian chewed a biscuit and decided she liked Old Bai's work better than the prefecture's when it came to things that had to not break. She left to write down in her ledger that the ferry was, by dusk, a Common Local Fixture. She smiled to herself while writing, because lying for the right side felt like telling a truth that hadn't happened yet.
Dusk slung shadows across the square. The temple bells gave a small chime—not a judgment this time, a "come here." Inspector Liang stood on the steps with a sealed packet in his hand. He had the air of a man who had slept less than his robe suggested and was being careful not to let the town see him tired.
"My report goes tonight," he said. "You will have two weeks of prefectural attention. Use it. The Chen will write their own reports. Use that, too."
"How?" someone called.
"By making it embarrassing to disagree with you," Liang said. "Shen Lian will file your board as a municipal convention. That makes your rules harder to call rebellion and easier to call housekeeping."
"Housekeeping," Aunt Mei repeated, liking that word in her mouth. "I'll put it on a banner."
Liang's gaze fell on Wu Tian. "You are going to be asked to do more than fight," he said softly enough that it made the space between them feel private in a way public speech sometimes can. "You will be asked to mediate, to record, to forgive. Forgiveness is dangerous if you don't make it cost something."
"I won't sell it cheap," Wu Tian said.
Liang nodded. "Good." He paused, then added, "When I leave, people will pretend you and I agreed on everything. We didn't. I think you are a good bet. I do not think you are the final answer."
"I'm not trying to be," Wu Tian said. "I'm trying to be a bridge that doesn't fall when people run across it."
"Then build more than one," Liang said, and left to sign papers that would make enemies work harder.
The square dispersed slower than usual. People had become reluctant to break the new habit of standing together. The clerk tried to assert himself twice and was gently ignored, which may have been the first time in his life he'd experienced civic evolution.
Night came with a wind that smelled like river and rumor. Wu Tian toured the watch points, checked the well lids (new hinges, new locks, two steeped with mint because Aunt Mei believed in traditions that bullied the nose), and walked the east alley where shadows gathered out of habit not malice. He found Qiao Ren leaning against a wall near the ferry build, hands empty, posture the kind you only adopt when nothing behind you matters enough to worry about.
"Pretty wheel," Qiao Ren said.
"It will be prettier when it moves people," Wu Tian said.
"It will make someone angry," Qiao Ren said.
"I'm learning that's a color I look good in," Wu Tian said.
Qiao Ren's mouth tugged. "The Chen steward has sent three letters today," he said. "One to a cousin in the prefecture with a job that doesn't appear on records. One to a merchant two towns downriver who specializes in shortages. One to a man in a black coat who does not sign his messages and collects debts with quiet hands."
"Poison?" Wu Tian asked.
"Fire," Qiao Ren said. "Tonight. They want your granary to turn into a story that discredits Inspector Liang's judgment tomorrow morning. If tomorrow looks like chaos, the report looks like a gamble."
"How many?" Wu Tian asked.
"Four," Qiao Ren said. "Two with oil, one with nerve, one who thinks climbing at night makes him invisible."
"Do you help?" Wu Tian asked.
"I inform," Qiao Ren said. "If I start putting out fires, I'll end up having to attend training and fill forms."
"Terrifying," Wu Tian said.
"Mm," Qiao Ren said, which from him was a laugh.
Wu Tian nodded once, then moved. He didn't run. Running wakes dogs and makes men make errors they don't deserve. He told Wu Feng with a glance. He told Wu Ping with a whistle. He told Wu Liang with two fingers and a tug on the rope that meant "north wall." Aunt Mei didn't need telling; she tensed like a storm cloud and went to the kitchen where water and a knife both lived.
They didn't wait inside the granary like stupid. They set a net above the alley. They placed buckets where hands could find them without eyes. They put a boy on the roof with a handful of sand because sand was water's smarter cousin for small flames. They hung a pot at just the height an unwelcome head would meet it if it stood too fast.
The men came when the night liked to pretend it was morning if you squinted—three and an hour. The first two moved like honest thieves. They checked their shadows. They minded their feet. The third moved like a soldier trying to remember he wasn't allowed to march. The fourth moved like he thought stories couldn't see him. Stories watch at night. That's when they happen.
Wu Tian waited until the oil opened its mouth. He dropped the net. The net isn't magic. It's intimidation with manners. Two got tangled enough to swear; one rolled and found himself on his back under a rope that had decided it would be a friend. The fourth—the soldier—stepped wide and avoided the edge of the net like he'd been told this trick. He came up with a hood over his mouth and a short blade in his fist.
Wu Feng met him. Spear haft against blade, knee into thigh. The man was good—his hand didn't go slack when pain visited. He pivoted, tried to cut along the haft into fingers. Iron Grip said no. Wu Feng drove him back into a stack of clay jars that made dum sounds when it should've been crash. Aunt Mei had sand in them instead of grain now—less loss if they broke; more useful if they didn't.
Wu Tian went for the one who liked stories. The man flung a handful of black dust with a snap that said he'd been taught to use it in people's eyes. Pulse Step carried Wu Tian sideways so the dust kissed air instead of pupils. The man lunged. Wu Tian stuck his spear across the alley at shin height and let his enemy decide how much of his future he wanted to buy for a step. The man learned a lesson and purchased dirt with his face.
"Don't kill," Wu Tian said, voice even.
"Boring," Wu Ping muttered, and knocked one out with a stone that had decided to be generous with its aim.
The last man panicked and did what panicked men do—he tried to make the world small by making fire. He flung oil at the granary door and lit it with a coal he'd brought warm in a rag. The flame took. It always does. But so did the sand and water. Buckets flew. The boy on the roof poured a stream that slapped the lick of flame in a way that made the crowd cheer softly to themselves. Aunt Mei's ladle hit a head hard enough to make a lesson. The fire coughed and died.
Someone in a nearby window had been halfway to screaming. They swallowed it when they saw how many hands were already moving. Screams serve panic more than they serve people.
The fight didn't last long. Good street fights rarely do. There wasn't room for art. There was just competence. Rope, sand, wood, breath. Two men unconscious. One moaning. One pinned by Wu Liang's knot that had earned the Aunt's name.
They dragged the men under the pear tree because all the important parts of Pinebrook eventually ended up there to see if the leaves would nod. They lit lamps and let the town see faces. No masks now. The soldier had a scar on his neck in the shape of a question mark. The boy had a scar on his pride that would hurt more later.
Wu Tian wrote on the board with chalk, because you use chalk when a thing isn't done yet:
Granary fire—attempted, extinguished. Four caught. Names in morning. Oil seized. No deaths. Sand works better than shouting.
"Write their names now," a man called from the crowd, voice sharp with the need to feel safe.
"If I write the wrong ones in the dark, you'll still be reading them in the morning," Wu Tian said. "We'll write them when the faces match papers and when their mothers have had a chance to put a hand on their heads and decide if shame will do a part of the work."
The man shut up because the part of him that wanted blood didn't like being told it would have to do work too.
The soldier glared. He had enough anger to power a mill and not enough sense to notice how it would burn his hands. "You won't stop us," he spat. "We'll burn it all."
"You tried," Aunt Mei said, dry as clean bone. "You weren't good at it."
"Who sent you?" Wu Feng asked.
The soldier laughed. "River devils. Ghosts. Your mother's shadow."
Aunt Mei's ladle twitched. Wu Tian put a hand on it gently. "He's not brave; he's dumb," he said. "No point proving it."
Shen Lian pushed through, ledger under her arm, hair string loose. She took one look at the scene and then at the board and then at Wu Tian and said, "You really do prefer the dramatic lighting."
"You want their names," he said.
"I want their faces," she said. "Liang likes to match crimes to cheekbones. It keeps the stories from putting the wrong line under the wrong man."
They tilted heads into lamplight. She wrote. She didn't flinch when the soldier tried to spit in the dirt near her shoe. She moved her foot without looking and let the spit hit ground that didn't care.
By midnight, the men were tied in a corner of the temple storehouse because the temple had walls that didn't let people go missing. The monk agreed without enthusiasm, which is what you want from a man holding other people's problems.
When the town had scattered into smaller, safer noises, Wu Tian sat under the pear tree again and let his breath wash the night from his lungs. He didn't check the lattice. He didn't need to. His hands shook and then didn't. The cut on his forearm from three nights ago pulled a little; Minor Recovery had done most of the job; the rest was the kind of ache that makes you polite to your own skin.
He heard steps that didn't apologize. Qiao Ren perched on a low wall like a man measuring a shelf for a book he hadn't decided to buy.
"You put out a story," Qiao Ren said.
"We put out a fire," Wu Tian said.
"Same thing," Qiao Ren said. "Stories are just fires you don't have to feed constantly."
"Chen?" Wu Tian asked.
"Twice angry," Qiao Ren said. "Once because you stopped them. Once because you made it look easy."
"It wasn't," Wu Tian said.
"I know," Qiao Ren said. "But they don't. Useful."
They sat a while. The pear leaves didn't move; there was no wind to blame for anything. Somewhere a dog argued with a dream and lost. The river made the sound rivers make when they are pretending to be asleep.
"You're not going to like the next letter," Qiao Ren said eventually.
"Ink or steel?" Wu Tian asked.
"Ink about steel," Qiao Ren said. "The Chen have petitioned the Mountain River Hall to 'investigate sect discipline' in Pinebrook. They're saying you used your new foundation to humiliate a young disciple on temple business."
"Chen Hao came asking for a public duel," Wu Tian said.
"And he left a public narrative," Qiao Ren said. "He yields on the river; then he writes that he was 'attacked with irregular terrain and civilian interference.' Men upstairs love phrases they've never had to live through."
"What does it mean?" Wu Feng asked, stepping out of the dark like a sentence wanting punctuation.
"It means a deacon from the Hall will come," Qiao Ren said. "He'll be polite. He'll be dangerous. He won't care about your board unless he trips over it. He will care that a sect's face was scratched."
"Will he be honest?" Wu Tian asked.
"He'll be honorable," Qiao Ren said. "Different."
"Then we make honor expensive, too," Wu Tian said.
Qiao Ren almost smiled. "Good. Do it gently."
"We're not good at gentle," Wu Ping said from the roof, where he had been pretending to be a gargoyle who sometimes snored.
"You'll learn," Qiao Ren said, and left them to discuss how velvet and rope could go together.
The morning came with the slow courage of people who had slept poorly and decided to be brave anyway. Wu Tian woke before it. He stood at the board and wrote the names under the chalk line: men from the river lot he knew, a soldier who kept his surname like a secret and his lies like a blanket. He didn't add more words than the town needed.
He ran his thumb over the ferry sketch again, then looked at the half-finished frame by the river. Old Bai was already there, arguing with a bolt. Shen Lian was there too, hair tied tighter, sleeves rolled like a person who knows clean ink still needs dirty hands nearby to matter. The wheel waited for water the way some men wait for applause. It would get the water. It would have to earn the applause.
Madam Lin sold bread under the board and told anyone who touched the letters with dirty fingers that Heaven would see and send birds to poop on their roof. Aunt Mei stirred stew and broke up an argument between two boys by making them carry a jar together until they remembered they liked each other.
Cultivation: Foundation, Layer 2.Talent: Low.Perks: Minor Recovery, Pulse Step, Iron Grip, Steadfast Breath, Flowing Strikes, Battle Trance, Qi Sight, Minor Blood Surge, Foundation Anchor, Rooted Step.Bloodline: None.
He didn't read the words as power. He read them like a checklist: feet, hands, breath, eyes, blood, ground, step. The rest would come when it could. He had time because he stole it every day from men who thought time belonged to them.
Shadows moved where shadows shouldn't near the Chen compound across town. He watched with Qi Sight until the lines settled into men making plans instead of rocks deciding to be cold. He exhaled slow, took a step, felt the ground answer, and went to build a wheel that told a river where to put its effort.
They lifted the frame with four men and the willingness of a fifth. They set the axle and said unkind things about its mother until it settled. They walked the rope across the water in a little boat that believed in optimism more than in buoyancy. Wu Liang tied the Aunt knot on the far bank and patted it as if it were a dog that had done a good trick. Old Bai pushed the wheel and it turned and the rope sang and the current grinned and for a moment the river did what the drawing promised it would do.
It wasn't much to look at yet. It was enough to move a plank with three sacks and a boy across slower than a man could throw a stone and faster than a boat fighting a toll.
Pinebrook gathered, clapped once, then twice, then let the sound settle into a memory. Inspector Liang watched from the square like a man making a footnote and changing his mind to a paragraph. Shen Lian wrote one word beside a sketch of the wheel: "Working."
Qiao Ren stood with his hands in his sleeves and pretended not to be pleased that a tool had been made out of a problem.
A runner in Mountain River Hall colors appeared on the road at noon, dust-gray and duty-stiff. He pinned a notice below the board with fingers that had never hammered in their life. He didn't look at the words once he'd done it. He didn't need to. His body knew. He left and took his dust with him.
Wu Tian read it aloud because he refused to let letters talk behind people's backs.
"Notice of Inquiry," he said. "Mountain River Hall will dispatch Deacon Yun to assess the duel between Chen Hao and the commoner Wu Tian. Local parties will provide testimony."
"Commoner," Aunt Mei repeated, tasting the word.
"I'm not offended," Wu Tian said. "Common is what we are when we're not lying."
He added a new chalk line under the names on the board:
Ferry works. Deacon coming. We tell the truth first.
He caught Shen Lian's eye. She lifted her ledger and tapped its spine. "Write first," she mouthed.
He would. On wood, on stone, in rope, across a river. He would write it so clean they'd need a chisel to scrape it free. He would make it expensive to lie, not just for the Chen, not just for a Hall, but for Pinebrook too, because that's how you get a town to love truth—by making it cheaper than the alternative.
He was Low Talent. He had a board and a wheel and a town learning how to keep itself upright. He had a deacon on the road and a steward in a hallway grinding teeth. He had breath and a ground that listened when he asked nicely.
For now, it was enough. And tomorrow, he would make more.