The heavier bark from the north curve bent every lamp as if wicks had ears.
"Square - pivot," Li Jianguo said, walking the word to where feet would step on it. Lanes shifted without collapsing. The clinic corridor held. Whistles found mouths and remembered to be quiet until asked.
The pack didn't charge. It rehearsed them. Snouts low, bodies high, then high-low, then nothing - a rhythm you could trip on if you tried to keep up.
"Walkers," Li said. "Inside edge, twenty paces. Don't break cadence."
Yu Peng slid to second slot on the north. Rana took third with her coil. Old Ma chirped once - left attention - and the woman at right sent back two like a nod.
A boy ran the inside lane with an empty lantern swinging from his hand - Darin, Lili's board had named him earlier. He reached the curve, bent to pick up a second empty near the line - and the arc of his arm carried his foot outside the barrier by the length of a toe.
Claws hooked his calf.
He yelled, not high, not brave - real. The empty lantern broke and became noise. The wolf that had him leaned backward with the expertise of a butcher.
"Hold the line," Li said, steady as rope. "Do not reach out."
Two people reached out. Reflex. Love. Their hands hit warm glass and slid. Another wolf clamped Darin's boot and the boy made a sound like a hinge giving up.
Take soft. Teach small, the pack's breath wrote in Beast-Tongue around the curve.
The silhouette of something heavier than the rest paused beyond the second rank - broader shoulders, measured head - Gray Knife. It didn't touch. It taught.
"Rope," Sun Jing told the kid line, voice soft and shaped like a home. "Look at me, not there."
"Wire," Rana said to Wang without looking - a question and a share.
"Later," Wang said. The coil trick would scatter paws - not jaws that had already found a boy.
He stepped to the invisible plane and let his breath go thin. Li Jianguo's eyes caught his for a half-beat. The look said: If you can - now.
"Two breaths," Wang said, so his legs would have a timer. He slid through warm glass and became one more piece of moving grass.
The wolves didn't bark. They pulled. Darin's calf slid two more centimeters and left a dark brush on the dirt. Wang let the pack's weight write lines in space and planted his feet where those lines would no longer balance.
The first cut was a whisper at the wrist that held the boot.
Steel argued - briefly - then the jaw decided to let go rather than own this conversation. The second cut went low across the rope of tendon above the first wolf's heel - not fatal, useful. The third stopped a fourth jaw from finding Darin's thigh by placing the blade where the jaw wanted to be and making it embarrassed to be there.
No Blink. No show. Just inches done correctly.
"Back," Li said from the other side of the air. Two hands inside the wall had a grip on Darin's wrists now - friction against glass, a human tug-of-war with the world.
A young gray feinted high - Wang's knee was not where the gray wanted it - then the gray discovered dirt with its teeth and decided to rename heroism later.
"Up," Rana said, and her coil kissed a second wolf's forelegs and taught them the lesson of tripping in public. The wolf's weight tugged on the first - they became a problem for each other.
Wang cut the first free of Darin's boot and the second free of its good opinion of its knees. "Pull," he said, and the inside hands obeyed. Darin slid, a centimeter at a time, the barrier skin squeaking against his shoulders. The boy didn't scream now. He counted breaths because someone had taught him that numbers can carry weight.
On the rim, Gray Knife did nothing and made that something. It watched Wang, not like prey, not like threat - like a tool it wanted to understand.
The bodies around Darin invited a different problem: feeding. Blood on dirt makes math for wolves. If one eats, all learn, and the curve becomes panic with teeth.
"Clear it," Li Jianguo said - not to Wang - to anyone who had ideas.
Wang had one. It didn't stay private.
He opened his hand.
White curled out of his palm and remembered itself as an eight-trigram cauldron - lines, circles, lip - Heavenly Furnace, not metaphor, not metal. It hung over his skin like a small sun that wouldn't apologize.
Night made room.
Old Ma's breath snagged like thread on a nail. "What -" he started, not to stop it, to name it before it named them.A child whispered, "Fire in his hand," like a story had walked into the square and asked to be read.Gao Fei's eyes did a fast math about leverage and a slower one about fear.Wang Lili's pencil hovered - then kept moving - because numbers steady hands.
Wang pushed the first wolf's carcass in. There was no time between is and ash. The ash tightened and dropped as a clean red bead into his other hand.
[Heavenly Furnace] Refining: Level-1 beast → Level-1 core.
The second followed - ash - bead. A third - bead. Each core made a sound like a coin remembering its name when it landed against another.
"Inside with him," Dr. Zhang said, voice carrying like a neat cut. She had hands on Darin the instant his shoulder cleared, two fingers at a neck, eyes on color. "Don't talk to me unless you are blood. Tape. Gauze." The clinic lane moved like a family who had been told when to sit and when to pass bowls.
"Count," Lili told herself quietly - and wrote CORES +3 on a small square she'd drawn in the corner of the board, because the village needed to see the exchange as medicine, not magic.
Wang tipped another body. Core +1. Core +1. The little sun purred like a bellows remembering a good day at work.
The front rank recoiled. Wolves do not converse about souls; they converse about patterns. Meat becoming not-meat in a white mouth that made no smoke - that was a pattern they didn't want to teach pups.
A gray lunged anyway - loyalty to hunger more than plan. Wang's blade wrote a short line on its throat and the furnace read the sentence to ash. Core +1.
"Back," Li said again, not to Wang - to the pack. The word had the shape of a push.
Wang stepped one foot behind the other through warm glass while the furnace hummed and didn't dim. He left three bodies as cores, two as dust, none as teaching. He did not look away from Gray Knife while he stepped. The leader held his gaze without eyes that humans would admit to. It didn't blink. Neither did he.
Inside the wall, Sun Jing's hand found Darin's - rope to rope. "Breathe in four, out four," she said, and the boy's chest obeyed because she owned the recipe.
Old Ma faced the little sun without stepping forward or back. Something important in him fought something older. "Child," he told the fire, which was safer than telling the man. "You will not eat what belongs to us."
"It doesn't," Wang said, calm, not loud. The furnace took another wolf and gave back another bead that chimed against its brothers. "Only beasts."
Old Ma grunted - not approval, not denial - a placeholder for a future that had opinions.
Gao Fei let his smile find a pious angle. "A blessing among us," he said for the hearing of many and the belonging of none. He lifted his hands as if presenting Wang to a crowd and carefully didn't come within arm's reach.
"Board," Wang Lili said to anyone who needed the comfort of paper. "CORES +9 - clinic priority - posted." She wrote Darin - in beneath headcount even though no one had asked her to, because ink calms.
"Whistles," Old Ma reminded, because the north curve had gone quiet in the way that means someone important is toughening their patience.
Gray Knife took two long, deliberate steps to the barrier and laid its muzzle close enough to feel the wall's warmth. It breathed - slow. It let every young body behind it see how a leader studies glass and lamp and human count. It did not press. It turned its head toward the white in Wang's palm as if recording the shape of the problem. Then it paced left, almost lazy.
The pack followed the way grass follows wind.
Wang kept the furnace open a moment longer. The square breathed toward it and away from it at the same time. Dr. Zhang called for antiseptic and a splint in the lane; the clinic moved like a kitchen at a good wedding - quiet noise, blurred hands, necessary acts.
"Close it," Li Jianguo said softly - not a command, a courtesy to everyone's nerves.
Wang curled his fingers. The eight trigrams folded like a sentence when you don't need it anymore. Light sank. His palm was a palm again.
The lamps remembered to be lamps. The barrier breathed like glass that preferred to be a wall and would be until told otherwise.
Outside, the tall grass made that coin-scrape sound of wolves turning away to take attendance somewhere else.
Every eye that mattered settled on Wang's bare hand in the wake of light.