The first light of dawn crept over the jagged teeth of the Verdant Peaks. Slipping in thin fingers between ridges and leaning across the village like a quiet verdict. Mist pooled low in the courtyards. Dead leaves and broken tiles steaming in the cold. Chickens scratched at the paths. An old woman banged a wooden ladle against a pot until the sound was sharp enough to chase sleep away. Smoke threaded up from a dozen chimneys. Carrying the smell of damp straw and boiled rice.
Wei An shouldered the empty bucket and felt the morning like an old bruise. Familiar. Expected. Never quite gone. His feet knew the stones. His palms knew the rope's slack. He moved through the courtyard with the small, practiced economy of someone who had been given no space to be careless. People glanced past him like wind past a reed. A child shoved him once. Then giggled. The child's mother pretended not to see. The village made a habit of not seeing things that might complicate life.
His hands were a map of that habit. Callused. With faint silvery scars like dried rivers. He kept his shoulders level. Breath steady. His eyes, though, were not dull. They scanned the ridgelines. The color of the sky. The way a shadow fell across a cart wheel. Little details lodged in him and would be worth something someday. He told himself that with the stubborn patience of people who learn to wait for luck.
By the well, the other water-bearers already gathered in a loose knot. Their voices weaving complaint and gossip. Old Chen, who sold dried fish and wisdom in equal measure, muttered about the price of salt. A young man from the Li household. Broad-shouldered. Clean-smelling. Looked at Wei An with the kind of amused contempt that is economy dressed as superiority.
"You'd break the rope if you tried lifting more," the young man said. Voice easy. He made the remark like a demonstration of power. Small. Unnecessary. Meant to be seen.
Wei An did not answer. He hauled the bucket down. Felt the cool clasp of water against his palms. Let the weight steady him. The rope slipped. The bucket swung. And the world narrowed to the rhythm of hauling. When he pulled the bucket up, the water shone like a slice of sky in a battered pail. He carried it through the morning smell of tar and wood and left a wet trail that no one bothered to remark upon.
He set the bucket by his mother's door. She slept on a pallet that had once been good enough. Now the wood bowed at its center like a tired back. She worked when she could and slept when she could not. Wei An smoothed her blanket with fingers that did not tremble even though his chest made small, unwanted hollows at the sight of her. There were debts written in another hand on a torn scrap of paper pinned to the cupboard. He traced the edge once. Then turned away.
By noon, he had a day's list. Fix the fence. Gather herbs for the old healer. Fetch millet. And if the wind was right, go into the low trees beyond the ridge to search for the small blue-leaf herb that fetched a decent price in market towns. The blue-leaf was rare near the village now. Most years the harvest was lean. That made it worth finding.
He moved through the forest like someone tracing a memory. Sunlight sifted through new leaves, turning them into coin. The damp smell of moss hid a thousand small things. The bruise of a fox's path. The faint metallic tang where a rock had been struck. The perfume of resin from a downed branch. He knelt at the base of an ancient oak and brushed aside a mantle of twigs. There—a flash of ugly blue. The edge of a leaf like a trapped bird's wing.
He reached for it and felt the air change.
It was too small to name at first. The hairs at the back of his neck nudged him into attention the way a bell does in the middle of a dream. The forest's sound condensed. One bird's clear cry. Then nothing. A smell rose. Not of earth but of old rain and something like metal warmed in sunlight. The world seemed to breathe as if inhaling a secret.
Wei An straightened slowly. The blue-leaf lay half-hidden in a shallow depression in the earth. But beneath it the ground was not ordinary soil. The stone there had veins. Faint, luminescent lines that pulsed with the heartbeat of someone awake. He knelt, fingers hovering, as if touching might be an answer or a question.
"Nothing in the world is ever simple," he told himself. The sentence was less comfort than habit. He pushed the herb aside.
A seam opened.
Not with the sound of a cracking stone but with the deeper, soft click of something ancient shifting into place. The earth sighed and a narrow chasm revealed itself, swallowing the sun. From within came a breath of cool air that smelled of old books and mountain rain. The luminescent veins flared like the first flash of lightning.
Wei An's first impulse was to run. That was the sensible thing to do. Go back to the village. Fetch help. Show the thing to men with good belts and straighter backs. But his feet did not obey the sensible path. Curiosity and the small hunger of a life that had been asked to be patient too often pressed his body forward. One step. Then another. Until the forest closed its teeth around him.
The mouth of the seam was narrow. A throat that could be widened with work. But there was no rush. A cool wind washed his face as he lowered himself into the cave. Stone closed behind him like a curtain. The light from the entrance fell away, and the world became a room of collected echoes.
Inside, the air was thick with age. Dust motes rotated lazily in the spill of light from his hand. The walls were not smooth but crisscrossed with the same faint veins of light. Neither wholly stone nor wholly crystal. They hummed, a high small note that slid along his teeth. Near the far wall lay something wrapped in scales of dark mineral. A blade-shaped shadow. Or perhaps the shadow of a blade.
Wei An crouched. Up close, the runes on the rock made no sense to his eyes. But his chest felt them as if someone had placed an extra bone there. He heard, or imagined he heard, a voice like dry leaves. A syllable without meaning at first. Then the ghost of a phrase. "Awake."
He swallowed. The sound of his breath had become too loud to be private. For a terrible, shining second he imagined himself as every unseen thing that had to hide in plain sight. Each small sin the village allowed. Each debt unsigned. The cave held him like a hand at the back of the neck.
Fear was a hard thing to wear. He felt it as heat behind his ears. A red tide rising. He felt, too, an unexpected lightness as if some invisible chain within him had loosened. The vein-shapes pulsed. And he felt the pulse in his own throat. It was a sensation like finding a seam in a torn robe and discovering a coin stitched into the lining.
He reached out.
The first touch was small. Just the tips of his fingers on stone that was not quite cold. The moment his skin met it, the brightness rushed through his arm like a current. He sucked in a breath. The world doubled. For a sliver of time he saw himself from something else's view. A boy who had always been looking up. A village that smelled of smoke. A mountain that was waiting.
His knees buckled and his fingers left a smear of dust on the white vein. His heart hammered as if trying to leave his chest by some secret door. The voice again. Clearer. This time more like a thought than a sound. You are capable. The phrase was not the cave's but of the thing inside it. And when it entered his head it was not loud. It was simply true.
Wei An staggered back until his shoulders hit rough rock. His palms left the stone. And the echo of that contact rang in him like an aftertone. His breath came ragged. The world tasting of rain.
He sat on a shelf of stone and pressed his forehead to his knees. Questions came like birds striking a pane. Who was he to be told that. What cost lay behind such a word. But beneath the questions was a simpler, meaner sound. Hunger. Not for food. For weight to be added to his life so that it might be worth more.
He thought of his mother's list of debts. Of the Li boy's neat laugh. He thought of Li Yue. He had seen her in the market once. A woman who moved like a blade's shadow. Eyes like an unread page. The idea of her was a splinter of light. A lesson waiting to be taught. He had never met her. Never even spoken. But the village's stories shaped her into the outline of a fate he could not yet name.
Footsteps outside the cave cut across his thoughts. Soft. Two pairs. Someone moving with the light tread of practiced caution. The kind of steps that do not belong to villagers who chop wood for a living. The sound scraped at the rim of his awareness. His hand went to the place where the stone's veins had eaten a memory into his skin. He wished he could be invisible. Wished he had the shade of a fox.
And then, beyond the mouth, a voice called in the language of men trained to listen for qi. A call both sharp and formal. "Hold there. Don't move."
Wei An froze. The cave breathed out around him. The pulse in his chest thrummed in answer to the unseen voice. He could move back into the dark seam. Swallow the cave and hope it would swallow him fully. He could stand. Wipe his palms on his trousers. And step out with the herb like nothing had happened.
Instead, he tucked the blue-leaf into his sleeve and stepped toward the darkness beyond the mouth of the cave. Because there are some things a life of patient waiting cannot refuse. The chance to change the ledger written over his family's door.
He paused at the seam's lip. Outside, the world waited with an authority that belonged to men who wore their years like armor. The mist over the village hung low and white. The sun half a world away was indifferent.
Wei An's fingers closed around nothing and everything.
A whistle cut through the trees. Then rustling. A branch. A shout. Or the soft clack of sword against scabbard.
He had found something that would not remain hidden. The mountain had found a voice. And someone trained to hear was listening.
He took one step out of the mouth of the cave.
The light hit him.