The first lesson at Han's place was not how to lift, or how to cut, or how to keep your hands from splitting when the cold turned rope into wire.
The first lesson was this:
If you didn't belong to anyone powerful, your work belonged to whoever arrived with enough men to take it.
Li Shen learned that before noon.
The shed where Han kept the new boys smelled of damp straw and old sweat. It wasn't cruelly filthy—Han didn't waste grain on sickness—but it was crowded, and every body made the air heavier. Li Shen woke before the others, not because he was eager, but because his mind refused to stay quiet once a debt had been written in ink.
He pulled on his clothes and stepped outside.
The bourgade was already moving.
Men with carts rolled toward the market road. Women carried water in buckets that looked heavier than they should. Early stalls opened—dried fish, needles, cheap cloth, rough medicine—while smoke rose in thin lines and broke apart under the pale wind.
Han's yard was a knot of activity. Workers dragged bundles toward a storage shed. Someone shouted for someone else to move faster. A clay jar clinked against a wooden beam. Life worked.
Li Shen found the stack of bundled reeds Han had pointed out the day before. He took a coil of rope and started without being told.
A man twice his age noticed and gave him a look—half suspicion, half approval—then moved on.
Two bundles in, Li Shen understood why the rope had been left out. It was stiff with frost. Each pull bit into his palms, turning old calluses into raw warning.
He didn't stop. He pulled, tied, and tightened until the reeds held.
He was halfway through the third bundle when a new sound cut across the bourgade—hoofbeats, measured and heavy, not like a farmer's tired mule.
Then voices. Not market voices. Command voices.
Han stepped out from the storage shed like he'd been called by a bell only he could hear. His head turned toward the main road. His jaw set.
"Stay where you are," he barked at the nearest workers. "If anyone starts staring, I'll dock your meal."
That did nothing.
Everyone stared anyway.
The unit came in from the east, a small column of men in dull leather and patched lamellar, the kind that didn't shine because it couldn't afford to. Spears were clean. Boots were caked with mud. A battered banner hung from a pole, its symbol half-faded by weather and distance.
A beast-suppression unit.
Li Shen had heard the words in the village like storms or taxes—things that happened to other people until they didn't.
Now the storm was walking down the road.
There were thirty—maybe forty—soldiers. Two carts followed behind them, one piled with nets and coiled chains, the other carrying barrels that smelled like oil even from a distance. Their faces were hardened by routine, not heroism. Men who had learned that fear was useful only if it made you faster.
At the front rode an officer on a short horse. He sat upright, shoulders square, gaze scanning the bourgade with the casual entitlement of someone who could take what he needed and call it duty.
And walking beside the horse—on foot, like he didn't care for riding—was someone else.
At first Li Shen thought he was simply another soldier.
Then the man turned his head, and Li Shen felt it before he understood it: a subtle thickness in the air, as if the space around the man carried a weight that didn't belong to ordinary lungs.
No robes. No ornament. Just a dark coat belted tight, boots cleaner than the rest, a short blade at his hip that looked too sharp for common work. His hair was tied back with plain cord.
He wasn't tall. He wasn't loud.
But the crowd made room the way wheat bends before a scythe.
A cultivator—barely.
Not a mountain immortal. Not a sect disciple with embroidered arrogance.
This was the kind of cultivator the world actually ran on: the lowest rung with enough Qi to tilt a room in his favor.
The bourgade reacted like dry grass near flame.
People stepped back. Stall owners swallowed and stopped talking. A child ran to his mother without being told. Even Han's workers shrank their motions as if size itself had become suspicious.
The officer reined in near the central square. His voice carried.
"By order of the Eastern District Garrison," he announced, "we are deploying to suppress a spiritual beast incursion along the river bends. This bourgade will provide supplies as required. Grain, dried meat, and oil. No delays."
The words were clean.
The meaning was not.
A merchant near the stalls lifted his hands in a placating gesture. "Honored officer, we are small people. We—"
The officer's gaze flicked over him. "Small people still eat. Small people still travel. Small people still benefit from not being torn apart on the road."
He gestured to the carts. "Bring what is needed."
Men in the unit moved immediately—efficient, not violent. They approached the nearest grain store with the confidence of people who had done this before.
Han's mouth tightened.
He didn't charge at them. He didn't shout. He moved like someone stepping into a fight he'd already lost, but still intended to choose how he lost it.
He strode toward the officer.
Li Shen watched from where he bound reeds, rope biting his fingers. He wanted to move closer, to hear the exact numbers, to understand the shape of this pressure.
But Han's warning hadn't been about meals.
It had been about attention.
Li Shen stayed where he was.
Han stopped a few paces from the horse. He didn't bow. He didn't puff up. He stood like a man negotiating with winter.
"Officer," Han said, voice flat. "You're taking from my stores."
"I'm taking for the road," the officer replied. "Your stores are in my district. You'll be compensated."
Han's eyes narrowed. "Compensated how?"
The officer smiled, small and humorless. "In safety."
Han's lips curled. "Safety doesn't fill bellies."
At that, the cultivator beside the horse shifted his weight.
It wasn't dramatic.
But the air tightened all the same, and workers in the yard went still as if a hand had pressed down on their shoulders.
Han noticed. He didn't look at the cultivator. He kept his gaze on the officer, because staring at the wrong man could get you hurt even if no one touched you.
"Name your amount," Han said.
The officer lifted two fingers and began ticking off numbers.
Li Shen couldn't hear the exact sacks from where he stood, but he saw Han's shoulders tighten as if each count was a blow.
"That's half a month's storage," Han said.
"That's half a month's road kept open," the officer replied.
Han inhaled through his nose.
"Fine," he said. "You take what you take. But you take it clean. No trampling. No grabbing from stalls like bandits."
The officer's brows rose. "You want to lecture discipline to soldiers?"
Han's voice didn't change. "I want to keep my people from starving because your men got bored."
The officer looked at him for a long moment. Then he gave a soft, almost amused exhale.
"You have spine for a grain man," he said. "Keep it. It might amuse someone later."
He made a sharp gesture.
Two soldiers broke off toward Han's storage shed. Workers there froze, unsure whether to block them or step aside.
Han barked, "Open it. Let them count. If anyone touches what isn't listed, I'll bite."
The soldiers began loading sacks.
And as they did, Li Shen watched a truth unfold that he had never been forced to see so clearly: grain was not food.
Grain was leverage.
Grain was the difference between being a man and being a resource.
He felt his jaw tighten. Not anger—something colder.
This is what Father was trying to avoid.
The loading continued.
Then a shout—sharp, panicked.
One of the soldiers near the oil cart stumbled as a barrel shifted. The wheel hit a stone at the wrong angle. The barrel rolled, heavy and slick with frost, straight off the edge.
A soldier lunged to catch it.
Too late.
The barrel dropped, bounced once, and smashed into his shin. The crack was audible even from the yard.
The soldier went down hard, face twisting, a sound escaping him that was more animal than man.
For a heartbeat, everything paused.
Then the officer swore. "Move him. Get a splint. Now."
Two men rushed in. A plank appeared. Cloth was torn.
They were competent.
It wasn't enough.
Blood spread fast, dark against the pale stones, and the injured man's breathing turned ragged as shock crept in like cold water.
The cultivator finally moved.
He crouched beside the soldier without ceremony, not like a healer descending, but like a man fixing a leak he'd seen a hundred times. He placed two fingers at a point above the wound—near the ankle, close to where a pulse hammered.
Li Shen watched his hand.
Nothing flashed. No light. No grand technique.
Just pressure.
The cultivator's brows drew together in concentration. His fingers pressed, and the air around them felt momentarily heavier—subtle, focused, unpleasant in the way deep winter cold was unpleasant.
The bleeding slowed.
Not stopped. Not healed.
Slowed enough that the blood did not pour out in seconds.
The injured soldier still shook. Still groaned. Still looked like death had sat down beside him and hadn't stood up yet.
A murmur rippled through the crowd.
"He… held it."
"Is that Qi?"
"It's not medicine."
The cultivator's hand remained for three breaths. Then he lifted his fingers.
The soldier's skin around the pressure point was already paling, numb from the crude seal.
"Carry him," the cultivator said, voice flat. "If you let him thrash, it opens again."
He stood, wiped his fingertips on his coat, and stepped away as if he'd tightened a knot and nothing more.
Li Shen's stomach tightened.
Not awe.
Recognition.
That is what power does.
It didn't make you righteous.
It made you able.
Able to keep a man alive long enough for the next step.
Able to decide whether a wound became a death.
A worker near Li Shen muttered, "He saved him."
Another answered, bitter, "He saved the unit's numbers."
Both were true.
Li Shen stared at the injured soldier's face—pale, sweating, eyes wide with fear and pain and something like gratitude.
Then he looked at the cultivator again.
The man didn't look back.
The officer snapped another order, impatient. "We're moving. Now."
The unit began to reorganize around the carts.
The injured soldier tried to sit up, panicked by the jostling, and the splint slipped. His leg twisted at the wrong angle.
He screamed.
A child nearby began to cry.
A soldier barked, "Hold still, idiot!"
The injured man's hands fluttered uselessly, and the plank slid again.
Li Shen's body moved before his thoughts finished forming.
Not rushing in like a hero.
Just stepping closer because someone had to hold a thing steady.
He came to the edge of the knot of soldiers, hesitated a fraction—because he was ten, because these were armed men, because Han's voice had warned him about attention—and then dropped into a crouch where he could see the splint.
"Like this," he said quietly, more to the nearest soldier than to the injured man. He pointed with two fingers, careful not to touch the wound. "Brace the plank here, or it slips again."
The soldier glared at him. "Get back."
Li Shen didn't argue. He simply kept his hands near the plank, showing the angle, letting the solution speak for itself.
The injured man's breathing hitched as the leg steadied. The scream fell into a rasp.
Another soldier grabbed Li Shen's sleeve, rough. "I said—"
"Enough," the officer snapped sharply, already watching the road. Not at Li Shen—at time. "Secure him and move. We don't have the luxury of theatre."
The grip on Li Shen's sleeve loosened, not out of kindness, but because the officer's impatience was a blade all its own.
Li Shen kept his eyes down.
He tore a strip from the hem of his inner cloth—rough, but clean enough—and slid it under the plank to stop it from sliding on stone. No speeches. No drama.
The soldier who had grabbed him hesitated, then used the strip without comment.
The injured man shuddered. His lips trembled.
He looked at Li Shen like he was trying to place him in a world that had no space for children near blood.
Li Shen reached into his pocket and pulled out the small bundle his father had packed—bread, meat, cheese.
He hesitated.
That bundle was not comfort.
That bundle was insurance against hunger, weakness, mistakes.
He thought of the ledger clause. Of his father paying if he failed. Of Qian Mei's steady eyes.
Then he looked at the injured soldier's face as shock hollowed him out.
Li Shen held the bundle out—not pushing it, not demanding.
"If you can chew," he said quietly, "do it. It keeps you awake."
The injured man's eyes flicked to the soldiers around him, as if seeking permission.
No one gave any.
No one cared.
He took the bread with shaking fingers and bit down.
The officer's voice cut through again. "Move."
The unit lifted the injured soldier onto the cart, splint secured. The crude seal held—for now.
The cultivator walked beside the horse again, already looking ahead, already done with this.
The column moved on, boots and hooves fading east toward the river bends where something with teeth waited.
The bourgade exhaled like it had been holding its breath.
Stalls reopened. Voices returned. People pretended their hands weren't shaking.
Han did not pretend.
He stormed across the yard, face red, eyes bright with fury and calculation.
"LI," he snapped, stopping in front of him. "You think you're clever?"
Li Shen lowered his gaze. "It was slipping."
"And you think that makes you useful?" Han hissed. "Useful gets you used. And broken."
Li Shen didn't answer.
Han's eyes flicked to the road, to the shrinking unit, to the missing sacks already piled on carts.
Then back to Li Shen.
"You gave food," Han said, voice low. "Your food."
Li Shen's throat tightened. "He was going cold."
Han's mouth twisted as if he didn't like the fact that it made sense.
"Fine," he said. "You want to pay? You pay."
He jerked his chin toward the storage shed. "Clerk. Ledger."
The thin older man from earlier appeared as if summoned by debt itself, book tucked under his arm. He opened it to a page already stained by years of ink and sweat.
Han pointed at Li Shen without looking away from him.
"Extra hour tonight," Han said. "No meal. And—" he paused, eyes narrowing "—a half-day added to his tally."
Li Shen's stomach tightened. Half a day wasn't pain.
It was time. It was his father's back, if Li Shen ever failed.
The clerk dipped his brush and wrote with a practiced scratch: a name, a mark, a number.
Ink sank into paper like a verdict.
Han leaned closer, so only Li Shen could hear.
"You do that again," he murmured, "and I don't add half days. I add full days. And if you get yourself beaten by soldiers, I still collect, because the ledger doesn't care about your bones."
Li Shen swallowed. "Yes."
Han straightened and barked, "Back to the bundles. Faster. You're not paid to stare at the world swallowing you."
Li Shen returned to the reeds.
His hands shook slightly as he gripped the rope again.
Not from fear.
From the knowledge that he'd chosen a road where costs didn't stop after the decision.
That night, long after the others ate and lay down, Li Shen stayed in the yard under Han's supervision, binding reeds until his fingers felt like wood. Hunger gnawed at him like an animal, making every breath shallow, every thought sharp around the edges.
When Han finally dismissed him, Li Shen stumbled back into the shed and lay on his back, staring at the roof beams.
Around him, boys breathed in heavy, exhausted rhythms.
Li Shen closed his eyes.
Sleep didn't come.
So he did the only thing he could do with a body that wouldn't stop aching and a world that wouldn't stop taking.
He tried to control one small part of it.
He drew a slow breath into his belly.
Held it—just a heartbeat longer than was comfortable.
Then let it go, long and steady, as if he could pour the day's noise out through his lungs.
Again.
And again.
At first it was only air.
Then, somewhere deep—below hunger, below pain—he felt something else. Not warmth exactly. Not strength.
A thin, stubborn steadiness.
As if a thread inside him had been pulled taut and refused to snap.
Li Shen opened his eyes in the dark.
He didn't understand what it meant.
But he understood this:
If the world was going to charge him for every breath, he would learn how to spend them on purpose.
And if the price of safety was grain, sweat, and blood—
Then he would start paying early.
Because one day, he intended to be the kind of man who could buy time back from death.
Not for the dead.
For the living.