By the time Li Shen stopped counting the days, the days had already started counting him.
The first week at Han's was nothing but edges—cold edges, hunger edges, rope edges that bit through skin and left thin red lines like warnings. He learned the yard's rhythm the way you learned a bruise: by being forced to notice it.
Up before dawn.
Water first.
Bundles and knots.
Hauling until the shoulders burned into numbness.
A thin bowl at midday if Han decided you had earned the privilege of not fainting.
Then work again, until the light failed and the yard stopped pretending it was human.
At night, the shed swallowed them, and sleep became a scarce resource traded for silence.
Li Shen didn't trade.
He lay still, listening, learning.
He learned who snored and who didn't. Who cried quietly into straw and who stared at the beams like they were waiting for permission to collapse. He learned which boys woke hungry enough to gamble their dignity for a crust.
And he learned something else—something that mattered more than rope or barrels.
He learned that Han's yard did not run on strength.
It ran on paper.
The ledger was kept in the storage shed, under the clerk's arm or under his elbow or under his gaze. It was always there, like a knife you couldn't see until it was pressed to your throat.
Li Shen saw the marks that followed men around: quarter-days, half-days, full days added like bruises. He saw how Han's voice became law the moment the clerk's brush touched ink.
Ink did not argue.
Ink did not forgive.
Ink did not forget.
That was what made it dangerous.
Li Shen watched the clerk write again on the third day—two workers who had been slow from fever, an old man who had dropped a sack and spilled grain, a boy who had argued over a ration.
Each time the brush moved, Li Shen felt his jaw tighten.
Not in anger.
In refusal.
He had grown up with a mother who kept a household alive by making sure nothing vanished without being accounted for. Not because she loved numbers—but because numbers decided whether you ate in winter.
Li Mei had used pebbles and beans when she taught him. A small pile on the floor. One moved to the side when it was spent. Another moved back when it was saved.
"Don't lie to yourself," she had said once, her fingers quick, her voice gentle. "If you don't know what you have, you'll lose it without noticing."
Li Shen had thought she meant grain.
Now he understood she meant everything.
That night, after the others fell into heavy sleep, Li Shen reached into the inner seam of his shirt and pulled out the small cloth sachet.
It was no bigger than his palm, stitched from a scrap of old fabric Li Mei had cut from a worn sleeve. The thread was uneven. The knot was lopsided. It was not pretty.
It was hers.
The dried herb inside had lost most of its scent, but when he pressed it between his fingers and warmed it against his chest, a faint bitterness rose—like smoke, like winter, like the inside of a home that had once been alive.
Li Shen held it until his breathing steadied.
He didn't pray.
He didn't cry.
He simply anchored himself to the fact that she had existed, that she had tried, that her hands had once made something meant to protect him from cold winds.
It hadn't saved her.
But it had kept him from losing the shape of her.
When he put the sachet away, he made the decision that would become a rule in his bones:
When I go back, I go to her first.
Not to ask for forgiveness. Not to promise miracles.
To face the debt, and then move.
---
On the eighth day, Shen Yu noticed the way Li Shen's eyes tracked the ledger.
"You like numbers?" Shen Yu muttered as they hauled bundles to the east stack.
Li Shen didn't look up. "I like not being cheated."
Shen Yu snorted. "Same thing."
Li Shen tightened a knot until the reed bundle stopped shifting. "My mother kept our house straight," he said, voice flat. "My father counts days the way other men count coins."
Shen Yu glanced at him sideways. "You're ten. Why talk like you're forty?"
Li Shen kept working. "Because if I talk like I'm ten, Han will charge me for it."
Shen Yu didn't laugh this time. His face stayed neutral, but his hands moved a fraction faster.
Later that afternoon, Han sent Li Shen and two others to carry a cart of reed bundles to a back storage area. It wasn't far, but the ground there was rough and the wheel stuck twice. Every time it stuck, the older boys cursed and yanked. Every time they yanked, the rope strained.
Li Shen studied the wheel. Then the ground. Then the angle of the cart.
"Lift the right side first," he said.
One of the boys—taller, older, already irritated by being assigned to hauling with "the new one"—glared at him. "Don't tell me—"
Li Shen didn't argue. He placed his shoulder under the cart's frame and lifted, forcing the weight just enough to change the wheel's bite.
Shen Yu, who had been assigned behind them, saw it and immediately braced on the other side.
The wheel freed.
The cart rolled.
The older boy's glare didn't soften, but he didn't speak again.
That was how it worked here: the yard did not reward intelligence with praise.
It rewarded it with slightly less pain.
---
The first real marker of time came with weather.
The pale wind shifted.
The air grew wetter, colder. A thin, steady rain began to fall in the evenings and linger in the mornings, turning the yard's dirt into mud that clung to shoes like it wanted to keep them from leaving.
Work changed under rain.
Rope became heavier. Reed bundles absorbed water and doubled in weight. Hands cracked faster because skin stayed damp, and damp skin split like rotten wood.
Li Shen's fingers bled again. The blood mixed with mud and turned his palms into dark stains. He wrapped them with rough cloth when he could, but cloth cost. Everything cost.
At night, boys coughed more. One had a fever that made his teeth chatter so hard it sounded like stones tapping.
Han didn't care about coughs.
He cared about output.
"If you can stand, you work," he said. "If you can't stand, you learn what the shed smells like when you rot."
The boy with the fever stood.
He worked.
And by the end of the day, he collapsed in the yard, face pale, lips bluish, eyes unfocused.
Han looked at him like he was a broken tool.
"Drag him inside," Han snapped. "If he dies, he dies in the shed, not on my dirt."
A few boys moved toward the fallen worker.
Shen Yu hesitated, eyes calculating. He could see the problem: dragging the boy cost strength. Strength cost food. Food cost days. Days cost the ledger.
Li Shen moved anyway.
Not fast. Not heroic.
Practical.
He knelt, slid his hands under the boy's shoulders, and nodded to another boy to take the legs.
"Don't pull his arms," Li Shen said. "You'll dislocate him."
The other boy blinked. "Why do you know that?"
Li Shen didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
They got the feverish boy into the shed and laid him on straw near the door where the air was less stale. Li Shen loosened the boy's collar, then pulled out his own thin blanket—the only warmth he had.
He hesitated.
Blankets weren't comfort.
Blankets were survival.
Then he placed it over the boy's chest anyway.
Shen Yu watched him, expression unreadable.
"That's your blanket," Shen Yu said.
Li Shen looked at the boy's shaking body. "He'll burn it off."
"Or he'll die," Shen Yu replied, voice low. "And you'll freeze."
Li Shen didn't deny it. "Then I'll work harder tomorrow."
Shen Yu stared at him as if trying to decide whether Li Shen was stupid or dangerous.
Maybe both.
---
The cost came that same night.
When food was handed out—thin porridge, a hard crust—there was a commotion near the corner where the smaller boys slept. A younger kid, no more than nine, held his bowl with trembling hands.
"It was here," the kid whispered. "I had it—"
A bigger boy stood over him, face blank, chewing slowly.
No one said anything.
No one wanted to be next.
Li Shen saw the math instantly: the bigger boy had stolen because hunger was a knife. The smaller boy would go hungry because the world didn't care about fairness.
Shen Yu's eyes flicked to Li Shen, warning him without words.
Don't.
Li Shen stood.
He didn't point. He didn't accuse.
He walked to Han's clerk, who was seated on a low stool with the ledger on his knees, counting out leftover measures.
Li Shen stopped two paces away.
The clerk looked up, annoyed. "What."
Li Shen held out his own crust of bread. "Take this," he said. "Mark it as mine. Give it to him."
The clerk stared at the bread as if it was an insult. "Why would I—"
"Because if he doesn't eat," Li Shen said evenly, "he collapses tomorrow. Then someone drags him. Then work slows. Then Han loses."
The clerk's eyes narrowed. He wasn't kind. But he understood leverage.
He took the bread and scribbled a small note in the margin—an informal mark, not a full penalty, but a record all the same.
"Half ration," the clerk muttered. "Voluntary."
He tossed the bread to the smaller boy without looking at him.
The bigger boy's jaw tightened. His eyes landed on Li Shen, cold and hungry.
Shen Yu shifted beside Li Shen, weight moving subtly, not offering a fight but showing that Li Shen would not stand alone.
Li Shen met the bigger boy's gaze once, then looked away.
He wasn't trying to win.
He was trying to stop the yard from becoming a place where the only law was teeth.
Later, when the shed darkened, Shen Yu leaned in and spoke quietly.
"You just bought yourself an enemy," he said.
Li Shen's voice was flat. "I bought a day."
Shen Yu's mouth twitched. "You really talk like an old man."
Li Shen didn't respond.
He reached into his shirt and touched the cloth sachet through the fabric.
Warmth didn't come.
But the thin steadiness did.
---
Two weeks became a month.
The rain turned into sleet twice, then stopped, then returned. The pale wind stayed. Hands cracked, healed, cracked again. Boys disappeared from the shed—sent away, taken by sickness, or simply unable to keep paying.
Han didn't mourn them.
He replaced them.
Li Shen stopped thinking of time as "days."
He started thinking of time as "marks."
Half-days. Full days. Interest.
And at night, when the shed was quiet enough, he took a piece of charcoal from the yard's firepit and a flat scrap of wood the size of his palm.
He drew.
Not pictures.
Lines.
A column like the ledger.
A mark for a day.
A half-mark for half a day.
A small circle for a ration.
A slash for a penalty.
He practiced until the charcoal broke, then rubbed the wood clean with his sleeve and practiced again.
Shen Yu watched once, then twice.
"What are you doing," Shen Yu asked on the third night, voice low.
Li Shen didn't look up. "Learning the shape of the chain."
Shen Yu frowned. "Why."
Li Shen paused long enough to make the answer clean.
"I promised someone," he said. "A girl back home. I'll teach her how to count so she doesn't get skinned by people like Han."
Shen Yu stared at him.
Then he gave a small, almost amused exhale.
"You're going to survive," Shen Yu said, as if it was a conclusion, not a compliment.
Li Shen went back to marking lines.
In.
Hold.
Out.
Not power.
Not yet.
Just the habit of refusing to be blind.
And the quiet certainty that when he finally returned to the village—whenever Han released his grip—
He would go to the grave first.
Because every step away from home was a kind of leaving.
And Li Shen did not leave without facing the name of what he'd lost.