The yard smelled different after the river bends.
Not because the mud had changed, or because the cold had gotten sharper—though it had, in a way that made every breath scrape the back of his throat—but because people had seen something too close to the edge and returned pretending they hadn't.
A cart wheel was repaired with more care. A rope knot was checked twice. Men spoke less, and when they did, their words had the flat tone of those who didn't want to invite the world to notice them.
Li Shen pushed the empty carts into their place and stood for a moment with his hands on the frame, letting the ache in his arms settle into something he could carry.
Han's clerk didn't look up when Li Shen passed. He didn't need to. The ledger already had Li Shen's name on it.
Names were easier than faces.
Han waited until noon—until work had begun and bodies had warmed, until hunger and routine had dulled the sharpest edges of last night—before he made his point.
He called them to the back corner where the cooking fire sat under a lean-to of warped boards. A pot of porridge simmered, thick with grain and thin on generosity. Steam rose in a weak ribbon and vanished fast into cold air.
The yard hands gathered with bowls in their hands. No one argued. Arguing cost breath, and breath was labor.
Han didn't start with a speech. He started with a board.
His clerk propped a narrow plank beside the pot, and on it, in charcoal lines, was a list.
Not names.
Numbers.
Li Shen's eyes moved over them slowly. Grain per bowl. Salt per bowl. Oil—rare enough that it was written like a warning.
Han tapped the plank with a thick finger.
"Prices climbed," he said. "Don't ask me why. You already know why."
A few heads turned toward the road without thinking, toward the direction the soldiers had taken when they left. Toward the river. Toward whatever lived in the brush and didn't care about contracts or hunger.
Han looked at them the way a man looked at weather.
"Here's how this works," he continued. "You'll be paid at the end. Until then, every bowl you eat is written down."
His clerk lifted the ledger slightly, as if to remind them it had weight.
Li Shen felt something tighten in his gut. Not surprise—he'd known Han kept accounts like a priest kept sins—but the clean clarity of hearing it stated out loud. A rule you could not pretend you hadn't heard.
A man at the edge of the group, older and bitter-eyed, muttered, "So we work to pay for the food that lets us work."
Han's gaze slid to him. "Yes."
No indignation. No shame. As if the sentence itself was simply the shape of the world.
"If you don't like it," Han added, voice calm, "go home. Eat your own grain. Freeze under your own roof. Pray your children don't start coughing when the wind turns. I'm not keeping anyone."
No one moved.
Because no one in the yard was here out of preference. They were here because the arithmetic of survival had narrowed their choices into a corridor.
Han nodded once, as if that settled the matter.
"Eat," he said. "Then work."
And just like that, hunger became not a feeling but a line item.
The week after the river run, Han's yard tightened its rhythm.
He didn't ask for heroism. He asked for output.
Mornings were water and wood until fingers went numb. Afternoons were field work—turning soil that didn't want to be turned, pulling weeds that grew as if they were paid to. Evenings were repairs: tool handles, ropes, cart frames—anything that could break and take days of labor with it.
Li Shen learned quickly what Han valued.
Not strength. Strength could be borrowed from youth and muscle, and it failed when bodies failed.
Han valued reliability. The habit of doing the next thing even when nothing inside you wanted to.
Li Shen had that.
Not because he was special.
Because he'd learned it in a home that had gone quiet in the space where a voice used to be.
At night, when the yard settled and the other boys fell into sleep like stones dropped into water, Li Shen lay still and listened to his own breath.
In.
Hold.
Out.
He didn't call it training. He didn't call it cultivation.
He called it not falling apart.
The cloth sachet under his shirt—small, stitched by hands that had once smelled of flour and woodsmoke—pressed warm against his chest. It wasn't magical. It wasn't a talisman.
It was proof that someone had loved him with a kind of attention the world did not naturally provide.
He touched it once, then let his hand fall away.
If he held on too hard, the ache sharpened into something that ate his sleep.
If he pretended it didn't exist, he felt hollow in a way that frightened him.
So he did what he always did: he kept it close, and he kept moving.
On the eighth day, Han sent Li Shen and Shen Yu to the market road with a short list.
Salt. Lamp oil—if it existed. Twine, if the price wasn't insulting.
Shen Yu took the list like it was punishment.
"It's a trap," he muttered as they walked. "He sends us to see the prices so we stop thinking he's cheating us."
Li Shen said, "He can cheat us anyway."
Shen Yu snorted. "Exactly."
The bourgade market wasn't a proper market. It was a road with stalls, tarps, and men who knew what you needed by the way your eyes lingered.
Even before they reached it, Li Shen felt the shift.
People moved with their shoulders slightly raised, as if bracing against an invisible shove. Conversations ended when strangers passed too close. A mother pulled her child behind her without looking ashamed of it.
At the oil stall, the vendor's face was pinched, his hands red from cold.
Shen Yu asked for a price.
The vendor named it.
Shen Yu stared. "That's robbery."
The vendor didn't blink. "Then don't buy."
"What changed?" Shen Yu demanded.
The vendor jerked his chin toward the road. "Ask the men who marched out last night. Ask the beasts that stopped them from marching out the night before."
Li Shen watched the vendor's hands as he spoke. The man's fingers were stained with soot and oil, but there was a tremor there too—faint, constant.
Fear wasn't just in faces. It lived in the hands.
They moved down the line. Salt was still salt, but the price had risen enough to make Shen Yu's jaw tighten. Twine was scarce.
At the far end of the market road, near the wine stall that had gone quiet and the butcher who looked like he'd rather not talk, a small knot of people stood around a man in a patched coat.
Li Shen didn't need to see anything dramatic to know what he was looking at.
The crowd's posture told him.
That slight tilt of bodies away. The careful distance. The way voices dropped as if the air itself might report them.
A cultivator.
Not high. Not radiant. But present, and presence was enough.
The man spoke with someone holding papers—an official clerk, not a sect disciple, not a noble. Just a man whose job was to make the world legible on paper.
Li Shen couldn't hear the words, but he caught the cadence: short, impatient, used to being obeyed.
Shen Yu swallowed. "That's… one of them."
Li Shen didn't answer. He watched.
The cultivator lifted a hand and pointed at something on the paper. The clerk nodded quickly, making a mark. No one else spoke.
It wasn't power like a sword.
It was power like a decision.
Quiet. Final. Accepted.
The cultivator turned slightly, and his gaze swept over the crowd without stopping.
Li Shen felt the same pressure in his ribs he'd felt at the river bends—mild, almost casual, like the world reminding him that it could press harder if it wanted.
The cultivator's eyes moved on.
Li Shen exhaled slowly, careful not to make it look like relief.
Shen Yu muttered, "Even the bottom of them makes the whole road behave."
Li Shen thought of his mother's last winter. Thought of how the village had behaved then—quiet, helpless, polite in the face of something that didn't negotiate.
He looked at Shen Yu and said, softly, "People behave when they know something can end them."
Shen Yu stared at him like he didn't know whether to agree or to be unsettled.
They bought what they could afford and began the walk back.
On the way, they passed the Lin shop.
It looked half-stripped—bolts of cloth tied in bundles, jars wrapped, the counter cleared as if someone had decided to move before the road decided for them.
The shopkeeper stood by the doorway speaking in a low, tight voice to an older woman. He didn't sound angry. He sounded careful—like every word had a cost.
Behind the counter, a girl sorted coins into small stacks with quick, precise movements. She never looked up. She didn't need to. The room already told her what was happening.
Shen Yu caught Li Shen's glance and nudged him. "Don't stare. When a family starts packing, it means they've run out of safe options."
Li Shen looked away and kept walking, but the image stayed with him: a shop preparing to vanish, quietly, before winter or debt made the choice for them.
Back at the yard, Han didn't ask for a report. He saw the purchases and understood what the prices meant.
He made a small sound in the back of his throat—half annoyance, half acceptance.
Then he said, as if confirming a calculation, "Good. You've seen it."
His clerk took the salt and wrote a new line.
Li Shen watched the charcoal move. Watched numbers become obligations.
Han nodded toward the pot. "Eat."
Shen Yu's mouth tightened. He hesitated before stepping forward, as if the bowl had become heavier now that it had a visible cost.
Li Shen stepped forward without hesitation.
Not because it didn't matter.
Because hesitation didn't reduce the price. It only made you weaker.
He took his bowl and sat on the edge of the yard near the woodpile, eating slowly, forcing each swallow to be deliberate.
Across from him, a yard hand—older, with split knuckles—muttered, "We work all day and the ledger still says we owe."
Shen Yu muttered back, "That's the point."
Li Shen didn't join either side. He ate. He watched. He listened.
When he finished, he stood and walked to Han's clerk.
The clerk looked up, annoyed. "What?"
Li Shen kept his voice steady. "How much does a bowl cost now?"
The clerk's eyes narrowed slightly, surprised by the question. "Depends on the day."
"Today," Li Shen said.
The clerk named the number.
Li Shen did the arithmetic in his head. Not perfectly. Not elegantly. But enough.
He swallowed once. "How many bowls until the end of the season?"
The clerk stared at him. "Are you trying to frighten yourself?"
Li Shen said, "I'm trying to know."
The clerk snorted and looked back down at the ledger. "Ask Han if you want extra work. Don't ask me to build you a coffin."
Li Shen nodded once and turned.
He found Han near the tool shed, checking the edge of a spade with his thumb.
Li Shen stopped at a respectful distance. Not close enough to look like insolence, not far enough to look like fear.
Han looked up. "What."
Li Shen said, "I want the night shift."
There wasn't an official night shift—nothing written, nothing announced. But there were always tasks that could be done when others slept: splitting wood, repairing rope, sharpening tools, cleaning the pot area so rats didn't get bold.
Han stared at him for a long moment.
"You want to pay faster," Han said.
Li Shen didn't deny it. "I want my work to mean something at the end."
Han's gaze raked over Li Shen—thin shoulders, chapped hands, eyes too old for ten.
"Night work costs sleep," Han said. "Sleep costs growth. Growth costs strength. Strength costs work."
Li Shen felt the loop tighten around him like a rope.
He said, simply, "I still want it."
Han's mouth twitched—neither smile nor pity.
"Fine," Han said. "You do wood and rope. If you cut yourself, you pay for the cloth. If you fall asleep and ruin a tool edge, you pay for the tool."
Li Shen nodded. "Understood."
Han added, as if it were an afterthought, "And if you start shaking from cold, you stop. A dead boy doesn't pay anything."
Li Shen held Han's gaze. "I'll stop if my hands stop obeying."
Han grunted, satisfied with that phrasing. "Good. You're learning to measure yourself."
Measure.
Ledger.
Cost.
Li Shen walked away with the night's work already settling onto his shoulders like a pack.
That evening, after the last bowls were counted and the yard hands collapsed into sleep, Li Shen stayed awake.
He split wood until his palms were raw, then sat under the lean-to and worked rope fibers with numb fingers, twisting and tightening, retying frayed ends until they would hold.
His breath became his metronome.
In.
Hold.
Out.
The cold tried to eat him from the outside in. Fatigue tried to eat him from the inside out.
He didn't fight either like an enemy.
He treated them like weather.
He lasted until his hands began to shake.
Not from fear.
From the kind of weakness that made tools dangerous.
He stopped, wrapped his fingers in cloth, and sat against the woodpile, eyes half closed.
In the dark, he heard the bourgade's distant noise—dogs, a muffled argument, a baby crying once and then being soothed.
Life continuing.
Somewhere beyond the yard, beyond the market road, beyond the river bends, something with teeth moved through brush and did not care about ledgers.
And somewhere in the bourgade, a family packed their shop in half silence, their girl counting coins as if precision could hold the world together.
Li Shen touched the sachet under his shirt once, briefly.
Then he let his hand fall.
He wasn't strong.
He wasn't chosen.
He wasn't anything the world would call promising.
But he could do one thing.
He could keep paying.
He could keep standing.
And if he kept standing long enough, maybe one day the price of a bowl would stop being the highest number in his life.
He opened his eyes and watched the dark until it thinned into the first gray of morning.