Han kept his promise the way he kept everything: not with warmth, not with ceremony, but with a line in a ledger and a sack on a shoulder.
The morning after he said the families would receive grain, he didn't gather the bourgade to announce it. He didn't send his clerk to make speeches about duty. He simply woke the yard before dawn, lit the fire, and pointed at the storeroom.
"Three sacks," he said. "And cloth."
His clerk hesitated. "Han—"
Han's gaze cut across him. "Names were written. Debts were made. We pay."
The clerk swallowed the rest of his argument like a stone.
Li Shen stepped forward without being called. That was becoming a habit, and he didn't know whether to be proud of it or wary.
Han looked at him. "You're coming."
Li Shen didn't ask why. He knew why. He'd seen Han's eyes last night—hard, tired, calculating. Han would send men who could carry weight and keep their mouths shut. A boy was useful in a way grown men weren't: he looked harmless, and people didn't blame him when they cried.
Han hooked a finger toward the sacks. "Lift."
Li Shen slid his hands under the rough weave and heaved. Grain shifted inside like a living thing, heavy and stubborn. It pulled at his shoulders and settled into his arms with the intimate cruelty of necessity.
Han's clerk added a folded bundle of coarse cloth on top of the second sack, then tied it down with rope.
"Time you lose on this," Han said, not looking at Li Shen, "comes out of your pay."
Li Shen blinked once. There it was. The cost. Han didn't do anything that didn't have one.
He nodded. "Write it down."
Han's mouth twitched, like the earlier half-smile trying to happen and failing. "I will."
They left the yard as the sky turned from black to gray. Frost filmed the hard ground in a thin sheen that cracked under their feet. It was the first frost of the year—early, sharp, the kind that arrived in these lands as if winter couldn't wait.
The bourgade was already awake.
Not because it wanted to be.
Because fear didn't let people sleep long.
Faces watched from doorways. Curtains twitched. Someone whispered a prayer under their breath like it might keep teeth out of the dark.
Li Shen felt eyes follow the sacks more than they followed him.
Grain was safety. Grain was survival. Grain was the difference between a thin winter and a deadly one.
And they were carrying it away.
The first house belonged to the wife.
She lived near the lower row, where the roofs sagged and the mud between buildings never fully dried. Her door was half open, as if she hadn't remembered she still had the right to close it.
When Han knocked, the sound was dull and final.
A woman appeared in the gap. Her face was blotched with old tears and new sleeplessness. She had the look of someone who'd been slapped by reality so hard her mind was still ringing.
Her eyes dropped to the sacks.
Then to Han.
Then—finally—to Li Shen, as if she needed to see something living to believe she was awake.
"Han," she said, voice raw.
Han didn't soften. He didn't harden either. He just existed, stubborn as a fence post.
"Name," he said.
Her throat bobbed. "Mei Lan."
Han nodded once. "Your husband's name?"
She flinched at the question like it was a blade.
"Gao—" Her voice broke. She took a breath. "Gao Shu."
Han's clerk, standing behind them with a brush and a small slate, wrote it down without looking up.
Han said, "He died on the slope."
Mei Lan's hands tightened around the edge of the door. "I know."
"Then you know why this comes," Han said. "Three sacks. Cloth. Not charity. Payment."
Mei Lan's eyes flooded again, slow and helpless. "He didn't die for payment."
Han's gaze didn't move. "He died because the road needed teeth. Payment is what's left for the living."
Silence filled the gap between them.
Then a small head peeked out from behind Mei Lan's hip—just a child, perhaps five or six, hair sticking up in tufts like straw.
The child stared at the sacks, then at Li Shen's hands gripping the rope, and didn't look away.
Li Shen's chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with weight.
He thought of Zhou Liang laughing by the river, of Qian Mei's careful eyes, of Da Niu's loud confidence before the world taught him fear.
A child that age should still believe the world made sense.
This one didn't.
Han's clerk cleared his throat. "Where should we—"
Mei Lan stepped aside mechanically. "Inside."
They carried the sacks over the threshold.
The house smelled of stale smoke and boiled water and the faint sourness of grief that had soaked into cloth. There was a single pot on the stove. No meat. No vegetables. Only thin porridge residue scraped too many times.
Han set the first sack down with a grunt. The second. The third.
He didn't offer comfort. He didn't touch her shoulder. He simply placed the cloth bundle on the table.
Mei Lan stared at it like she'd forgotten what cloth was for.
Then her eyes went to Li Shen again.
"How old are you?" she asked suddenly.
Li Shen blinked. "Ten," he said—ten by the village count, the way people measured years here. He didn't add the explanation. No one cared about precision when hunger was a sharper calendar than birthdays.
Mei Lan's lips trembled. "My husband… he said he'd come back before our boy turned six."
Han's clerk stopped writing.
Han didn't react.
Li Shen didn't know what to do with that sentence. It didn't ask for anything. It didn't accuse. It was just a fact that had nowhere to go.
So he did the only thing he could do: he looked at the child.
The boy stared back with too much quiet in his eyes.
Li Shen forced his voice steady. "He won't starve," he said, nodding toward the sacks. "Not this winter."
Mei Lan's mouth opened, then closed. A sound came out—half laugh, half sob. She bowed her head and pressed her forehead against her own knuckles like she was trying to hold herself together through pressure.
Han turned as if that was the end of it.
At the doorway, Li Shen paused.
He reached into his pocket and felt the small piece of chalk he'd given the peddler to take back to Qian Mei—gone, already sent. Good.
His fingers found a few loose grains stuck in the seam of his sleeve. He brushed them off without thinking, then stopped.
He looked back at the sacks.
Three sacks sounded like a lot. It wasn't. Not for a winter. Not for a household that had lost its strongest hands.
He swallowed.
When Han stepped outside, Li Shen lingered one breath longer and took a small handful from the torn corner of the top sack where grain had spilled. He didn't take enough to show. Just enough to feel wrong.
He slid it into Mei Lan's cooking pot—dry grains hitting metal with a soft, honest sound.
Mei Lan lifted her head sharply.
Li Shen met her gaze and said nothing.
He stepped out.
They walked to the second house with the remaining cloth and one smaller sack Han had set aside.
This one belonged to the father.
An old man sat on a low stool in the yard, hands resting on his knees as if he'd been told to sit there and wait for something that would never arrive.
He didn't stand when they approached.
Not because he was rude.
Because grief had taken the strength out of his legs the way sickness took breath out of lungs.
Han stopped in front of him. "Old Gao."
The old man's eyes lifted slowly. They were red-rimmed, but dry.
"I heard," Old Gao said. His voice was like gravel. "I heard from the mouth of a man who still had blood on his boots."
Han nodded. "Three sacks to the wife. One here. Cloth. Payment."
Old Gao stared at the sack as if it were an insult.
"My son didn't sell his life," he said.
Han's tone didn't change. "Your son was sold the day he signed his name to the unit."
Old Gao's jaw trembled. He didn't argue. He didn't have the energy to fight a truth that sharp.
His gaze shifted to Li Shen. "You're the boy working for Han."
Li Shen inclined his head slightly. "Yes."
Old Gao looked him up and down the way old men looked at tools—assessing what they could take before they broke. "You carried it yourself."
Li Shen said, "Yes."
Old Gao's eyes narrowed. "Why?"
It wasn't a moral question. It was practical, almost offended.
Li Shen answered honestly. "Because if the road breaks, the bourgade breaks. If the bourgade breaks, the villages starve. My father is in one of those villages."
Old Gao stared for a long moment.
Then he gave a small, ugly laugh. "Good. At least one child still knows what matters."
Han's clerk set the sack down gently. "We'll—"
Old Gao cut him off with a wave. "Go. I'll store it."
He didn't reach for it right away. He just looked at it and breathed, slow, like the sack was proof the world still followed some kind of rules even if they were cruel ones.
As they turned to leave, Old Gao spoke again, quieter.
"The beast will come back," he said.
Han didn't deny it. "Maybe."
Old Gao spat into the dirt. "Maybe? A 'maybe' killed my son."
Li Shen's stomach tightened. "It was driven back," he said, repeating the words he hated.
Old Gao's eyes snapped to him. "Driven back by who?"
Li Shen hesitated.
He saw the oilcloth bundle in his mind—the careful wrap at the cultivator's waist. The way the captain had looked away. The way power moved through a yard like cold air, noticed but never challenged.
"A cultivator," Li Shen said.
Old Gao's mouth twisted. "Cultivators. They come, they take, they leave. And the rest of us count corpses and grain."
Li Shen didn't contradict him.
Because that was the truth.
And the truth had teeth.
On the walk back, Han didn't speak for a long time.
Frost crunched under their feet. Smoke still clung low in the air. The bourgade watched them again from doorways—watched the empty rope, the lighter hands.
Someone muttered, "They gave it away."
Someone else hissed, "Shut up."
Li Shen kept his eyes forward.
He could feel the weight of what he'd done as clearly as if the sack was still on his back.
A handful of grain.
A small theft.
A small mercy.
A small stupidity, depending on who you asked.
When they reached the yard, Han stopped at the storeroom door and looked at Li Shen.
"You took grain," Han said.
It wasn't a question.
Li Shen's pulse jumped anyway. He forced his face still. "Yes."
Han's eyes were sharp. "How much?"
Li Shen didn't lie. Lying was how people died slowly and called it living. "A handful."
Han stared at him for a long moment.
Then he turned to his clerk. "Write it."
The clerk's brush paused. "Han… it was for—"
"I don't care what it was for," Han said, and his voice finally had an edge. Not anger. Boundary. "If he wants to be generous, he pays for generosity."
The clerk wrote.
Han looked back at Li Shen. "That handful comes out of your pay. And because you did it without asking, there's a penalty."
Li Shen's mouth went dry. "How much?"
"Two days' worth," Han said.
Li Shen didn't flinch. He nodded once. "Fine."
Han's gaze narrowed. "Fine?"
Li Shen met his eyes. "Yes."
Han exhaled slowly, like he was deciding whether to respect the answer or break it.
Then he said, "Next time you want to 'help,' you ask. If I say no, you decide whether you disobey again. But you will not pretend disobedience has no cost."
Li Shen said, "I understand."
Han watched him a moment longer.
Then Han said, quieter, almost unwillingly, "You did the right thing."
Li Shen's breath caught.
Han immediately ruined the softness by adding, "But the right thing done stupidly gets you killed."
Li Shen nodded. "I understand."
Han turned away. "Go work."
Li Shen went.
His hands were already cracked. The rope already cut into his palms. The frost already lived under his nails.
He worked anyway.
Because what else was there?
That night, Shen Yu found him behind the shed, rubbing oil into his knuckles to keep them from splitting further.
Shen Yu's eyes flicked to Li Shen's hands. "You gave grain."
Li Shen didn't look up. "I didn't give. I stole."
Shen Yu's mouth twitched, uncertain. "Han knows?"
"He knows everything," Li Shen said.
Shen Yu hesitated. "Why would you do it? You're already working to send grain back to your father."
Li Shen paused.
His mother's voice rose in his memory—scolding, warm, alive. His father's silence rose beside it—heavy, stubborn, mechanical.
And then there was that child's stare in Mei Lan's doorway: too quiet, too early.
Li Shen said, carefully, "If my father dies one winter because the road breaks and I didn't do what I could… I'll never forgive myself."
Shen Yu blinked. "That's about your father."
"Yes," Li Shen said.
Shen Yu waited, as if expecting a noble conclusion.
Li Shen didn't give him one.
After a moment, Shen Yu sighed. "You're not normal."
Li Shen finally looked up, eyes flat in the dark. "No one who survives here is normal."
Shen Yu laughed softly, humorless. "True."
He started to leave, then stopped. "How do you know how to… keep your hands from tearing like that?"
Li Shen glanced down at his knuckles.
He could have said, I learned here. He could have pretended it was instinct.
Instead, he answered with the truth, because the truth was the only thing he trusted.
"My mother," he said.
Shen Yu's brows lifted.
Li Shen's voice stayed even. "She used to rub oil on my father's hands in winter. When he came back from cutting wood. And Old He—an old woman in my village—she'd yell at drunks and roll them on their side so they didn't choke on their own stupidity. I watched. I remembered."
Shen Yu stared at him, then looked away as if embarrassed by the intimacy of that knowledge.
Li Shen lowered his gaze again.
A handful of grain.
Two days' penalty.
A lesson paid for in numbers.
And somewhere inside him, something smaller and harder had taken shape—quiet, persistent, dangerous.
Not saintliness.
Not softness.
A rule.
Protect what keeps you alive.
His father.
His promises.
The thin thread of people he could still reach.
If power existed, he would take it—not to save the world, not to be righteous, not to shine.
To keep his house from going quiet again.
Outside, the wind slid along the roofs, colder than before. Somewhere beyond the bourgade, in the dark hills, the wounded beast still breathed.
And the cultivator's oilcloth bundle—whatever it held—remained unseen, owned, and untouchable.
The world had its rules.
Li Shen was learning them.
One debt at a time.