The man arrived three days before the testing, though no one in Willow Creek Village noticed his arrival.
He walked the dirt road that connected their settlement to the larger world, his robes the color of morning mist, grey and white bleeding into one another in patterns that hurt to focus on. Not because they were bright. Because they suggested something the eye couldn't quite capture, like trying to see the moment between one heartbeat and the next.
The farmers working their fields didn't see him pass. The children playing near the well didn't hear his footsteps. The dogs, usually quick to bark at strangers, simply laid their heads back down and continued sleeping.
He stopped at the edge of a particular field.
Two figures worked the soil. An older woman whose movements carried the weight of decades, each swing of her hoe economical, practiced, containing no wasted motion. Beside her, a younger man worked with similar efficiency, though his rhythm held a different quality. His body knew what to do. His mind was elsewhere.
The man in mist-colored robes watched them for exactly seventeen breaths.
Then he turned and walked away, his footsteps leaving no marks in the dust.
Behind him, unaware of observation, the young man drove his hoe into earth that had been worked for generations.
Li Zhiwei struck the soil and felt it give.
The satisfying resistance of earth that had been turned before, that knew the shape of this particular hoe, this particular angle of descent. His shoulders absorbed the impact, distributed it through muscle and bone that had performed this exact motion thousands of times.
Lift. Swing. Impact. Pull.
The clod broke. A stone emerged, pale and smooth. He bent, collected it, added it to the pile that would eventually become part of someone's wall or foundation or garden border. Nothing was wasted in Willow Creek Village. Even stones had purpose.
Beside him, Aunt Han worked her own row. She had the efficiency of someone for whom farming wasn't labor but language, a conversation with earth that had been listening to her for longer than he'd been alive.
The sun hung low, turning the sky shades of copper and rust. Evening approaching. The time when farmers finished their work and returned to homes where rice waited to be cooked and bodies waited to be rested.
But Aunt Han wasn't moving toward home yet. Neither was he. They had perhaps another hour of light, and both of them knew without speaking that neither wanted to be alone with their thoughts tonight.
Tomorrow was the testing.
Li Zhiwei's hoe struck something harder than expected. He knelt, dug around it with his fingers, and extracted a root. Dead, thick as his thumb, stubborn. He pulled until it gave way, shook the dirt loose, tossed it toward the pile of organic waste that would eventually feed next year's crops.
"You're thinking too much," Aunt Han said.
"I'm working."
"You're moving like someone working while thinking about not working." She didn't look up from her task. "Tomorrow."
The word sat in the air between them. Heavy. Singular. Tomorrow.
Li Zhiwei drove his hoe into the ground and left it standing upright. "Tomorrow."
"The Han Xu Sect testing." Aunt Han paused, finally looked at him. Her face was weathered in the way clay vessels were weathered, harder and more defined with time rather than eroded. "You should sleep early tonight. Long walk at dawn."
"I know."
"Should eat well. Testing takes energy even if you're just standing there waiting."
"I know."
"Should manage your expectations." She turned back to her hoeing. "Most who go get rejected. That's just the way of things. Numbers don't care about hope."
Li Zhiwei pulled his hoe free and resumed working. "I know that too."
Aunt Han studied him for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she returned to her own row, her hoe biting into earth with the steady rhythm of someone who had made peace with repetition long ago.
They worked in silence for a time. The sun continued its descent. Somewhere in the distance, a bird called out. Another answered. The usual conversation of evening beginning.
"Your father would be proud," Aunt Han said suddenly. "That you're trying."
The words landed like stones in still water. Li Zhiwei watched the ripples spread outward but didn't touch them.
His father had died three years ago. Winter illness that came quietly and stayed until it finished what it started. His mother had died two years before that. Same kind of death. The slow kind that took its time.
But there had been no cultivators in Willow Creek Village. Only farmers and the earth they tended and the sky that gave or withheld rain according to principles no one controlled.
"He would also tell me not to get my hopes up," Li Zhiwei said.
"He would. Because he was practical." Aunt Han's hoe struck a stone. She bent, pried it free, examined it. Too large for building. Too small to be useful. She tossed it toward the edge of the field. "But practical and proud aren't opposites. He'd be both."
Li Zhiwei nodded but said nothing.
They worked until the sun touched the horizon and the light became too poor for safe hoeing. Aunt Han finally straightened, pressed both hands against her lower back, and stretched.
"That's enough for today. We'll finish this section after you return."
After. Not if. After assumed returning. Assumed rejection. Assumed life continuing in its established pattern because that was what life did for most people.
They collected their tools and walked back toward the small house that sat at the edge of the village. Two rooms. Packed earth floors. A hearth that had been rebuilt three times in Aunt Han's memory. Home in the way that anything familiar and functional became home, regardless of its qualities.
Inside, she began preparing the evening meal. Rice. Pickled vegetables. A small portion of dried fish that had been saved for occasions that warranted something more than plain grain.
Tomorrow qualified.
Li Zhiwei sat at the low table and watched her work. Efficient movements. No flourishes. Everything done in the order that made sense, that saved steps, that wasted neither time nor resources.
The silence between them was comfortable. They had lived together for three years now, since his father's death, and had learned the rhythms of cohabitation. When to speak. When to let quiet do the work of speaking.
But tonight, something needed to be said.
"Aunt Han," he began.
"Mm."
"When people talk about sensing things. In cultivation. What does that actually mean?"
Her hands paused. She set down the knife she'd been using to slice vegetables and turned to face him fully.
"That's a specific question."
"It's something I've been thinking about."
"For how long?"
"A while."
She was quiet for a moment, then returned to her cutting. But her movements were slower now, more deliberate. "You mean spiritual energy. What cultivators call Qi."
"Yes."
"It's supposed to be everywhere. In the air, in the ground, in living things. Cultivators can sense it naturally once they awaken."
"But before awakening," Li Zhiwei pressed. "Can they sense it then?"
"Usually not. That's what awakening means. Opening the perception that lets you feel what was always there but invisible."
"Usually not. But sometimes?"
Aunt Han set the knife down again. This time she didn't pick it back up immediately. "Some people with very strong potential claim they could feel something even before formal testing. A vague sensation. Warmth in certain places. Coolness in others. Different people describe it differently."
"I don't feel anything."
The words emerged flat. Statement of fact rather than complaint.
"Most people don't," Aunt Han said. "That's normal. It doesn't mean anything."
"Or it means exactly what it suggests."
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she resumed cutting vegetables, each stroke of the knife precise and final.
"Tomorrow will tell you what you need to know. No point in guessing tonight."
She was right. He knew she was right. But knowing something was pointless didn't prevent it from occupying his mind.
They ate in silence. The rice was good. The fish was salty enough to make each grain worthwhile. The pickled vegetables added texture and brightness. It was a meal that understood its purpose and fulfilled it without pretension.
After eating, Li Zhiwei helped clean the bowls and put things away. Then he lay down on his sleeping mat and stared at the ceiling.
Sleep didn't come easily.
He thought about the testing. About the Han Xu Sect. About the stories he'd heard from the few people in the village who'd ever attempted cultivation. Most of those stories ended in rejection. A handful ended in acceptance to outer sect labor positions. One ended in actual cultivation training, though that person had left the village years ago and never returned.
He thought about tomorrow. About standing in line with hundreds of others. About placing his hand on whatever device they used for testing. About waiting to see if anything would happen.
He thought about what it would mean if nothing happened.
Return to the village. Return to farming. Marry someone eventually. Raise children who would also farm. Grow old working the same fields his father had worked, his grandfather before that, generations stretching back until the origins became myth.
That wasn't a bad life. Wasn't a wrong life. Just a particular life, one of countless others like it.
But it wasn't the life that had occupied his thoughts for the past year. Wasn't the possibility that made him wake up feeling like something was waiting just beyond the horizon.
He tried to sleep. Failed. Tried again. Eventually succeeded, though his dreams were fragmented things that made no sense when he tried to remember them upon waking.
When he did wake, it was still dark. Too early for dawn, but also exactly the right time because lying awake was worse than walking.
He dressed quietly, careful not to wake Aunt Han. Found the small pack she'd prepared the night before. Rice balls wrapped in leaves. A flask of water. A spare cloth in case the weather turned.
He was nearly out the door when her voice came from the darkness.
"Li Zhiwei."
He stopped.
"Yes?"
"Whatever happens today. Come home after."
He nodded, then realized she couldn't see the gesture in the darkness. "I will."
"Good. The field still needs finishing."
He smiled despite himself. The field. Yes. The field would need finishing regardless of what today revealed.
He closed the door carefully behind him and began walking.
The Han Xu Sect was three hours away on foot if you maintained a steady pace. The road was well-traveled, packed dirt that showed the passage of many feet over many years. As dawn began to break, other figures appeared on the road, all heading in the same direction for the same purpose.
Some walked in groups, talking nervously or with forced confidence. Others walked alone, lost in their own thoughts.
Li Zhiwei walked alone because there was no one else from his village making this journey. He was the only one who'd bothered to try this year.
The sky gradually lightened. Dawn arrived without ceremony, the way it always did. Just darkness giving way to grey giving way to light, the sun rising because rising was what it did.
By the time he reached the Han Xu Sect's outer walls, morning was well established.
The walls were tall. Not impossibly tall, not