Old Wei saw them on the road. Nine figures in grey robes with swords across their backs.
His hands shook. He pressed them into the wet earth at the ditch edge and held them there until they stopped.
He picked up his hoe and walked back toward the village.
---
Shen Qing assessed the village entrance from ten paces. Two wooden posts and a crossbeam. No wards. He stepped through.
The village smelled of woodsmoke and drying grain. A dog in the dirt opened one eye at them and closed it.
"Standard survey," Shen Qing said. "Jiang He, east quarter. Shu Yan, center. Yun Xiao, north. Report only."
They moved.
Shen Qing crossed the square. An old woman sat on a low stool shelling beans into a basket. White hair pulled flat against her skull. Her hands did not stop.
"Welcome," she said, without looking up. "You've come a long way for a village with nothing worth coming for."
"Grandmother. I am Shen Qing, Azure Wind Sect."
"I know what you are. The swords give it away." She cracked a pod. "Have you eaten?"
"We have rations."
"Then you haven't eaten." She set another bean in the basket. "What do you want?"
"We need to examine the well."
Her hands stopped for a moment. Then they resumed. "The well is deep," she said. "Don't fall in."
---
Stone rim, worn smooth at one point where ropes had rested for a long time. A wooden bucket on the edge. Shen Qing leaned over.
Warmth rose from below the water line, steady, around thirty-eight degrees. Body temperature.
"Shu Yan."
She came with her equipment. Six brass poles around the rim, silver thread connecting them. She worked without talking.
"Readings."
"Thirty-eight degrees, constant. No geothermal source. No gas." She looked up. "There's nothing in the geology that accounts for it."
"Then what's heating it?"
"I don't know."
Shen Qing let a thread of qi down the shaft. At ten feet the thread registered water and stone. At twenty, mineral sediment.
At forty feet the thread stopped returning information. He could still feel it extending, but the space below gave nothing back. Below the silence, something was running. He could feel it through the stone rim, low and constant, like standing on a floor with machinery under it.
He pulled the thread out.
"I'm getting the same," Shu Yan said. She was writing. "Below forty feet, my instruments return readings that don't resolve. The geometry comes back wrong."
"Formation?"
"Formation. Layered. Twelve layers minimum, likely more." She set her pen down. "Older than anything in the sect archive. By a margin I will not estimate. I need more time with it."
He looked at the water. Clear. The village had been drinking from it for as long as anyone could remember.
"Background qi?"
She checked. "Clean. Unusually clean for an unmanaged rural zone."
He filed this.
---
Shen Qing walked the village perimeter and took notes.
The doors had no locks. He asked a woman carrying wet clothes why. She said they'd never needed them.
He watched children wrestling on the north path. When one fell hard, the other two stopped and waited for him to get up. He got up. They kept going.
A girl sat on a low wall near the eastern house, facing the well. Blue clothes, patched at the knees. Stalk of grass in her mouth. Early twenties. She was watching the well.
He was standing between her and the well. She was watching the well.
He noted her and continued.
The buildings sat at angles that didn't match the terrain. There was a pattern in the placement, but he couldn't see it from ground level.
---
He wrote the report before dinner. Formation of unknown origin and purpose. Anomalous thermal readings. Layered structure, age outside existing classification. Population 203. No threat indicators.
He gave it to Jiang He. "Send this. Request a senior containment team."
"Timeline?"
"I want them here inside the week."
The response came back before the meal started. Authorized. Senior team dispatched. Five days.
---
The village ate together in the square. Grandmother Liu put food in his bowl before he asked for it. Rice, stewed mushrooms, pickled greens.
"You're too thin," she told him. "All cultivators are."
The food was better than sect rations. The rice was sticky and the mushrooms tasted of the local soil.
His team was eating. At the far end of the square, a heavy-set man was telling a story about a fish. The fish got larger each time he referenced it. Yun Xiao was listening with her hand nowhere near her sword.
Shen Qing ate. Two women were arguing about pickling. Children ran in circles around the communal stone.
A boy cut across the square at a full run, looking behind him at a friend. He hit a raised paver with his front foot.
He was going headfirst into the corner of the stone trough. Shen Qing saw it and was too far.
The girl caught the boy's wrist. The one from the wall. She had been sitting four feet from the trough with her bowl in her lap. The boy went from falling to standing.
She let go. Picked up her chopsticks.
The boy blinked, then ran off.
Shen Qing had seen cultivators in combat move more slowly. There had been no qi in the catch.
He watched her. She was holding her bowl in both hands, looking at the broth.
That night he added a note to his report. Subject Fuxi, village resident, early twenties. Reflexes inconsistent with mortal capacity. No cultivation signature. Recommend assessment by senior team.
He went to sleep.
Outside, the well steamed in the cold air.