A hand appeared on the rim of the well.
Wet fingers gripped the stone. The fingers were pale, the nails colorless, the skin of someone who had not touched solid matter in a very long time. A second hand joined the first. The grip tightened. Arms pulled. A man hauled himself over the rim the way a man climbs out of a hole in the ground.
He stood on the rim. Dripping. Rags that might have been clothes once, soaked through, hanging from his frame in strips. His hair was long and matted and fell past his shoulders. His feet were bare and pale and soft. Feet that had not walked.
He stood on the rim of the well in the village of the dead and he breathed.
...
Air. Cold air. Moving air. Air that carried smell: blood, cooking fires, river mud, stone dust, autumn. He could taste the season. He could taste the altitude. He could taste the distance to the nearest body of water, the chemical composition of the soil, the mineral content of the rain that had fallen here three days ago.
He was breathing. He was standing. He was existing in three dimensions after an interval so long that the concept of duration had become abstract. Stone and water and darkness and the sound of footsteps above him and the vibration of voices through earth. That had been existence. Now there was light.
Light was an assault. The grey dawn was brighter than anything. His eyes, unused, teared. He blinked. Each blink was a recalibration. The first blink brought shape. The second brought distance. The third brought color.
Color. He had forgotten color. The green of the rice terraces. The brown of earth. The grey of stone. The red of blood on the square.
He was standing on the rim of a well in a village and the village was dead.
...
He stepped off the rim. His feet met the ground. The ground was cold. He could feel every grain of stone through the sole of his foot. His body was a symphony of sensation and every instrument was playing at once.
He walked into the square.
Bodies. He had heard every one of them through the earth. Their footsteps, their conversations, their breathing at night. Generations of them. He had listened to births and deaths and arguments about goat fences and the old man's fish story told differently every time. He had listened for longer than the constellations held their shapes.
He looked at them now with eyes instead of listening to them with stone.
A woman leaning against the communal hall wall. Late seventies. Sharp face, even in death. Her hands were in her lap. She had been mid-sentence.
A man on the ground near the well. Barrel-chested. Sunburnt. His hands were still.
A farmer on the northern terrace path. Face down. His hands flat on the dirt.
A boy on the stones of the square. About ten years old. A butterfly on his fingers.
A couple, together. His arms around her. Her face against his shoulder. The rounding of her belly visible beneath her clothes.
Two hundred and three.
His lips moved as he counted. He counted the way he had always counted: automatically, precisely, without deciding to. Every body. Every position. Every face. Two hundred and three people who had lived above him and whose warmth had been the only warmth in his darkness.
He finished counting. His hands hung at his sides. The wind moved through the square and carried the smell of blood and mushroom stew from the evening's pots, still warm on their stones.
...
Nine figures stood in a loose formation around the well.
Cultivators. He could see what they were. Their spiritual energy moved through conduits in their bodies, channeled along patterns they had been taught. The patterns were simple. Functional. Narrow.
They had learned techniques. Answers to questions. The techniques worked within their designed parameters. Outside those parameters, the techniques had nothing to offer. They were tools that did not know they were tools.
The one at the front had drawn a sword. Foundation Establishment. The blade carried a threading of spiritual energy along its edge. The threading was competent. It would cut through reinforced stone.
It would not cut through understanding.
He walked toward them.
The man with the sword shouted something. An order. The nine cultivators launched a coordinated assault. Spiritual energy from nine sources, converging on a single point, bound by a shared formation pattern. Azure Wind Combined Assault. He could read the pattern the way a literate man reads a child's handwriting. Each stroke formed. Each stroke recognizable. The whole thing elementary.
The combined assault reached him. The binding pattern came apart. The spiritual energy that held the nine streams together was a set of assumptions about how energy behaved. In his presence, the assumptions were incomplete. Incomplete assumptions could not hold. The energy scattered into the air like water thrown against wind.
He kept walking.
A woman to his left launched a sealing lattice. The lattice was well-constructed. It would have contained anything within its designed parameters. He was not within its designed parameters. The lattice reached him and its structure recognized, for a fraction of a second, that it was a partial truth in the presence of a more complete one. It dissolved.
He passed through the space where it had been.
...
Eleven seconds.
He walked through them the way a man walks through a room. He did not slow down. He did not speed up. He walked at the pace of a man crossing a village square, and the cultivators he passed fell where they stood.
He touched them as he passed. His hand on a forehead. His palm on a chest. His fingers brushing a shoulder. The touches were light. Brief.
Their spiritual energy went out. Not violently. Quietly. The way a candle goes out when you close your hand around it. The flame does not fight. It simply stops.
Shu Yan fell first. She had been closest to the well. He touched her forehead as he passed and she folded to the ground with her bleeding palms still open.
Jiang He fell beside the communal hall. His eyes were open when he went down.
Deng Liang fell at the western edge. She had been trying to reach the gate.
Three others fell in a line across the square. He passed them the way the wind passes through grass.
...
Yun Xiao was on her knees beside the boy.
She was not fighting. She was not running. She knelt on the stones of the square with her hands on Desheng's back and her face wet. The butterfly had moved from the boy's fingers to his hair. It sat there.
He stopped in front of her.
She looked up at him. Her eyes were red. Her mouth was open. She was trying to speak. She could not speak.
He stood there. Three seconds. He looked at her hands on the dead boy's back. He looked at the boy. He looked at the butterfly.
He placed his hand on the top of her head. She fell beside the boy. Her hand landed on his shoulder.
The butterfly stayed.
...
Shen Qing had not moved.
His body had decided before his mind. Every part of him that had kept him alive for twenty years was sending the same signal. The signal was older than language. Older than cultivation. Older than the concept of self-preservation. It was the signal that lives in the base of the skull. The one that makes prey stop moving when the shadow passes.
He stood with his sword drawn and his feet locked to the ground and he watched a man in wet rags walk through his entire team in eleven seconds.
The man walked to him. His pace was even. His face was ordinary. The kind of face you forget in a crowd of ten. He was barefoot. Water dripped from his hair and hit the stones.
"Two hundred and three," the man said. His voice was rough. Unused. The voice of someone who had not spoken aloud in longer than Shen Qing could imagine. "I counted."
Shen Qing's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
The man looked at him. There was nothing in his eyes that Shen Qing could name. Not anger. Not judgment. Not mercy. Something that contained all of those and was none of them.
He touched Shen Qing's chest. The touch was gentle.
Shen Qing's vision went dark at the edges. The last thing he saw was the well, and the light rising from its water, and the face of the man who had been inside it.
...
He stood in the village of the dead.
Wind through terraced fields. A door banging against its frame. The well water overflowing its rim and running between the stones of the square. The light from below was fading. The seal was open. There was nothing left to seal.
He extended his perception.
Even degraded, even diminished by an interval he did not yet have a number for, his perception covered the valley. Every body. Every structure. Every insect. Every shift of air pressure and temperature.
Two hundred and three villagers. Nine cultivators. Dead.
At the eastern edge of the village, in a drainage ditch, his perception found a heartbeat.
Thready. Weakening. Present.
He walked to the ditch.
...
The girl lay on her side in the mud. Her eyes were open. A wound crossed her back from the left shoulder blade to the right hip, shallow, long, still bleeding. She had been hit by a stray pulse from the extraction array.
She was breathing.
He looked at her.
Her body was unusual. Internal pathways pre-formed, pre-widened, aligned in configurations that the cultivators he had just killed had spent decades trying to achieve through training. In a girl with no training, no exposure, no external conditioning, pathways like these should not exist.
The well water. His consciousness had been seeping through the seal for a long time. Absorbed into the water. Drunk by generations. It had shaped the people here. This girl had been shaped more than most.
He could walk away. She would die within the hour.
He stood above the ditch. The wind blew. Her breathing slowed. Her blood mixed with the mud.
His hands moved before his mind decided. He bent down and picked her up. She weighed nothing. Her head fell against his shoulder. Her blood soaked into his rags. Her breathing hitched and then steadied.
He did not know why he picked her up. The thought to save her and the thought to leave her had arrived at the same time, and by the time he finished weighing them his body had already chosen.
He walked east.
Behind him, the door kept banging. The well water kept flowing. The butterfly sat on a dead boy's hair in a village square where nobody would come for a very long time.
He walked out of the valley. His body moved. His mind began to work. He had no knowledge of the world above him. No allies. No resources. A body that barely functioned and a girl who was dying in his arms.
His awareness, applied at the wound site, began closing the torn flesh. Layer by layer. Muscle, tissue, skin. He left the surface wound visible. Questions he could not answer yet.
She would live.
The valley disappeared behind a ridgeline. Ahead, the road wound through hills he had last seen when they were younger and the trees on their slopes were different species.
He walked on.