The village changed in the week before the examination.
Not dramatically. Not in the ways that showed — no decorations went up, no extra preparations were made, no one treated it as a celebration. This was not the kind of village that celebrated the possibility of losing its children to a distant sect. Three hundred and forty-seven people, and the ones who had children in the examination age range understood perfectly well that invited to sit the entrance examination meant invited to leave and not come back very often.
The change was subtler. It was in the way mothers watched their children at dinner. In the way fathers found reasons to come home early from the fields. In the way the children themselves — Chen Yi observed this carefully — moved differently, not quite themselves, aware of being watched and not sure how to feel about it.
The village had sent four children to the sects in the last thirty years.
Two had done well. One had come home after three years, quiet in a way she hadn't been before, and married the blacksmith's eldest son and never spoke about it. One had died in a sect training accident at age sixteen, and his parents still lived on the eastern edge of the village, and everyone knew which house it was by the way no one looked at it directly.
The examination was not something Green Stone Village approached with uncomplicated hope.
Chen Yi watched this understanding move through the village the week before and filed it alongside everything else and did not entirely know what to do with it. His family was not afraid — his father had already established they expected nothing from the examination and it did not appear to concern them — but the village's collective unease was present in the air the way weather was present, and he found himself aware of it in ways that distracted him from the cultivation work.
He mentioned this to Xiao Hei.
He had not met Xiao Hei yet. That came nine days later.
But this was the week he first noticed the hollow below the inheritance ground, and first noticed that the hawk from the ridge had been appearing closer to the village than usual, and first had the specific feeling of being watched that he could not locate the source of.
He filed it.
He went back to the cave and breathed his three paths and let the streams find their groove.
The examination was in seven days.
He was ready.