The morning of Tang San's sixth birthday began like any other.
He woke before his parents, which was not unusual. He ate the rice porridge Tang Xia had left covered on the stove, burning his tongue on the first spoonful as he always did, yelping at the ceiling as he always did, and then blowing on each subsequent spoonful with theatrical caution. He pulled on his outer robe — slightly too big, the hem dragging — and slipped out the front door into the cool morning air.
The village was alive in the unhurried way of early hours. Old man Fei was already at his grinding wheel. The Wei sisters were hauling water from the well, bickering in low voices. A dog lay sprawled in a patch of early sunlight, indifferent to everything.
Tang San wandered, as he usually did, toward the eastern edge of the village where the tree line thinned and the hills opened into a wide meadow. He liked it there. The grass was long enough to disappear into if he crouched, and there were always interesting insects moving through the stems if you were patient enough to watch.
He had been crouched for perhaps half an hour, tracking a beetle with focused blue eyes, when he heard the first explosion.
It was distant enough that he felt it before he heard it — a low concussive thump that moved through the ground and up through his knees. He stood up straight. A second explosion followed, closer, louder. Then a third.
Then the screaming started.
Tang San ran.
He covered the distance from the meadow to the village edge in a sprint that left his robe hem shredded against the grass, and what he arrived to was not the Tang village he had left twenty minutes ago.
Three buildings were on fire. One had already collapsed into a pile of burning timber, and the smoke rising from it was thick and black and wrong. Bodies were on the ground — he recognized faces, names, people who had handed him sweets and ruffled his hair — and moving between them like dark water were figures in black robes, unhurried, systematic, some of them still casting the soul skills that had done this damage.
Evil soul masters. Even at six, Tang San knew what they were. His father had explained them with the careful seriousness of a parent arming a child with knowledge they hoped would never be needed. People who chose the wrong path. Who cultivate through inflicting suffering on others. Who harvest negative emotion like farmers harvest grain.
Tang San stood at the village's edge and his mind went very, very quiet.
He found his parents near the center of the village. They had fought. Tang Chen's Iron Sword was still in his hand, and Tang Xia's soul rings — two of them, yellow and yellow — were still faintly luminescent around her. They had fought, and they had been overwhelmed, and they were both still.
Tang San stood over them for a long moment. The screaming had largely stopped, replaced by the crackle of fire and the low, businesslike conversation of the black-robed figures who were now moving through the wreckage, collecting something — feeding on something, he would understand later, harvesting the concentrated grief and terror soaked into the very air.
Something shifted inside him.
It was not a thought. It was not a decision in any conscious sense. It was something far beneath thought, far beneath decision — something that lived in the marrow and the blood and the part of the soul that exists before language does. It rose up through him like a tide.
His hands began to shake. Then stopped shaking. His vision blurred. Then cleared, sharper than it had ever been.
And then the pain hit.