The following morning, Drystone felt emptier.
The youths accepted by the Gray Cloud Sect had already departed with the recruiters at dawn. They were not many, but in a small village it only took three or four missing faces for everything to feel shifted. The families of the chosen walked with a strange mixture of pride and mourning, as if one part of them had risen while another had been torn away.
Everyone else went on with their lives.
That was the worst thing about personal defeats: the world did not stop to contemplate them.
Lin Yuan chopped wood.
Carried water.
Escorted two small children to the stream.
Helped repair the wheel of the old cart Old Mei sometimes used to take vegetables to the market.
He did everything with the same quiet precision as always.
But inside, he still felt a kind of contained pressure. As if his chest had filled with smoke and still had not found a way out.
Toward evening, Old Mei told him to rest. He obeyed only because arguing would have drawn the attention of the younger children.
Once more he climbed to the rise behind the orphanage.
The sky was clear at first, but the air held that strange stillness that announces a harsher cold during the night. From up there he could see almost all of Drystone: the central square, the well, the crooked fences, the little plots, the smoke from the kitchens, the market closing little by little.
From a distance, everything looked simple.
Everything looked bearable.
Perhaps that was why the rise had become, without his deciding it, the only place where he allowed himself to truly think.
He sat on the flat stone and removed the medallion from his neck.
He held it in both hands.
It did not shine.
It did not vibrate.
It did nothing unusual.
And yet it was the only thing in his life that seemed to resist being explained by the daily misery of Drystone.
Lin Yuan closed his eyes.
He tried to remember the dream from the night before, but all he retained were fragments:
Light.
Falling.
A bloodied hand.
Cutting wind.
Something around him.
Nothing clear.
Nothing sufficient.
He pressed the medallion into his palm.
"Who are you?" he murmured, without knowing whether he was speaking of the object or himself.
The wind barely stirred the dry grass on the rise.
There was no answer.
For a long time, Lin Yuan simply remained there.
The shadows lengthened.
The sky passed from blue to dark purple.
The first stars appeared.
And with the darkness, thoughts grew harder to contain.
He did not want to admit it, but the public humiliation had awakened a wound far older than the test itself.
It was not only the sect's rejection.
It was the brutal confirmation of something that had pursued him all his life.
That he had been left behind.
That his existence had begun as something disposable.
That perhaps, before he had even learned to walk, someone had decided he was not worth enough to keep.
Lin Yuan swallowed.
The night turned a little colder.
He remembered the first time one of the orphanage children had asked where his parents were.
He remembered not knowing what to answer.
He remembered the years afterward, when he learned to reply with a grimace or with silence so no one would realize how much it truly hurt.
He remembered every time he saw other village children run to their mothers or fathers at the end of the day, to be lifted, laughed with, or scolded.
He remembered understanding very early that he would never have that.
And above all, he remembered the medallion.
The object he had always carried as proof that, at least once, someone had touched him before leaving him behind.
He could not stop himself from thinking it.
If his parents had truly loved him, why had they never come back?
If they could not come back, why had they left no clue?
And if they had abandoned him by choice... had it been because they already knew about his meridians?
The thought struck him again, harder than before.
He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees.
He was not a little child.
He was not going to sit there under the stars and cry like some fool from the sentimental tales drunken merchants sometimes told. But he could not deny that something inside him was too tight, too full, too close to breaking.
"How ridiculous," he muttered to himself.
The voice sounded hollow on the deserted rise.
Rage returned first.
Against the sect.
Against Luo Feichen.
Against the boys from the village.
Against the ease with which other people accepted phrases like that's just how the world is.
Against his parents, even though he did not know who they were.
Against the body he had been born in.
Against fate itself.
And beneath all that, there was something else.
Fear.
A fear so dry and shameful that he did not even want to name it.
What if this really was all there was?
What if there was nothing more?
What if his entire life amounted to accepting that the gate to cultivation had closed before he could even reach out and touch it?
Lin Yuan lifted his gaze to the stars.
For the first time in days, the vastness of the sky made him feel how absurdly small the village was.
And how absurdly small he was as well.
An orphan in a miserable hamlet of an insignificant region.
A boy with broken meridians and a medallion he could not understand.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
The wind changed direction suddenly.
Colder.
Stronger.
Lin Yuan lowered his eyes to the medallion once more.
"If you truly mean something," he said through clenched teeth, "then prove I'm not some damned joke of fate."
He did not expect an answer.
So when none came, he was not surprised.
He only felt that same bitter laugh rise into his throat.
He remained there until the cold began to bite into his fingers. At last he returned to the orphanage with the medallion hidden beneath his clothes once more and his body full of a weariness that had not come from work.
Night fell completely.
The children ate early and went to bed early. Old Mei put out the main oil lamp sooner than usual to save fuel.
Soon the dormitory lay sunk in darkness.
Lin Yuan tried to sleep.
He could not.
He turned on the pallet.
He heard the others breathing.
Counted heartbeats.
Thought of the village.
Thought of the sect.
Thought of the forest.
Thought of the dream.
Thought of the blood on the medallion.
The deep night grew deeper.
Outside the orphanage, the wind struck a poorly fitted window once. Inside, someone shifted in sleep. Then silence again.
Lin Yuan opened his eyes and knew he could not bear staying shut in there any longer.
He rose without making a sound, put on his robe, and stepped into the yard.
The world was black and freezing.
The stars were tiny knives over an immense sky.
The ground crunched beneath his steps as he crossed to the yard post and leaned against it, looking toward the hills. The air hurt a little as it entered his lungs.
He drew out the medallion.
Held it up in the scant starlight.
Nothing.
Then, driven by a mixture of frustration and exhaustion, he squeezed it too hard.
The edge of the metal dug slightly into the badly closed wound in his palm. He felt the sting. Fresh blood welled out.
One drop fell onto the dull surface.
And the medallion vibrated.
Only once.
Brief.
Unmistakable.
Lin Yuan froze.
In that same breath, something in front of him seemed to distort.
Not the whole yard.
Only a strip of air at eye level.
As if space itself had been touched by an invisible stone.
A slight ripple.
A fold.
A shiver in the void.
Then it disappeared.
Lin Yuan stopped breathing completely.
He looked to one side.
Then the other.
No one.
The orphanage remained still behind him. The yard. The well. The woodpile. Everything exactly the same.
Only the medallion, still trembling faintly between his bloodied fingers.
A dull noise sounded in the distance. He could not tell whether it was an echo of the wind among the hills or something else.
The medallion's vibration intensified.
The air before him rippled again.
This time not for an instant.
More.
Clearer.
Deeper.
Lin Yuan took half a step back, every muscle tense.
The space before him folded in on itself like cloth under brutal pressure. A black line, thin as a knife cut, appeared suspended in the air. It was not shadow. It was not absence of light. It was something else.
A crack.
A vertical wound in the void.
Icy terror climbed Lin Yuan's spine.
He tried to step back again.
He did not get the chance.
The crack opened a little wider, and a sudden force of suction yanked his clothes and hair forward.
The medallion suddenly burned against his palm.
Pure instinct made Lin Yuan fling out his other arm toward the nearest post.
His fingers brushed wood.
They failed to catch.
The world broke.
Not with a sound, but with a sensation.
The yard, the night, the orphanage, the cold of Drystone... everything seemed to be torn from its place in an instant.
Darkness swallowed him.
And the last coherent thought that crossed his mind before he fell was so absurd it would almost have been funny at another time:
Apparently, fate had finally answered.