Sunlight was a personal offense.
Shen Wuwei stood in the doorway of the Drowsy Teapot with one hand shielding his eyes and the other clutching the jade pillow like a man preparing to use it as a weapon against the entire visible spectrum. The sun was too bright. The sky was too blue. The air smelled of jasmine and wet earth and something green and alive, and all of it was unreasonably aggressive for a man who had just woken up after ten millennia of underground darkness.
"Loud," he said. To the sun. To the birds. To the concept of morning in general.
Behind him, the sounds of Huo Yanran angrily sweeping dust out of her establishment provided a rhythm section he hadn't asked for. The broom hit the floorboards with a violence that suggested it was a stand-in for his skull.
[HOST! ISN'T IT BEAUTIFUL??? THE SUN! THE SKY! THE BIRDS! THERE ARE BIRDS, HOST! I HAVEN'T SEEN BIRDS IN 10,247 YEARS!!! LOOK AT THEIR LITTLE FACES!!!]
"Birds don't have faces."
[THEY HAVE BEAKS! BEAKS ARE FACES!!! +5 INDOLENCE POINTS FOR "CORRECTING SYSTEM WHILE SQUINTING"!!!]
He stepped off the wooden porch and onto the dirt road that ran through Qingmeng Town. His bare feet registered cold packed earth, small stones, a patch of moss that was softer than it had any right to be. The town sprawled around him in a way that suggested it had never been planned so much as it had simply happened — buildings leaning into each other for support, tea terraces climbing the hills in staggered green rows, a stone bridge over a creek that was more moss than stone.
It was quiet. Not the dead quiet of his chamber, but the living kind. Water over rocks. A dog barking somewhere behind a wall of drying laundry. The creak of a cart being pulled up the hill by a man whose ox had apparently quit for the day.
Shen Wuwei walked. Slowly. The kind of slow that wasn't a pace so much as a negotiation between his legs and the earth about whether movement was strictly necessary.
The townsfolk noticed him. Hard not to — a barefoot man in a grey robe that looked like it had been tailored by moths, carrying a jade pillow, shuffling down the main road with the enthusiasm of someone attending their own funeral. A few stared. One woman pulling weeds from her garden gate watched him pass and then looked at her neighbor. The neighbor shrugged. Border towns saw all kinds.
He followed the road because it went downhill, and downhill required less effort.
At the edge of town, where the road curved toward the creek, a cluster of stones jutted from the hillside. Old stones. Worn smooth in the way that only centuries of wind and water could manage, but their arrangement was wrong for natural erosion — too deliberate, too spaced, the gaps between them too precise. He slowed. Something about the geometry pulled at him. Not recognition exactly. More the feeling of almost-recognition, the shape of something trying to surface through ten thousand years of sleep and silence.
He stared at the stones for a long moment. His thumb moved across the jade pillow in its usual circles.
Then he kept walking. The creek was below. The flat rock was waiting. His legs had enough complaint left for one more downhill stretch and that was where he intended to spend it.
The creek appeared. He sat on a rock beside it. The rock was sun-warm and flat and exactly the right shape for sitting on, which meant it was probably the wrong shape for anything useful, which made it perfect. He set the jade pillow beside him. He closed his eyes.
[Host, your spiritual nodes are operating at 12% active capacity. Residual buildup from your ten-thousand-year accumulation is leaking into the environment at a rate of—]
"Mm."
[—about 847 units per second, which is why the local vegetation is growing 300% faster than regional averages and also why the fish in this creek are two feet longer than they should be. Host. HOST. The fish are mutating.]
He opened one eye and looked at the creek. A fish the length of his forearm drifted past. It was glowing slightly.
"Huh."
The fish didn't comment.
He closed his eye and listened to the water and the birds-with-faces and the distant sound of Yanran's broom, which had apparently followed him out of the shop and into the ambient noise of his new life. He was considering going back to sleep — a solid plan, a proven plan, a plan with ten thousand years of successful execution — when the screaming started.
Not adult screaming. That he could have ignored. This was small. High-pitched. The kind of scream that came from a throat that hadn't learned yet that screaming doesn't fix anything.
A child.
His eyes opened. Both of them. A sliver more than usual.
Down the creek bank, past a tangle of wildflowers and a fencepost that had surrendered to gravity sometime during his nap, a boy of maybe six was backed against a boulder. He was clutching a fishing rod made of a stick and twine, and his face was wet and red and absolutely certain that the world was ending.
The reason for his certainty stood between him and the road.
A Golden-Maned Fox. Spirit beast, second tier. Not a creature that should have been this close to a human settlement. Its shoulders came up to the boy's chest. Its mane — thick, bristling, crackling with faint amber sparks — stood on end in a display that said everything about its intentions. The beast's eyes were wrong. Not the sharp intelligence of a healthy spirit beast, but something fogged, agitated, like it had been driven here by something it couldn't name.
Shen Wuwei looked at the fox. The fox hadn't noticed him. Its attention was fixed on the child, who had stopped screaming and started the quieter, more dangerous business of being too frightened to breathe.
[HOST! GOLDEN-MANED FOX! TIER TWO SPIRIT BEAST! ESTIMATED POWER: FOUNDATION ESTABLISHMENT PEAK! DANGER LEVEL FOR A CELESTIAL SOVEREIGN: ...um. about "stepping on an ant."]
He didn't respond to Lingling. He looked at the boy. The boy's fishing rod was shaking in his hands. The twine had snapped at some point. He was holding a bare stick.
[HOST? Are you going to—]
Shen Wuwei yawned.
Not a small yawn. Not the polite, hand-over-mouth variety that society had apparently invented in the ten thousand years he'd missed. This was a full, committed, spine-arching, jaw-unhinging yawn — the kind that started in his chest and rolled up through his throat and out into the world with the absolute conviction that the world needed to know about it.
The shockwave hit the fox sideways.
It wasn't visible — not exactly. A ripple in the air, the way heat shimmers above summer stone. But the effect was immediate and total. The Golden-Maned Fox, two hundred pounds of muscle and spiritual fury, lifted off the ground. Its paws left the dirt. Its mane flattened. Its eyes, already fogged, went blank. It sailed backward, gently, almost tenderly, and landed in the creek with a splash that sent the mutant fish scattering.
It didn't get up. Not because it was dead — its flanks still rose and fell, slow and even. It was asleep. Deeply, profoundly, irrevocably asleep, curled in the shallow water with its mane floating around its head like a golden halo.
[...PASSIVE YAWN SHOCKWAVE! TIER: IMMEASURABLE! OUTPUT: 0.003% OF TOTAL CAPACITY! RESULT: COMPLETE INCAPACITATION OF TARGET! +50 INDOLENCE POINTS EARNED! "DEFEATING AN ENEMY WHILE YAWNING" ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!!!]
[Host, that was INCREDIBLE! You didn't even—you just—the FOX—it's SLEEPING! You made it SLEEP! With a YAWN!]
"Mm. Was noisy."
The boy was staring at him. The fishing stick hung limp in his hands. His tears hadn't dried; they'd just stopped falling, suspended in that gap between terror and awe that only children inhabit properly.
"Did you..." The boy's voice came out in a squeak. He swallowed. Tried again. "Did you just... beat a spirit beast... with a yawn?"
Shen Wuwei looked at the boy. The boy looked at Shen Wuwei. The fox snored in the creek. A bird landed on the fox's floating mane, decided the accommodations were suitable, and settled in.
"...Wasn't trying to beat it."
The boy's eyes got wider. "Then what were you doing?"
"Yawning."
The boy processed this. The gears turned visibly behind his round, tear-streaked face. Six-year-old logic was assembling a conclusion that no adult mind would have reached.
"Are you a god?"
Shen Wuwei picked up his jade pillow. He tucked it under his arm. He looked at the sleeping fox and the bird on its mane and the mutant fish that were cautiously returning to investigate the new obstacle in their creek.
"Mm." He turned back toward the road. "Tired."
[+10 INDOLENCE POINTS! "REFUSING TO CLAIM DIVINE STATUS WHILE BAREFOOT" BONUS!!!]
He shuffled back toward the Drowsy Teapot, leaving the boy standing beside the creek with his broken fishing rod and a story that nobody in Qingmeng Town would believe for about twelve more chapters.
---
From a crack in the wall of a storage shed forty feet away, something watched.
Not with eyes, exactly. Gu Lingzhi didn't have eyes in this form — just the pale purple cap of a mushroom the size of a child's fist, trembling against the weathered wood. But the root network beneath the shed's foundation carried vibrations, and those vibrations told her things that eyes could not.
The pressure wave from the yawn had passed through her.
She'd felt pressure waves before. In ten thousand years of growing in the sleeping man's chamber, his unconscious spiritual leak had fed her, shaped her, made her into something far beyond a common spirit fungus. She knew his energy the way she knew the composition of the soil she grew in. Intimately. Completely.
But she'd never felt him use it while awake.
The wave had carried something new. Not just force — there was intent in it, buried so deep beneath the laziness that it was barely a whisper. Not the intent to destroy. Not the intent to protect.
The intent to make the noise stop so he could go back to sleep.
And that intent, somehow, had been enough to put a spirit beast down like a candle in a gale.
Gu Lingzhi's tiny mushroom cap trembled. Not from the pressure wave. From something she hadn't felt in eight thousand years of silent watching.
Hope.
Someone was finally awake.
---
Back in the Drowsy Teapot, Shen Wuwei lay on the floor he'd ruined and stared at the ceiling he'd come through. Yanran had gone to the market. The shop was empty. The kettle whispered on the stove.
[Host?]
"Mm."
[I picked you, you know. The System didn't randomly assign me. I chose you. Before you were born. I chose you because you would never cultivate, never force yourself to grow, never try to be strong. I chose the person who would do absolutely nothing, because nothing is what the Protocol needs.]
He didn't answer.
[...Host?]
Silence.
[Host, are you asleep?]
His breathing was slow. Even. His hand rested on the jade pillow. His eyes were closed.
But his left hand, the one hanging off the edge of the hole in the floor, was curled into a loose fist. And the fingers were trembling. Just barely. Just enough that if anyone had been watching — and no one was, because Yanran was at the market and Bao Bao hadn't emerged yet and Gu Lingzhi was forty feet away watching through a wall — they might have thought he was dreaming.
He wasn't dreaming.
He was remembering a hand he'd let go of ten thousand years ago.
[...Goodnight, Host. I'll keep counting.]