Chapter 15: The Source (Part 1)
Wei didn't sleep.
He lay on the kang, staring at the fish-shaped knot in the ceiling beam, and the swamp would not leave him alone.
Every time he closed his eyes, the images surged back with the force of a physical blow—the white ribs gleaming in the moonlight, picked so clean they could have been carved from ivory, the bone gleaming wet and pale against the dark mud.
The curled hand, fingers still bent inward as if reaching for someone who would never come, the knuckles swollen and wrong, the skin grey and peeling away from the bone.
The jiangshi woman with her empty eyes and her torn blue dress, stumbling toward a horizon she would never reach, her bare feet dragging through the mud, her mouth open in a silent, eternal moan.
And the boars crashing through the reeds with their tusks slick and dark, their hooves shaking the ground like drums, their eyes small and wild and utterly without fear, their breath steaming in the cold air as they thundered past, close enough that he could smell the rot on their hides, the mud caked in their bristles, the blood still wet on their tusks.
He turned onto his side. The blanket twisted around his legs, binding them like ropes. He kicked it off with more force than necessary, his heel striking the wooden frame of the kang with a dull thud, and lay still, breathing hard through his nose.
The house was silent except for the soft rhythm of the other rooms—his mother's breathing slow and steady, the breath of a woman who had learned to sleep through anything, who had weathered famine and flood and the end of the world and still woke every morning to make congee.
His father's breathing deep and even, the breath of a man who worked hard enough to rest deeply, whose body had learned to take sleep where it could find it.
Hao's occasional snort, that ridiculous sound that was halfway between a pig and a broken whistle, the sound Wei had been hearing since they shared a room as children, when Hao would fall asleep mid-sentence and Wei would have to blow out the candle.
Outside, the dogs were quiet. The wall stood against the darkness. The farm was safe.
But Wei's hands wouldn't stop trembling.
He held them up in the darkness, watching the faint tremor in his fingers, the way the moonlight caught the edges of his nails.
The same hands that had killed the orc in the forest, that had held the scythe steady against the goblins on the wall, that had cradled the crawfish in the swamp, careful not to damage their eggs, that had pulled Jianguo from the sinkhole, that had pressed the first Silvervein Rice seeds into the mud.
Now they shook like leaves in a storm, and he couldn't make them stop.
Stop it. I'm not there anymore. I'm home. The wall is standing. The family is asleep. No one is dead. No one is hurt. Just breathe. Just fucking breathe.
He pressed his palms flat against the kang, feeling the residual warmth of the fire beneath, the rough texture of the brick through the thin mattress. And he forced himself to inhale the way Jianguo had taught him years ago, when a fox got into the chicken coop and he'd been too shaken to think straight.
He'd been twelve, maybe thirteen. It was late autumn—he remembered the frost on the grass, the way his breath had misted in the cold air.
The fox had killed three hens before Hei chased it off, and Wei had found the bodies in the morning, their feathers scattered across the yard like bloody snow, their bodies torn and still warm.
One of them had been his favorite—a small brown hen with a crooked beak that he'd raised from a chick. He'd been so shaken he couldn't eat breakfast, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything but sit behind the tool shed with his hands shaking exactly like this.
Jianguo had found him there. Home on leave, still in his uniform, this massive, intimidating soldier who seemed to fill every room he entered.
He hadn't said anything at first. He'd just crouched down beside Wei, his knees cracking, and sat there in silence, watching the sun climb higher.
After a long while, he'd said, in that quiet, steady voice of his:
"Breathe with me. In through the nose. Hold it. Out through the mouth. Like this."
And he'd sat there, patient as stone, breathing slowly and evenly until Wei's hands had stopped trembling.
In through the nose. Hold it. Out through the mouth.
The trembling eased a fraction. But the images didn't fade. They never did. He'd learned that by now, over weeks of fighting and killing and barely surviving. They just retreated to the back of his mind and waited for a quiet moment to return, like predators in tall grass, patient and inevitable.
His father's face surfaced in his thoughts. Not the way it looked at dinner—grim and tired, the lines around his mouth carved deeper than they'd been a month ago, his chopsticks moving through his noodles with mechanical precision, his gaze drifting toward the window, toward the distant fields.
The way it would look in three months, when the last sack of rice was empty and the fields were still dead and there was nothing left but potatoes and regret. The way it would look when he had to tell his family that the farm could no longer feed them.
A meal without rice is like a day without sun.
He'd said it with a dry smile, like it was a joke. Hao had laughed—that quick, easy laugh he used to cover everything he didn't want to think about. Li had rolled her eyes, the way she did when their father got sentimental, the way she'd been doing since she was old enough to recognize sentiment. But Wei had seen the truth underneath it. The grief.
Their father had been growing rice since he was old enough to hold a seedling, since his own father had taken him out to the paddies at dawn and taught him how to push the tiny plants into the mud, how to feel the water level with his fingers, how to read the color of the leaves.
"Yellow means too much sun," Grandfather would say.
"Pale green means not enough nutrients. Dark green with a slight curl at the tips—that's perfect. That's what you want."
The paddies weren't just fields. They were his inheritance, his identity, the proof he offered the world that he had kept the family legacy alive.
And now they were dead, all forty mu, every stalk withered and brown, the soil cracked and barren, and part of him had died with them.
Wei had watched it happen. He'd seen his father walk the paddies every morning for weeks, his boots sinking into the dry soil, his shoulders bowed under a weight that had nothing to do with physical labor.
He'd heard him muttering in his sleep—"the water's gone, the soil's dead, three months"—like a prayer to a god who wasn't listening, like a mantra against despair.
He'd watched him grow quieter at meals, his gaze drifting toward the window more often, his chopsticks pausing halfway to his mouth as if he'd forgotten what he was doing.
I can't bring the old paddies back. But I can give him new ones. I can give him water. I can give him something to believe in.
Wei sat up. The blanket fell away. The cold air bit at his bare shoulders, raising goosebumps along his arms. He ignored it. He had learned to ignore discomfort over the past weeks—the ache of muscles pushed too far, the sting of cuts and bruises, the bone-deep exhaustion that never quite went away.
Those things were just signals now, information his body gave him about its condition. They didn't control him anymore.
He pulled up the System Store. The golden panels flickered to life in the darkness, hovering before him in the air, casting their soft amber glow across his tired face and the rumpled blanket and the worn wooden floor.
The familiar interface materialized—categories, lists, prices, all the tools and seeds and upgrades he'd been studying for weeks.
But he didn't navigate to any of them. He didn't scroll through the building options or compare seed prices or check his credit balance. He simply closed his eyes and let the need take shape in his mind, pressing it against the store like a key against a lock.
Water. Not a trickle. Not a hope. A source. Something that won't dry up when summer comes. Something that will fill every paddy and keep them filled. Something my father can touch with his own hands. Something that will make him believe we're going to survive this.
The store flickered. The categories blurred and reformed, the golden text running like water, rearranging itself into patterns he'd never seen before. And then—
```
┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ NEW ENTRY DETECTED │
│ │
│ Springfront...? │
│ ??? │
│ ??? │
│ ??? │
│ │
│ Cost: 200 credits │
│ │
│ Processing... │
│ Matching need to available constructs... │
│ │
│ Match found. │
│ Details unavailable until activation. │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘
```
Wei stared at the panel, his pulse quickening, the golden light reflecting in his eyes.
Springfront?
What is that now ?
The question marks stared back at him, maddeningly, deliberately vague. No dimensions. No description. No indication of what it would look like or how big it would be.
Just a name—a name that suggested something significant, something large, something that might actually solve their problem—and a cost. Two hundred credits. Nearly half of everything he'd saved over weeks of harvesting and killing and barely surviving.
He had never seen the store act like this before. Usually it showed him exactly what he was getting. The chicken coop upgrade had been precise: dimensions, materials, the exact percentage increase in egg production, all laid out in neat little bullet points. The beehive had been the same—every detail accounted for, every credit justified.
But this was different. This was the store reaching into his need and pulling out something that hadn't existed until he asked for it, something it couldn't fully describe until it was already in the world. Something that was still, in some fundamental way, a mystery.
Two hundred credits for question marks. This is insane. This is absolutely insane. If it doesn't work—if it's not enough—if it turns out to be nothing but a hole in the ground—
He thought about his father's face. The quiet grief. The way his voice had cracked when he talked about potatoes, trying to make it sound like a joke and failing. The way he'd looked at the dead paddies yesterday evening, standing at the edge of the field with his hands in his pockets, not saying anything at all, just standing there in the fading light while the shadows stretched long across the cracked earth.
A meal without rice is like a day without sun.
Do it. Stop overthinking and do it. You've killed an orc. You've faced goblins on the wall. You've walked through a swamp full of corpses. You can spend two hundred credits on question marks.
But he couldn't do it here. Whatever this thing was—whatever the Springfront turned out to be—he needed to be somewhere open when it activated. Somewhere the tree's roots reached, so the blessing would hold. Somewhere no one would notice until morning, so he could deal with the aftermath on his own terms. Somewhere with space—real, open space—in case the thing was bigger than he expected. Much bigger.
He swung his legs off the kang and dressed in the dark. His fingers found each garment by touch and habit. Thick pants—the ones with the reinforced knees that his mother had sewn for him last winter, before the shimmer, before any of this, when the biggest concern was whether the frost would take the winter wheat.
A dark shirt, the one with the worn elbows that she kept threatening to patch and never did, as if leaving it unmended was a small act of normalcy she could control in a world that had spun beyond anyone's control. His boots, the leather soft and familiar, molded to his feet by years of wear, the soles worn thin in the places where he put the most weight.
The scythe went across his back last, the familiar weight settling against his spine like an old friend. He didn't go anywhere without it now. Not after the swamp. Not after the orc. The blade was wrapped in dark cloth, but he could feel its presence, a constant, reassuring pressure between his shoulder blades.
He slipped out of the house without a sound. The floorboards knew him—every creak, every loose nail, every spot where the wood had worn thin over decades of footsteps—and they didn't betray him.
He'd learned their language as a child, sneaking out to catch fireflies with Hao, and he'd never forgotten it. The third board from the door always creaked if you stepped on the left side, but the right side was silent.
The threshold had a loose nail that would catch your boot if you weren't careful. He avoided them all without thinking, his body remembering what his mind had long since archived.
The door knew him, and it didn't creak. He'd oiled the hinges himself three weeks ago, after the goblin attack, when silence had become as important as any weapon.
He'd used the good oil, the one his father saved for the tractor that no longer ran, and he'd worked it into the iron until the metal sang without a whisper.
Outside, the courtyard was silver and black under a sliver of moon. The stars were cold and distant overhead, scattered across the sky like grains of rice thrown by a careless hand.
The air was sharp with the promise of frost, and his breath misted in front of his face as he crossed the packed earth. The dogs stirred as he passed—the three pups were tangled together near the well, a heap of fur and twitching legs, one of them chasing something in a dream.
Da and Er were at their posts by the animal pens, too disciplined to leave, their heads turning to track him but their bodies staying still. And Hei lifted his head near the gate, his dark eyes catching the faint moonlight, his grey muzzle twitching as he read Wei's scent on the wind. The old dog's ears pricked forward, a silent question.
Wei crouched and scratched behind the old dog's ears, finding the spot where the fur was softest, where the skin underneath was warm and loose with age.
Hei had been guarding this farm for ten years, and his body carried the evidence of that service—the grey muzzle, the stiff joints, the leg that had never healed right after the Lins had broken it.
But his eyes were still sharp. His loyalty was still absolute. He leaned into Wei's touch, his tail giving a single, slow wag.
"Stay," Wei whispered. "Guard the family. I'll be back before dawn."
Hei watched him for a long moment, his dark eyes patient and knowing. Then he laid his head back down on his paws, settling into the watchful stillness of a dog who understood that some things had to be done alone. The trust in that gesture was a weight of its own—the trust of a creature who had been hurt before and had chosen, despite everything, to believe.
Wei walked past the vegetable garden, where the new radishes were pushing up through the dark soil in neat green rows, their leaves pale and fragile in the starlight. He'd planted those seeds himself, kneeling in the dirt while Grandfather supervised, and now they were already breaking through.
The system had promised ninety-five percent survival, and so far it had delivered. Past the silent animal pens where the pigs snored in their blessed sty, their massive bodies rising and falling with each breath, the sweet scent of the moss that grew on their enclosure drifting on the cold air.
Old Wang was visible through the slats—the old boar, now a Mountain Boar, his tusks curving up from his jaw, his coarse brown fur thick along his spine. He was sleeping, but one eye opened as Wei passed, tracking him with ancient, knowing patience.
Past the chicken coop where the Bronzeflame Hen perched at the highest point like a bronze-feathered sentinel, her golden eyes tracking him as he passed. She clucked once, softly, as if acknowledging his presence, then tucked her head back under her wing.
Past the orchard's edge, where the trees cast long, twisted shadows in the moonlight and the bees from the Gilded Thread hive slept in their golden hexagons, their wings folded, their bodies still.
The air here smelled of ripening fruit and the faint, sweet perfume of the white flowers that grew at the base of every blessed tree. Somewhere in the branches, the small brown bird that had been singing the same seven-note melody for weeks was silent, dreaming whatever birds dreamed.
He walked until the cultivated land gave way to a broad, open space—a fallow field that had never been planted, too rocky for the plow, too far from the old irrigation lines, too stubborn to be tamed. His grandfather used to say it was good for nothing except grazing goats, and they'd never kept goats.
The family had talked about it sometimes, at dinner, over the years—Grandfather suggesting they clear the stones and try a crop of millet, Wei's father shaking his head and saying the soil was too thin, the water too far. And the field would sit empty for another year, waiting for a purpose that never came.
The field stretched before him now, flat and empty, the dry grass silver in the moonlight. The sky was huge above it, vast and indifferent, scattered with stars that had watched this valley for millennia without comment.
The wall was a dark line on the distant horizon, barely visible against the deeper darkness of the hills. There was nothing here but space and silence and the faint, golden pulse of the tree's roots far beneath his feet—a pulse he could feel through his boots, steady as a heartbeat, warm as blood.
This is it. Whatever this thing is, it'll have room to grow here.
He stopped in the center of the field, his boots planted on the cold earth, and took a long, slow breath. The air tasted of dust and dry grass and the faint, distant smoke from the town that was still burning somewhere beyond the hills. He could feel his heart beating in his chest, steady and insistent. He could feel the scythe's weight against his spine, cool even through the cloth wrapping. He could feel the vast, empty space around him, waiting to be filled.
He pulled up the purchase panel one more time. The mystery entry hovered in the darkness, still maddeningly, deliberately vague. Still offering nothing but a name and a price and those three question marks that seemed to mock him.
```
┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ CONFIRM PURCHASE? │
│ Springfront — ???? │
│ Cost: 200 credits │
│ Credits: 511 → 311 │
│ │
│ [YES] [NO] │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘
```
Here goes nothing. Please don't be a waste of credits. Please just—work. Please be what my father needs. Please be enough.
He pressed YES.
The credits drained away. He felt them go—a subtle shift in the system's presence at the back of his mind, like a pocket emptying, like a door closing. And for a moment, nothing happened. The night was still. The wind tugged at his sleeves. The dry grass scratched against his boots. The stars kept their cold, indifferent watch.
Nothing. There's nothing happening. Did I just waste two hundred credits on—
End Of Chapter 15