News in Qinghe Village traveled faster than any horse.
By the second morning, half the village had heard some version of what happened on the mountain — an old man who fell off a cliff and didn’t die, a jade pendant that glowed, whispers that the Li family’s adopted son wasn’t quite as ordinary as everyone had assumed.
By the time the rumor reached Widow Chen, it had grown a pair of dragons and a thunderstorm.
By the time it reached the children playing by the well, Tianyun could apparently breathe fire.
“I cannot breathe fire,” he told them for the third time that morning, hauling a bucket up from the well while four small faces watched him with open suspicion.
“Then do the mist thing,” said the smallest one, a boy missing both front teeth.
“There is no mist thing.” “Old Zhao said there was a mist thing.” “Old Zhao,” Tianyun said, “has never once told a story that didn’t grow a mist thing by the end of it.” The children looked deeply disappointed and wandered off to bother someone more interesting.
Tianyun carried the water back toward the herbalist’s stall, where a familiar voice called out before he’d even rounded the corner.
“There he is.
The dragon boy.” “Ah Rou, I swear on this bucket—” “Breathes fire, commands mist, terrifies small children.” Ah Rou leaned against her family’s stall, arms crossed, a smear of flour on her cheek from the morning’s baking.
She’d grown up two houses down from him, close enough that she’d once broken his nose with a wooden sword at age nine and never once apologized for it.
“I heard you also grew a second head.” “That one I hadn’t heard yet.” “Give it an hour.” He set the bucket down and wiped his brow, and for a moment neither of them said anything, the easy silence of two people who’d run out of things to tease each other about faster than they’d expected.
Ah Rou’s smile faded just slightly.
“Is it true, though?” she asked, quieter now.
“That you’re leaving?” “Three days,” Tianyun said.
“An old man told me to be at the shrine past the eastern ridge at dawn.” “That’s not an answer to whether it’s true.
That’s just what he said.” He looked at her, surprised, the way he sometimes was when Ah Rou saw past a thing faster than he’d managed to see it himself.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“I don’t know what’s true yet.
I just know I have to go find out.” Ah Rou was quiet for a moment, turning a wooden bao steamer over in her hands without really looking at it.
“Bring back a mist thing,” she finally said.
“For the children.
They’ll be unbearable if you come back with nothing.” “I’ll do my best.” “And Tianyun—” She caught his sleeve before he could turn away, and whatever teasing had lived in her voice a moment ago was gone now.
“Come back at all.
That part matters more.” He didn’t have an answer for that one.
He only nodded, and she let go of his sleeve, and neither of them said anything else about it, because some things were easier left exactly where they’d landed.
That evening, Tianyun found his father sitting alone on the back step, sharpening a kitchen knife that didn’t need sharpening.
He sat down beside him without a word.
For a while, the only sound was the whetstone’s steady rasp against the blade, and somewhere in the dark, crickets tuning up for the night.
“You knew him,” Tianyun finally said.
“The old man.
Before yesterday.” Li Wei’s hand didn’t slow.
“A long time ago.” “He almost called you something.
Before he said your name.” The whetstone stopped.
For a moment, Tianyun thought his father might actually answer — really answer, the way he never quite had about anything from before Qinghe Village, before the herb basket and the quiet mountain lessons and seventeen years of a life that had always felt, in hindsight, a little too carefully built.
Instead, Li Wei set the knife down and turned it over in his hands.
“There are things a man buries,” he said slowly, “not because he’s ashamed of them, but because digging them back up costs more than most people understand.
I buried mine a long time before you were born, Tianyun.
I’m not ready to explain all of it tonight.
Maybe not for a while yet.” “But someday?” “Someday.” His father managed a tired smile.
“When you’re strong enough that the answer won’t be the most dangerous thing you’re carrying.” It wasn’t the answer Tianyun had wanted.
But it was, he realized, more honesty than his father had ever offered him before, and there was something almost comforting in that — proof that whatever secrets lived behind Li Wei’s calm herbalist’s face, they weren’t secrets meant to hurt him.
“Will you teach me something?” Tianyun asked.
“Before I go.
Anything.” Li Wei considered this for a long moment.
Then, without a word, he stood, walked to the edge of the yard, and dropped into a stance Tianyun had never once seen him use in seventeen years of hauling firewood and picking herbs — low, balanced, one hand curled loosely at his hip like it was resting on a hilt that wasn’t there.
“Watch my feet,” he said.
“Not my hands.
Everyone watches the hands first.
That’s how they lose.” For the next hour, under a sky slowly filling with stars, an herbalist who was apparently not just an herbalist taught his son how to stand like he might actually survive whatever waited for him at that shrine.
The morning of the third day arrived gray and quiet, mist pooling thick in the low fields the way it always did before the sun burned it away.
Lin Su pressed a cloth bundle into his hands at the gate — rice cakes, dried meat, a small jar of the pickled plums he’d loved since he was small enough to steal them off the shelf when she wasn’t looking.
“You said he told you to bring nothing,” she said.
“He did.” “He’s not your mother.
I am.
Eat something on the road.” Old Zhao showed up uninvited, as he always did, leaning on the fence with an expression that was trying very hard to look casual and failing completely.
“So,” Zhao said.
“Off to become some kind of immortal, are you.” “I’m off to find out what an old man wants from me, mostly.” “Same thing, in my experience.” Zhao cleared his throat, gruffer than usual.
“Don’t let them work you too hard up there.
And don’t come back soft.
I need someone strong enough to haul my firewood when I’m eighty.” “You’re going to live to be a hundred and fifty out of spite alone.” “Damn right I am.” Zhao pulled him into a crushing, wordless hug before he could say anything else, released him just as quickly, and turned away toward his gate a little too fast, clearing his throat again on the way.
Tianyun looked back once at the small wooden house, at his mother’s hand pressed to her mouth, at his father standing very still beside her with an expression Tianyun couldn’t quite name — not fear, not sadness, something older than either — and then he turned and walked the eastern trail alone, the cracked jade shard warm against his chest with every step.
The old shrine sat exactly where the villagers always said it did, past the eastern ridge, half-swallowed by wild peach trees that bloomed a season too early.
Its stone steps had crumbled at the edges.
Its carvings had worn to little more than suggestion, just as Old Zhao always described — except that up close, in the gray light before sunrise, Tianyun could see they weren’t worn at all.
They were moving.
Slow, deliberate lines shifting across the stone like ink settling in water, forming characters and then dissolving before he could read them, over and over, the whole surface of the shrine breathing with a kind of patience that made the hair on his arms rise.
The old man was already there, seated cross-legged atop the crumbling altar, wine gourd resting in his lap, as though he’d been waiting since long before dawn — or perhaps long before Tianyun had ever been born.
“You’re early,” the old man said, without opening his eyes.
“You said dawn.” “I did.” One cloudy eye finally cracked open, studying him with something that might have been approval.
“Most boys your age would have found a reason to be late.
Fear does that.” He rose, robes settling around him, and for the first time since the mountain, his voice lost every trace of dry humor.
“Good.
You’ll need whatever isn’t fear today.” Tianyun’s stomach tightened.
“What happens today?” The old man raised his staff, and the moving characters across the shrine’s stone surface all froze at once, then flared into brilliant, blinding light.
“Today,” he said, “we find out exactly how broken you really are.” CREATORS’ THOUGHTS Astranor_Shinjitsu Creation is hard, cheer me up!