The fire in the stove burned down to small orange coals. The room was quiet. Gu Qinghan had gone back to the mattress, her hand still holding onto my sleeve until she fell asleep. Her face looked relaxed, without the constant strain she usually carried.
Mo Ran was resting too, leaning her head against the side of her wooden seat, her fingers loosely curled on the armrests.
Only Ye Xinyang remained awake. She was sitting on the edge of the straw mat, staring down at the charcoal markings on the paper. She hadn’t moved for an hour. Her brow was slightly furrowed, and she kept tracing the lines with her finger, hesitating.
I walked over and sat down on the floor a few paces away from her. I didn’t want to crowd her.
"You’re overthinking it," I said softly.
Xinyang looked up, her eyes reflecting the dim orange light. She let out a soft sigh, crumpling the edge of the paper just a bit. "It goes against everything I was ever taught, Lu Chen. Since I was seven, my master told me that the stomach is the center of your life. To send energy straight into my arms and ribs... it feels like I’m breaking a sacred law. I’m afraid."
"The people who taught you that abandoned you the moment your stomach core was hurt," I told her, keeping my voice very gentle. "Their laws only work for people who are lucky. You aren’t in their grand halls anymore. You’re here with me. Trust your own body, not their old books."
Xinyang bit her lip. She looked at the sleeping girls next to her, then looked back at me. The stubborn wall in her eyes was completely gone. She just looked like a young girl who wanted to stand up on her own strength again.
"If I do this," she whispered, her voice carrying a deep, raw vulnerability, "will you stay close? If... if it goes wrong, I don’t want to scare the others."
"I’ll be right here," I said. "I won’t let anything happen to you. Just close your eyes and breathe normally."
She nodded. She straightened her posture and closed her eyes. I watched her shoulders drop as she took a slow breath. At first, her face twisted in pain—she was trying to find her old core out of habit.
"Don’t look down there," I guided her quietly, my voice smooth and calm. "Forget your stomach. Feel the warmth from the food you ate. Let that warmth move up into your collarbone. Then let it flow down your arms, right into your bones."
Xinyang followed my words. Her breathing hitched for a second, and then her face smoothed out. A soft, tiny ripple of energy moved beneath her skin, traveling from her shoulders down to her elbows. It didn’t leak out. It didn’t tear her chest apart. Her skeletal frame absorbed it like a dry field drinking rain.
She opened her eyes, staring at her palms. She didn’t say anything, but her face flushed with an intense, quiet joy. She looked at me, her eyes shining, and she gave my hand a quick, grateful squeeze before tucking herself under the blanket to rest.
...
By noon the next day, the sun was bright, but a new problem arrived at our doorstep.
An old clerk from the outer administration hall walked down the mountain path. He wasn’t an elder, just a low-level manager named Deacon Wu. He didn’t bring any guards, and he didn’t try to fight. He just held a thick leather ledger in his hands and looked at our small dirt plot with a small, nasty grin.
I stepped out of the shack to meet him. Ye Xinyang and Mo Ran watched from the open doorway.
"Lu Chen," Deacon Wu said, tapping his quill against the book. "Elder Ironwood sent me down to log your official grain requirements for the upcoming autumn festival. As an outer servant, your usual quota is fifty bags of husked millet from these fields."
"The fields are small," I replied calmly. "Fifty bags is the maximum this can produce if the weather is perfect."
"Yes, well, things have changed," Deacon Wu smiled, his voice full of a greasy, underhanded malice. "Elder noted that you now have four additional mouths to feed in this household. Since your wives were stripped of their disciple status, they are logged as your dependents. Therefore, your mandatory harvest delivery has been raised to two hundred bags."
Behind me, Ye Xinyang stepped out , her face full of shock. "Two hundred bags? That’s impossible! This plot doesn’t even have enough soil to grow that much grain. You’re deliberately setting a trap to arrest him!"
"Those are the official calculations, Lady Ye," Deacon Wu said smoothly, bowing with fake politeness. "If Lu Chen cannot deliver two hundred bags to the main granary in two weeks, he will be logged as a thief who stole from the sect’s reserves. The punishment for that is twenty years in the mining mines. Good luck with the planting, young man."
He turned around and walked away, his small chuckles echoing down the path.
Xinyang walked up to my side, her fists clenched, her voice shaking with worry. "Lu Chen... this is bad. Ironwood is using the system to destroy you without ever lifting a finger. Even if you work day and night, you can’t force the earth to grow four times its limit."
I looked down at the empty dirt rows, then looked back at the shack where the white packets of Spiritual Grain Essence were stored. I remembered what the system note said—it could strengthen weak bodies, but it could also change the very nature of what it touched.
I turned to Xinyang, giving her a small, confident smile that instantly calmed her racing thoughts.
"Don’t worry about the old man’s numbers," I said softly, my voice reassuring and kind. "They think they are trapping us in a corner. But they don’t know that we are about to grow something this sect has never seen before. Let’s go inside and prepare the seeds."
Xinyang looked at my calm face, and the worry in her chest seemed to melt away but not completely. She nodded, a soft smile finally touching her lips. "Okay. Whatever you need, I’ll help you."