The soldier was the first one who nearly killed Yuan on the road.
It was not long after dawn.
Yuan had descended from the mountain and reached the narrow pass that crossed above a shallow valley.
A bearded man stood there beside a mule loaded with sacks, selling water from leather skins.
When he saw Yuan’s torn clothes, the man laughed and said the water cost one copper coin, while directions cost two.
The man’s hand rested on his belt.
A knife with a bone handle.
Nothing more than a cutting tool.
But a voice inside Yuan’s head did not see a knife.
It saw a weapon.
Now.
The voice came from somewhere beneath his ribs, rough and eager, shouting with the enthusiasm of a man who had spent fifty years waiting for an order.
Strike before he strikes you.
Don’t retreat.
Strike.
Yuan’s right hand moved on its own toward a pointed stone at the edge of the road.
His breath stopped.
He saw the man smiling, unaware of anything.
He saw his own fingers closing around the stone.
He calculated the distance between the stone and the man’s head, then the five days it would take for the body to be found, then the price of it all.
There was no profit in it.
Killing without profit was a luxury, and Yuan had no luxuries.
“Close the door,” he said inside himself, his voice louder than everything else.
His fingers opened.
The voice was forced back into the darkness, grumbling as it went.
“One copper coin for the water,” Yuan said to the man in a perfectly ordinary voice.
“And one coin for information.”
For a need like this, another voice had to be called upon.
Yuan closed his eyes for a single moment and opened a small crack toward another part of the dark passage within him.
A soft, mocking voice slipped through, sniffing at the man the way a jeweler might inspect counterfeit gold.
He is lying about the distance, not the direction, the dead merchant whispered.
He’ll say two days.
It’s really a day and a half.
He’ll ask for two coppers and accept one and a half if he sees you’re not ashamed to bargain.
So don’t be ashamed.
“Two days?” Yuan said to the man, rubbing his chin as though he were uncertain.
“I think it’s closer.”
The man’s smile faltered for half a moment.
Yuan paid one and a half copper coins and received both the water and the correct direction.
Then he walked on.
Ah, the merchant said inside his head.
I like you when you’re stingy.
“I don’t like you at all.”
That doesn’t bother me.
I’m dead.
Yuan spent the rest of the morning beneath a weak sun.
The road gradually descended between unharvested wheat fields and distant huts with white smoke rising from them.
Farmers passed him, glanced at him, then looked away as though avoiding a diseased dog.
It was nothing strange to him.
What was strange was that, amid the familiar noise inside his head, he was hearing something else for the first time in seven years.
The voices of the living.
A creaking cart.
A crying child.
A man cursing his mule.
It was as though the world he had believed was dead was returning to life before his eyes, piece by piece.
⸻
The first few months had not been this amusing.
On one night during his third month, when he was still stumbling through a hundred voices without knowing one from another, Yuan awoke with his hands clenched around a shard of pottery, its sharp edge pressed against his throat.
At first, he did not understand.
Then he did.
A soldier had been defeated in an ancient battle beneath the mountain.
He had died believing defeat was a disgrace that could only be erased by death.
That thought had turned endlessly within him for months without a witness, until it found a living body to wear.
The voice whispered in Yuan’s ear with unsettling calm.
You lost.
Losers do not live.
End it with honor.
The shard cut his skin.
Yuan found nothing within himself to stop it.
No fear.
No desire to live.
Nothing inside him objected.
Then another voice exploded from somewhere he did not know.
Live!
It was a woman’s voice, rough from screaming.
There were no other words.
A woman who had died protecting a child with her body, leaving behind only one command.
Live.
Live.
Live.
She did not know Yuan.
He was not her son.
But instinct had never cared about details.
The shard fell from his hand.
Yuan sat trembling in the darkness, and for the first time since that afternoon at the temple, he understood something completely.
He had not survived through reason.
Nor through courage.
He had survived because one strange voice had happened to overpower another.
Chance was not a plan.
“I can’t let the voices fight by chance,” he said to himself in the darkness.
“I have to be the judge.”
⸻
So he built a system.
It was not written in any sacred book.
He had no book to begin with.
He built it stone by stone, like a prisoner digging a tunnel, knowing that one wrong calculation could bring the ceiling down on his head.
The small voices, those with fleeting hatred and minor desires, were not worth speaking with.
They were burned.
He gave them just enough of his light to burn for a breath or two, took whatever strength they left behind, and then they went out as ash.
The coherent voices, like a soldier who refused to retreat or a craftsman who had died in pursuit of precision, were rented.
Yuan opened the door to a small room for them and gave each one a task, boundaries, and a time to return.
Once the task was complete, he closed the door by his own will and returned them to silence.
As for the violent ones, those close to madness, the ones that wanted revenge against the entire world or saw death as salvation, he neither burned nor rented them.
Burning them would be like putting out a fire with oil.
He built them a room deep within his consciousness, its walls made from his own hardened will, and left them to scream there until they grew tired.
He misclassified them many times.
Once, he mistook a seemingly minor voice for fuel, only to discover that it carried a scheme twenty years in the making.
It nearly seized control during a moment of weakness.
But mistakes taught him the way broken paths taught those who walked them.
After years, he rarely made the wrong judgment.
And on nights when everything grew quiet, he could hear the imprisoned room.
There were usually no words, only a long scratching against the wall of his will.
Then, once during the eighth month, it was not scratching.
It was speech.
A voice without a name or face whispered from behind the wall in the tone of someone who could wait without hurry.
One day, you will open the door for us.
Yuan did not answer.
He measured the distance between the door and his fist, then added another stone to the wall.
⸻
At sunset, he reached the edge of a hill and sat beside a stream to wash his face.
The cold water restored a pleasant clarity to his mind.
He raised his hands before his eyes.
There were no glowing pathways beneath his skin as the books described.
No aura.
No radiance.
From a distance, anyone looking at him would see only a thin young man staring at his palms beside a stream.
He knew what lay beneath the skin.
“Question,” the dead merchant said inside him, in the tone of someone slowly pouring tea.
How do you not dissolve into us, boy?
Everyone who tried this path before you dissolved.
Every one of them.
They became babbling madmen.
Yet you speak to us as though we were your servants.
“Because I’m colder than you.”
Arrogant.
“Honest.
You have a thousand reasons to cry over.
I haven’t found anything in my chest worth crying over since the day I was born.”
He dried his hands on his clothes.
“You can’t hold on to something that has no hand.”
The merchant was silent for a moment.
Then he spoke more softly.
That is the most honest thing you’ve said.
A pause.
And the most frightening.
Yuan stood.
From the top of the hill, the city finally came into view.
It looked like interlocking rings of gray stone, each ring higher and cleaner than the one before it, all gathering toward a center that gleamed like the surface of water.
Seven walls.
Xian Yu.
He stood staring.
It was the first time he had seen with his own eyes something the world had built to protect order, rather than a place where something could be stolen from.
Going to sell yourself in the City of Laws?
the merchant asked mockingly.
Yuan did not move.
His eyes remained fixed on the last wall, on the highest illuminated ring.
“No,” he said.
“I’m going to buy everything in it.”
He looked at the city below.
“With a currency they don’t know how to count.”