The wolves came easier now. Xu Yuan had stopped noticing the moment his body took over from his thinking — it just happened, the same way breathing happened, and he only caught himself doing it afterward, standing over a dead animal with no clear memory of the last three seconds.
Mission
Gray Wolves 27 / 100
Basic Sword Understanding: 11%
He sat on a fallen log to catch his breath and let the number sit there without chasing after what it meant. Seventy-three left. He used to flinch at that math. Now it just felt like a chore with a long list, the kind you worked through one line at a time without adding up the whole thing in your head.
Liang found him on the walk back, a rabbit slung over one shoulder from his own morning out.
"You've been going out alone a lot."
"The wolves aren't going to hunt themselves."
"That an order from someone, or just you?"
Xu Yuan thought about how to answer that honestly. "Just me."
Liang matched his pace without saying anything else about it, which was one of the things Xu Yuan liked best about him. He didn't dig unless you handed him a reason to.
They walked past the fork where the old road split off from the hunting trail, and Liang slowed without meaning to, the way people did near things that made them uneasy.
"You still going out there? To the ruins?"
"When I have time."
"My father used to tell that story like it was nothing. A village that wasn't there anymore. I always figured he made half of it up." Liang shifted the rabbit to his other shoulder. "Now I keep thinking about it at night. Wondering what actually happened to the people."
"I don't know yet."
"That's not comforting."
"It's not meant to be." Xu Yuan looked toward the trees where the old road disappeared into shadow. "I'd rather tell you the truth and have it sit wrong than tell you something easy that turns out to be a lie."
Liang didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had lost some of its usual lightness. "Fair enough."
Gu Chen's camp had grown again by the time they reached the village — not back to its original size, but close. Two new tents, a fresh set of horses tied along the fence line, and a face Xu Yuan didn't recognize standing at the folding table with Gu Chen, going through a stack of papers thick enough to need both hands.
"Who's that?" Liang asked.
"Don't know."
They found out an hour later, when the Village Chief called Xu Yuan over to the meeting hall. The stranger was older than Gu Chen, gray at the temples, dressed in robes that had clearly never seen a horse until recently — a scholar's cut, not a soldier's.
"This is Registrar Bao," Gu Chen said. "Sent from the Capital archives. He's here to check something against the local records."
Bao looked up from his papers with the mild, distracted air of a man more comfortable with old documents than living people. "Village Chief, I understand your records here don't go back terribly far."
"Sixty years, maybe seventy, in anything written down," the Chief said. "Older than that, it's just what people remember their grandparents saying."
"That's the trouble everywhere I've been sent." Bao set two ledgers side by side on the table, tapping one and then the other. "I've been comparing the Capital's tax rolls against local settlement counts for this whole region, going back as far as anyone's bothered to keep records. There should be a steady climb. More villages founded each generation, more names on the rolls." He frowned at the pages like they'd personally offended him. "Instead there's a gap. A clean one, about four hundred years back, where the number of settlements listed simply drops. Sharply. And stays low for almost a century before it starts climbing again like nothing happened."
Xu Yuan felt something go still in his chest, though he didn't let it show on his face.
"A famine, maybe," the Chief offered. "Or a war nobody bothered writing down properly."
"Possibly." Bao didn't sound convinced. "Except the drop isn't gradual, the way a famine or a war would show up. One year the number's where you'd expect it. The next year it's less than half that, all at once, and none of the surrounding records explain why. No mention of plague. No mention of an invading army. Just fewer villages, as if a portion of the map simply stopped being counted."
Gu Chen's jaw was tight. "That's the word I keep landing on too. Not destroyed. Not abandoned. Uncounted."
Xu Yuan thought of the buried village with its perfectly matched drainage channels, its houses all facing the same direction, its well set dead center like something measured with a string. He thought about telling them what he'd found.
He didn't, not yet. Not until he understood more of it himself.
"I'd like to see whatever old stories your people still tell," Bao said to the Chief. "The kind that don't make it into any ledger. Sometimes that's the only place the truth survives, once the official version's been cleaned up."
The Chief's eyes flicked briefly toward Xu Yuan before he answered. "I know a few. Come by this evening. I'll pour the tea."
Xu Yuan found Mei Lin at the well afterward, working through a fresh basket of wool, her hands moving through it the same way they had every day this past week. He told her what Bao had said, keeping his voice low even though there was no one close enough to overhear.
She listened without stopping her hands. "A whole century where nothing got counted."
"That's what he said."
"That's not a famine." She pulled a clump of fleece apart, more force in it than the wool needed. "Famines get written down. People remember famines. This sounds like somebody went through afterward and decided the records shouldn't say what actually happened."
"That's what I thought too."
She looked up at him then. "You've found something out there. In the old ruins."
"I think Pinebrook's built on top of whatever got left out of those ledgers."
Mei Lin set the comb down slowly. "Does the Chief know?"
"Some of it. Not all of it." Xu Yuan looked toward the meeting hall, where smoke was already rising from the chimney, tea being set to boil for a guest who'd traveled a long way to ask about a hundred years nobody could properly explain. "I don't think anyone knows all of it yet."
"Then find out," she said, simply, like it was the only reasonable next step available to either of them. "Before whatever erased those villages decides Pinebrook's overdue."
He didn't have an answer for that. He just nodded, and went to find a seat near enough to the meeting hall to hear whatever story the Village Chief decided a stranger from the Capital had earned the right to know.