The story the Village Chief told Bao that evening was the same one he'd told Xu Yuan weeks earlier, about a village that vanished and a road that used to stretch farther than any road needed to. Bao wrote it all down without much visible reaction, the careful blankness of a man who'd learned not to let his face show what he thought a story was worth until he'd had time to weigh it properly.
Xu Yuan sat near the doorway and listened without adding anything of his own. When the Chief finished, Bao asked a single follow-up question that made Xu Yuan's stomach turn cold.
"Has anyone in the village ever found anything from that time? Objects, I mean. Not just stories."
The Chief's face didn't change. "Not that I've heard of."
It was, as far as Xu Yuan knew, the first outright lie he'd ever heard the old man tell.
He didn't ask about it that night. He waited two days, until he found the Chief alone by the Spirit River, and asked him plainly.
"Old Han has something. Doesn't he."
The Chief didn't look surprised, which told Xu Yuan he'd been half-expecting the question since the night of the tea. "You noticed that too."
"Shen Yu gave him a stone before he left north. I saw the look on Old Han's face when he took it. That wasn't the look of a man being handed an ordinary rock."
The old man was quiet for a while, watching the current. "There are things Old Han knows that he's never told me the whole of, even after forty years of friendship. I've learned not to push him on it. A man's allowed to keep his own troubles to himself, if that's how he needs to hold them."
"Even if it's connected to all this?"
"Especially then." The Chief finally turned to look at him. "You've been chasing answers since the day you woke up in that valley, and most of the time that's served you well. But not every locked door needs kicking in the moment you find it. Sometimes the person holding the key needs to decide, on their own, that it's time to use it."
Xu Yuan accepted that, though it didn't sit easily with him. He went to Old Han's forge that afternoon anyway, not to demand anything, just to be present in a way that might eventually make the old blacksmith comfortable enough to talk.
He picked up the hammer without being asked and got to work on a batch of nails, the same crooked, ugly things he'd been making for a week now, slowly getting less crooked with each attempt.
Old Han watched him work for a long while before speaking. "You've gotten better."
"Not good, though."
"No." A dry laugh. "Not yet."
They worked in silence for a while, the forge's heat pressing against Xu Yuan's face, the hammer falling into a rhythm that left almost no room for thinking about anything else.
"That registrar," Old Han finally said, not looking up from the blade he was shaping. "He's not wrong about the gap in the records. I've known about it longer than he has."
Xu Yuan kept his own hammer moving, careful not to react too sharply and scare the words back into silence.
"My grandfather's grandfather was a smith too. Passed a few things down that never made it into any ledger. One of them's a way of reading certain stones — the kind Shen Yu found on the eastern ridge. Stones that shouldn't exist anymore, because everything that made them was supposed to have been wiped out a very long time ago."
"Wiped out by what?"
Old Han's hammer paused, just for a beat. "I don't know the whole of it. My family's knowledge was never the whole of it — just enough to recognize the signs when they showed up again. And they're showing up again."
"The wolves. The fortress. The doorway symbol."
"All of it." Old Han set his hammer down and looked at Xu Yuan directly for the first time since they'd started working. "I'm not keeping this from you out of spite, boy. I'm keeping it because half of what I know is guesswork passed down through five generations of smiths who didn't fully understand it themselves. I won't hand you a half-truth and let you build a plan on top of it. When Shen Yu gets back, when he's read whatever that message actually said, we'll know more. Until then, I'd rather stay quiet than get you killed on bad information."
Xu Yuan turned that over. It didn't feel like a door slamming shut so much as a door being left ajar, with a promise attached that it would open properly once there was something worth walking through it for.
"Alright," he said.
Old Han studied him for a moment, his weathered face easing into something closer to respect. "You didn't push."
"The Chief told me not to."
"Good advice." Old Han picked his hammer back up. "Now get back to work. Those nails won't fix themselves, and neither will the roof they're meant for."
That night, Xu Yuan found Mei Lin outside her borrowed house, sorting a fresh batch of dyed thread by color under lamplight.
"Old Han knows something," he told her. "He's not ready to say what yet."
"Are you angry about that?"
He thought about it honestly before answering. "No. I think I understand it better than I would have a month ago."
She looked up at him. "What changed?"
"I used to think knowing everything as fast as possible was the only way to stay safe." He sat down across from her, watching her hands sort red thread from blue by lamplight that made both colors look nearly the same. "I'm starting to think knowing the wrong thing too early can be its own kind of danger. Old Han's not hiding this to protect himself. He's hiding it because he doesn't trust it yet, and I'd rather wait for something true than rush toward something half-finished."
Mei Lin held up a spool of red thread, checking it against the lamp. "That's a calm way to think about it, for someone with a hundred wolves waiting on him."
"Seventy-three now."
"Fine. Seventy-three." She almost smiled. "Still calm about it."
"I'm learning it from people who are better at it than I am."
She set the thread down and looked at him properly. "That's not a bad thing to learn from anyone."
They sat together a while longer, the lamp burning low, the village going quiet around them house by house, while somewhere in the mountains east of Pinebrook, whatever Old Han's family had spent five generations half-understanding waited for its own moment to be recognized again.