Xu Yuan brought Mei Lin to the shrine three days later, mostly because she'd asked and partly because a second pair of eyes had a way of catching things his own had gone blind to from staring too long.
The shrine stood at the edge of the square, small and unremarkable, the kind of thing villagers touched for luck on the way to market without thinking much about why. Xu Yuan knelt beside its base and showed her the marks worn into the stone — faint, evenly spaced, the same rhythm he'd found on the road stone and the cracked monument in the ruined village.
Mei Lin ran her fingers along the grooves the way he had, slow and careful. "You're right. It's the same pattern."
"I wanted to be sure I wasn't imagining it."
"You're not." She sat back on her heels. "So this whole village really is sitting on top of it."
"I think so."
She was quiet for a moment, looking at the shrine like she was seeing the whole square differently now — the well, the meeting hall, the packed dirt roads that all met at slightly odd angles she hadn't noticed until this moment. "That's not a comfortable thing to know."
"No."
"Does the Chief know how deep it goes?"
"I don't think anyone does yet. That's sort of the problem."
Mei Lin reached out and pressed her palm flat against the stone, the same way Xu Yuan had done days earlier. Nothing happened — no glow, no message, nothing the Interface cared to acknowledge. But she left her hand there a moment longer than she needed to, like she was trying to feel something underneath the stone that the stone itself wasn't offering.
"When I was small," she said, "there was an old well behind my grandmother's house that nobody used anymore. Cracked, mostly dry. My mother told me a whole village used to stand there before ours, generations back, and everyone just built on top of what was left because starting fresh took more effort than reusing what was already there." She pulled her hand back slowly. "I never thought about what that actually meant until now. People just build over each other. Layer after layer. And eventually nobody remembers which layer they're standing on."
Xu Yuan looked at her, something in the observation landing harder than he expected. "That's exactly it. That's the whole problem."
"It's not really a problem, though, is it? It's just how things work. Nothing stays new forever. Somebody's always building on top of somebody else."
"Maybe. But this feels different. This wasn't just old houses getting reused. Something happened to the people who built this, and it happened fast enough and completely enough that nobody even remembers it happened at all." He looked at the shrine stone again. "That's not the same as time passing. That's something being erased on purpose."
Mei Lin didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice had gone quieter. "Like what happened to Eastbrook. And Cold Creek."
"Yes."
"You think it's happened before. A long time ago. And it's happening again now."
"I think that's exactly what's happening."
She wrapped her arms around her knees, the same posture she'd had beside the river on her first night in Pinebrook. "That's a lot to carry around while you're also supposed to be killing wolves and learning swordsmanship."
"I don't carry it all the time." He sat down beside her. "Some days I just card wool with you and forget about it for an hour."
That got a real laugh out of her, short and unforced. "You've never carded wool in your life."
"I've watched you do it. That counts for something."
"It counts for nothing, but I'll allow it." She bumped his shoulder lightly with hers, an easy, unthinking gesture that neither of them made a point of afterward. "Come on. Show me the rest of it. The road, the ruined village. I want to see what you've been staring at every time you disappear for half a day."
They walked out together that afternoon, following the old road past the point where Xu Yuan usually stopped, past the fork Liang always slowed down near without meaning to. Mei Lin studied everything the same careful way she studied a basket of wool — the wheel ruts, the drainage channel, the stone markers with their worn, unreadable numbers.
At the ruined village itself, she stood at the edge for a long moment before stepping in, the way Xu Yuan had done on his very first visit.
"Nineteen houses," he said. "All facing south. Well at the exact center."
"How do you know they're all facing south?"
"I paced it out. Checked it against the sun."
She looked at him sideways. "You really have been out here a lot."
"There wasn't much else to do, before you got here."
Mei Lin walked the perimeter slowly, the way he had, running her hand along doorframes and foundation stones. She stopped at one of the smaller houses near the edge of the settlement and crouched beside it.
"This one's different," she said.
Xu Yuan came over. "How?"
"The stones are a different color. See here, along the base." She pointed to a faint discoloration running along the lowest course of the foundation. "The rest of the houses are all the same gray stone. This one's got a band of something darker mixed in, right at the bottom."
Xu Yuan crouched beside her and looked closely. She was right. He'd walked past this exact house twice before and never noticed it — too focused, he realized, on the layout as a whole to look closely at any single piece of it.
"That could mean something," he said slowly. "Or it could mean nothing. A different batch of stone, maybe."
"Maybe." Mei Lin traced the discoloration with one finger. "But you said it yourself. Nothing about this place looks like an accident."
Xu Yuan pulled out his notebook and added a new line under a fresh heading. One house, different foundation stone. He didn't know what it meant. But he was starting to trust, the way he'd trusted the road's exact measurements before he had any proof, that it meant something.
"Thank you," he said, "for coming out here."
Mei Lin looked at the darker stones a moment longer before standing. "I didn't do much. I just looked at what was already in front of you."
"That's more than nothing."
She smiled at that, small and real, and the two of them walked the rest of the ruined village together as the afternoon light began its slow slide toward evening.