Pei Desheng laced his sandals in the dark.

  The straw was fresh, braided the night before by his wife's hands even though her fingers shook worse each morning. He tied them tight because a loose sandal on a march caused blisters, and a blister on a march caused a limp, and a limp in a battle meant a body on a cart.

  The conscription order had come three days ago. The Prefect's men rode through the village on horses, read names from a wooden tablet, and left. The Lord of Qinghe needed bodies for his southern campaign, and bodies he would have.

  Desheng stood and looked at his sons on the shared mat.

  Hao slept on his back with his arms thrown wide, mouth open, one leg kicked free of the blanket. He was seventeen and already broader across the shoulders than most grown men in the village.

  That was why Desheng had given his own name when they asked for volunteers. One Pei on the tablet was enough.

  Liang slept on his side, curled inward, one hand near his face. He was fifteen years old and he'd been quieter these past few months. He used to run with the other village children, shouting, throwing rocks at birds, and coming home with scraped knees and someone else's stolen radish. But something had settled in the boy recently. Desheng had caught him watching the village elder speak last week, studying the old man's face the way a merchant studied a scale. It was odd considering the boy had never before cared for such things.

  He would keep Hao steady. Desheng believed that. The younger one had a head for thinking through problems, even if it was new, and between the two of them their mother would be looked after.

  He touched the doorframe on his way out and kept walking.

  Rice doesn't care about your past life.

  That's the first useful thing I learned after waking up in this body.

  Rice doesn't care that you seem to have transmigrated into the kind of setting that most xianxia stories blow past in a single paragraph of backstory.

  I pressed another seedling into the paddy mud and straightened up to stretch my back. The water sat at the right level today. Took me four months to figure out that the irrigation channel on the east side was slightly higher than the west, which meant uneven flooding if I didn't pack the divider walls properly.

  Welcome to the Pre-Sect Warring States experience.

  Hao was on the other side of the field, hauling a sack of nightsoil to the compost heap. He made it look easy. Everything physical came easy to my brother. He could carry twice what I could and work twice as long and still have the energy to joke with the neighbors on his way home. People liked Hao. Old women saved him food and the other young men in the village looked to him when decisions needed making, even over men ten years older.

  It was, frankly, a problem I hadn't figured out how to solve yet.

  Sure, Hao was a good guy. He was warm, generous, trusting, and completely incapable of seeing the worst in people. If a stranger walked into our village tomorrow and said he needed help, Hao would feed him before asking his name.

  In a normal world, that made someone good. In a world where cultivators existed and warlords conscripted farmers to die in territorial skirmishes, it made someone a target.

  I pushed the next seedling in.

  Six months in this body and the best I've managed is better rice yields. Truly, the cultivation world trembles.

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  The genre-savvy part of my brain, the part that had absorbed hundreds of xianxia novels across a lifetimes' worth of late nights, kept running scenarios. In a proper cultivation story, I'd have stumbled into a cave by now. Found a dying immortal or an ancient manual or a sentient artifact that called me "young master" and kickstarted my path to ascension. But this world didn't work like that. Cultivation existed here the way swords existed. People had them. People used them. Nobody sat down and wrote a curriculum about it. The strong took what they wanted, the weak gave what was demanded, and the distance between the two was measured in bodies.

  Our father was adding to that measurement right now, somewhere south.

  I didn't think about it. There was nothing to think about. He went so Hao wouldn't have to, and that was simple enough that even a transmigrator with no farming skills could understand it.

  The men came back.

  I saw the dust from the north road while I was checking the irrigation channels and stopped. I quickly counted the figures as they came closer. Fourteen had left. I could see ten walking, maybe eleven. It was hard to tell at this distance.

  There was a cart behind them.

  Hao was already moving toward the road, dropping his hoe, and I followed at a walk because there was no point running toward something you couldn't change. The other families poured out of their homes, wives and children and the elderly, all pressing toward the road with desperate hope.

  I couldn't see Father walking.

  The men filed in through the village entrance, and the sounds split apart. Crying that meant joy on the left where a woman threw herself at her husband. Wailing on the right where a young wife saw her husband's face in the cart instead of in the crowd. Hao pushed through to the front and I watched his shoulders lock when he reached the cart and looked down.

  He didn't make a sound. Just stood there with his hands at his sides, staring.

  I looked at the cart. Father lay on his back with his arms folded across his chest. Someone had closed his eyes and cleaned most of the blood from his face, but his tunic was stiff and dark on the left side. A blade wound, probably.

  He went so you wouldn't have to, Hao. Both of us know it.

  I touched my brother's arm. "Let's bring him home."

  We buried Father behind the house where Mother could see the grave marker from her bed.

  She didn't cry. She was too tired for that, and the cough that had been building since winter took most of her breath. She knelt with us and placed a bundle of dried herbs on the packed earth because we couldn't afford incense, and her hands trembled through the whole thing, and none of us spoke for a long time.

  Hao broke the silence. "I'll go to the Prefect tomorrow."

  "No," I spoke up.

  He looked at me with red grief stricken eyes. "Our enemies killed our father, Liang."

  "The Prefect will come recruiting within the month." I kept my voice level. "He lost men in that skirmish, which means he needs replacements. It won't be long before he comes here and recruits you next."

  Hao gritted his teeth. "What would you have me do, brother? Refuse to fight our Lord's enemies, the very same enemies that took our father away from us?!"

  "I just want you to think."

  "I am thinking. I'm thinking about what kind of son stands over his father's grave and doesn't shed a tear!"

  That one landed, and it forced a sigh to escape from my lips.

  "If you go to the Prefect, you fight his war. You die in his war or you survive and he sends you to the next one. That's how it works. That is all you are to him." I looked at the grave marker. It was a single flat stone because we didn't even have wood for a proper one. "Father knew that. That's why he went instead of you."

  Hao's fists clenched, and I felt something shift in the air.

  It was faint. Like standing near a fire you couldn't see. The hairs on my arms prickled. The air around my brother thickened for just a moment, and then it passed and Hao let out a breath and his shoulders dropped.

  He didn't notice what had just happened.

  "Enough." Mother's voice called out to us from the doorway. "Not tonight. Please."

  Hao went to her and guided her back inside with both hands on her shoulders and murmuring something I couldn't hear. The warmth in him came back that fast. Anger to tenderness in the space of a breath. He'd always been like that.

  I stayed by the grave a moment longer.

  Qi. That was qi. It was leaking out of him like heat from a cracked furnace.

  My brother had spiritual aptitude. In a world with sects, someone would have scooped him up years ago. Tested him, ranked him, and slotted him into a system designed to turn raw talent into power.

  Unfortunately we served a warlord and a Prefect who fed farmers into border skirmishes like kindling, and were in a village full of people with no idea that the charismatic young man who carried their grain and laughed at their jokes could level a hillside in ten years if someone taught him how.

  I pressed my palm flat against the grave marker. The stone was still warm from the afternoon sun.

  And when I reached for that feeling, that pressure in the air, that heat Hao threw off without knowing...

  I realized that I could feel Qi too.