Two weeks after we buried Father, I sat behind the house before dawn and tried to feel the world.

  That sounds more profound than it was. What I actually did was sit cross-legged in the dirt with my eyes closed, palms flat on my knees, breathing the way I'd read about in roughly three hundred cultivation novels and hoping something would happen that wasn't mosquito bites.

  The novels were useless, by the way. Every cultivation system I'd ever read described the process of sensing qi like it was obvious. "He turned his awareness inward and felt the flow of energy through his meridians." Great. Wonderful. Extremely helpful when you're a fifteen-year-old transmigrator sitting in the dark behind a farmhouse with no teacher, no manual, and no frame of reference beyond fiction written by people who had never cultivated.

  Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Feel for... something.

  Two weeks of this. Every morning before Hao woke up, every night after Mother fell asleep. Two weeks of sitting in the dirt like an idiot, reaching for a sensation I'd only felt once, standing next to my brother while he leaked spiritual energy like a cracked jar.

  Except it wasn't nothing. That was the frustrating part.

  There was something at the edges. But the moment I focused on it, it vanished. The moment I stopped trying, it brushed against my awareness like a current in still water and then disappeared before I could grab hold.

  I opened my eyes. The sky was turning grey along the eastern ridge. Twenty minutes, maybe, before Hao stirred and I needed to be in the fields looking like I'd slept a full night.

  Alright. Different approach.

  I stopped reaching. Stopped trying to pull the sensation toward me. Instead I just sat there, breathing, letting my attention go soft the way your eyes unfocus when you stare at nothing.

  And there it was.

  A warmth that started somewhere behind my sternum and radiated outward in slow pulses, faint enough that a stray thought scattered it. The morning air carried something too, a coolness that pressed against my skin from outside while the warmth pushed from within, and for a span of maybe three breaths I could feel the boundary between the self and the world. A membrane I hadn't known existed.

  Then a rooster crowed in the village and I lost the feeling.

  I sat there for a moment, heart beating faster than it should've been.

  I sighed and stood up onto my feet and headed to the rice fields.

  I spent the rest of that morning doing something more practical.

  I walked the village.

  I'd been watching for months and cataloging without drawing attention to myself, but today I made a circuit of the whole settlement with a purpose. Fourteen men had left for the Prefect's campaign and ten of them had came back. That left four families without a primary laborer heading into the growing season, and two of the men who did return were carrying injuries as well.

  I stopped at the irrigation ditch on the south side and crouched to check the water level. It was always low on this end because the channel silted up where it bent around Old Fen's plot, and nobody had cleared it properly since last autumn. Old Fen had been one of the four that had died in the campaign.

  Problem one. Labor shortage. Four dead, two injured, which means six families struggling to work their fields at the worst possible time. If their yields drop, the village produces less grain. If the village produces less grain, we can't meet the Prefect's tax quota. If we can't meet the quota...

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  I didn't finish that thought. I didn't need to. The Prefect's tax collectors were less creative than xianxia villains but considerably more predictable. Shortfall meant seizure. Seizure meant hunger. Hunger meant desperation, and desperate villages were easy to conscript from because starving men would trade their lives for the promise of fed families.

  It was a cycle and it worked exactly the way every exploitative power structure in every novel I'd ever read worked, except there was no righteous young master coming to dismantle it.

  There was just me, squatting by a silted ditch, doing math.

  I cleared the blockage with my hands. Took fifteen minutes of digging through compacted mud, but the water started flowing again. Nobody would notice or thank me for it, but that was fine. The rice in those downstream paddies would notice.

  I kept walking.

  The village — Hekou, named for the river fork it sat beside — had forty-three households. Maybe a hundred and ninety people total, counting children and elderly. There weren't any walls or watchtowers, just a single dirt road that connected to the northern trade route, which connected to the Prefect's seat at Meishan, which answered to the Lord of Qinghe.

  We were four layers removed from anyone with real power and completely exposed to anyone passing through.

  In a novel, the MC would find an ancient formation buried under the village and activate it with his protagonist energy. In reality, the best defensive asset Hekou has is a river on one side and a hill on the other, and nobody has thought to use either.

  I passed the Zhao family compound. Zhao Ping, the closest thing the village had to a leader since the elder had died two winters back, was mending a fence. He was fifty, stocky, missing three fingers on his left hand from a farming accident a decade ago. He'd avoided conscription by age, but his two sons hadn't. The older one came back. The younger one didn't.

  "Pei Liang." He looked up from his work. "Your brother was here earlier. He helped me move the grain stores to the dry shed."

  Of course he had. "Sounds like Hao," I said back.

  "He's a good strong boy." Zhao Ping drove a post into the ground. "Your father would be proud of how he's carrying himself."

  I nodded and kept walking because the alternative was saying what I was actually thinking, which was that Hao's habit of helping everyone with everything meant half the village already looked to him for support and the other half would follow within a month, and that a seventeen-year-old with uncontrolled spiritual aptitude becoming the de facto leader of a defenseless farming village in a warring states period was the kind of setup that got people killed.

  Not his fault. He's doing what comes naturally. But natural leaders attract attention, and attention in this world is a death sentence.

  I finished my circuit at the river fork that gave Hekou its name. The water was clear and fast-moving from the spring melt. Good land around here, actually. Fertile soil, decent rainfall, natural barriers on two sides. If someone with half a brain had been planning this village's layout, they'd have terraced the hillside for extra growing space and built a simple palisade across the open northern approach.

  Nobody had done either of those things, because nobody here thought in terms of defense. Why would they? They were farmers. Defense was the Prefect's job, and the Prefect's idea of defense was taking their men and feeding them into skirmishes so the Lord of Qinghe could draw his borders a little wider.

  I crouched by the water and watched it move.

  Resources: fertile land, river access, natural barriers, a population just large enough to sustain collective labor if organized properly.

  Liabilities: no defenses, no leadership structure, no cultivation knowledge, a tax burden that extracts more than it protects, and a brother who is going to accidentally become the most important person in this village whether I want him to or not.

  Somewhere upstream, a fish jumped. The splash sent ripples across the surface that caught the morning light and spread outward in clean concentric circles until they hit the bank and scattered.

  I can feel qi. Hao can produce it without trying. There are forty-three households here with people who've never been tested for their Qi aptitude because there's no Sect around to test them.

  The thought sat heavy in my mind as I cupped my chin in thought.

  How many of these farmers have spiritual roots they've never discovered? How many of their children? What happens when the Prefect's next conscription order comes and Hao says no, and the riders notice that the boy who said no can crack the air with his bare hands when he's angry?

  I stood up. The sun was fully above the ridge now, warm on my face. Across the fields I could see Hao moving between plots, stopping to talk to the Liu family, laughing at something their youngest said. Even from here I could see the way people leaned toward him.

  I can't stop that. I'm not even sure I should stop that. But if I can't keep him hidden, I need to make sure that when the world notices him, we're ready for what comes next.

  I walked back toward the fields. There was rice to tend, and a ditch to check, and about forty things to plan that I had no idea how to start.