Mother was having a good day, which meant she could sit upright without the coughing fits lasting more than a minute. I brought her tea, which consisted of boiled water with dried chrysanthemum from the patch behind the house — and sat across from her on the floor of our main room while Hao was out helping the Wei family replant their eastern field.

  "You've been walking the village," she said.

  I set the cup down and nodded. "I have."

  "You've checked the irrigation, counted the grain stores, and you've been watching who talks to who..." She sipped her tea with shaky hands, but her eyes never wavered from him. "Your father used to do the same thing before planting season. But you're not checking fence posts."

  I could've deflected, but Mother had raised two sons in a warring states farming village while her husband got conscripted twice, buried a daughter last winter, and kept this household running through three bad harvests.

  She didn't need me to manage her.

  "The Prefect lost men in that skirmish," I began to say. "More than expected, based on how few came back across the region. The Liu family has a cousin in Dongshan village, and their village lost six men. We lost four. That pattern holds across the prefecture, which means the Prefect's fighting force is down by at least a third."

  Mother watched me over her cup.

  "Which also means one of two things: Either the Lord of Qinghe pulls back and consolidates, in which case the Prefect leaves us alone for a season while he rebuilds. Or the Lord pushes forward because he's already committed to the southern campaign and can't afford to stall. In which case the next conscription will be harsher than the last."

  "So you're afriad that they'll come for Hao," Mother said.

  "They'll come for every man and boy old enough to hold a spear. Hao just happens to be the one who'll draw the most attention because he's the strongest person in this village."

  She set the cup down. The tremor in her hands stilled for a moment. "What are you proposing?"

  And there it was. No tears, no panic, no telling me I was too young to be thinking about this.

  She's sharper than I gave her credit for. Sharper than Liang — the original Liang — probably ever realized.

  "The village needs to produce more with fewer hands," I said. "Four families lost their primary laborer. Two more have men too injured to work a full day. If those six households fall behind, their yields drop, the village total drops, and we can't meet the Prefect's tax quota. You know what happens after that."

  "Seizure. Then hunger. Then the next conscription will fill itself because starving men volunteer themselves for the sake of their families." Mother said in a matter of fact manner.

  "Hao is already helping those families. He's been rotating between plots every day, lending muscle wherever it's needed. The problem is he's doing it without a schedule in place."

  "He has his father's heart," Mother couldn't help but smile.

  "He does. And I need to put a frame around it before he runs himself into the ground." I pulled a stick from the kindling pile and started drawing on the packed earth floor.

  "These are the struggling households. Three of them share adjacent fields on the south side. If I can convince them to work each other's plots in rotation then they will cover more ground with the same number of hands. Hao becomes the anchor for that rotation instead of sprinting between six different families every day."

  Mother leaned forward to look at the marks on the floor. "The Zhao family won't share labor with the Fen family. Old Fen owed Zhao Ping a debt he never repaid, and now Old Fen is dead and the debt is unresolved."

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I stared at her. "How do you know that?"

  "I've lived in this village for twenty years, Liang. I know every grudge, every debt, and every marriage arrangement that fell through and why." She coughed, then steadied her breathing. "If you want to reorganize how these families work together, you need to know who will cooperate and who won't. I can tell you."

  I sat back on my heels.

  In three hundred xianxia novels, the MC's mother was either dead before chapter one, too weak to matter, or a plot device to generate motivation. A source of tragedy, not strategy. I'd been making the same assumption without realizing it, treating Mother as someone to protect rather than someone to consult.

  Stupid. She's been running the social intelligence of this household for two decades and I was too busy doing perimeter walks to ask her what she knew.

  "Tell me everything," I said.

  She did.

  Over the next hour, while her voice held and the coughing stayed manageable, Mother laid out the social architecture of Hekou village.

  The Wei and Liu families had intermarried twice and would cooperate without question.

  The Zhao family respected strength and results, so anything Hao endorsed they'd follow.

  The Chen household was isolated because the father had been accused of stealing seed grain three years ago. This accusation was never proven, but the suspicion stuck.

  Old Fen's widow had a brother in Dongshan village who might take her in, which would free up their plot but lose a household from the tax roll.

  I drew lines on the floor between the marks.

  "The Chen accusation," I said. "Was it true?"

  "No. The seed grain was eaten by rats. I saw the droppings myself. But Zhao Ping had already made his accusation publicly and couldn't back down without losing face," She explained.

  "So if someone cleared Chen's name with evidence, then Zhao Ping could accept it without embarrassment..."

  "The Chen family would be grateful enough to do anything you asked, and Zhao Ping would owe you a favor for resolving something that's been sitting on his conscience for three years." Mother smiled.

  "You think like your father."

  He's not my real father but I'll take the compliment.

  "There's something else," I said. "Something I need to tell you that's going to sound strange."

  She waited.

  "Hao has spiritual aptitude. I've felt him release qi when he's emotional, whatever is inside him, it's significant."

  Mother's expression didn't change. She didn't display the shock that I had expected for her to. She just looked at me with those steady dark eyes and nodded once.

  "I know," she said. "I've always known. Why do you think your father volunteered so fast when the conscription riders came? If they'd tested the young men before selecting, if they'd felt what Hao carries..." She trailed off into a cough that lasted longer this time. I handed her the tea and waited.

  "Your father wasn't just protecting Hao from the fighting," she said when she recovered. "He was protecting him from being discovered."

  The floor marks stared up at me. Six struggling families. A web of debts and grudges. A brother with untrained power. And now this — my parents had known about Hao's aptitude for years and had been actively hiding it.

  "Can you feel it too?" Mother asked.

  I nodded because there was no point in lying. "Yes, I can."

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them, I recognized that her eyes were sharp, as if she had finished calculating probabilities.

  "Then you'll need to learn faster than he does," she began. "Because when someone finally notices what your brother is, you'll need to be ready."

  I looked at the map on the floor. The labor rotation was the first move. Clear Chen's name, unify the south-side families, put Hao at the center of a cooperative structure that made the village more productive and made him harder to extract without disrupting everything.

  Layer one.

  "I'll start with the Chen family tomorrow," I said. "I need to find those rat droppings, or what's left of the grain store from three years ago. Anything physical Zhao Ping can point to and save face."

  "Check the old store shed behind the Chen plot. They never tore it down." Mother settled back against the wall, her energy was fading. "Oh, and Liang?"

  "Mm..?"

  "Your brother will want to help. Let him. He'll do it better than you."

  She was right. Hao walking up to the Chen family and offering reconciliation carried ten times the weight of me doing it. The whole village trusted him already. I just needed to point him in the right direction.

  I gathered the kindling stick and smoothed the marks from the floor. "Get some rest. I'll bring dinner when Hao gets back."

  She was already closing her eyes. "Check the old shed before the next rain. The rat evidence won't survive another wet season."

  I stopped at the doorway and looked back at her. This thin woman was drowning in a blanket, but she had just handed me a complete intelligence briefing on the village social structure.

  The original Liang had no idea what he had in this house.

  Hao wouldn't be back until the sundown. It was plenty of time to find what I needed and be back before anyone asked where I'd been.

  I laced my sandals tight, the way Father used to, and headed for the Chen plot.