Mother had been a healer's apprentice before she married Father.

  I didn't learn this from the original Liang's memories, which were patchy at best.

  I learned it because I asked.

  "You use chrysanthemum for headaches and dried ginger for nausea," I said, sitting across from her on a morning when her coughing was light. "Did someone teach you that?"

  She looked at me over her tea. "Sun Ai. The healer in Chenjia village, east of the river fork. I apprenticed under her from age eleven to fifteen, before I married your father and moved here."

  "Why didn't you keep practicing?" I asked.

  "Hekou village didn't have a healer's hut or any supplies, and your father needed help with the farm more than the villages needed a girl with very little medical training. " She said it without bitterness.

  "What did Sun Ai teach you?"

  Mother's eyebrows lifted. She was used to Hao's questions, which were starkly different than the nature of mine.

  "We went over how to prepare and identify herbs," She counted on thin fingers. "As well as reading pulses and the body's pressure lines in order to relieve pain, and stop bleeding. One thing she was sure of was to teach me where not to press because the body's flow runs through it, and disrupting that flow will kill someone faster than any wound."

  I went very still.

  "Say that last part again..."

  "The body's flow?" She dupped her head to the side.

  "The pressure lines. What did your teacher call them?"

  Mother frowned, dredging up terminology from many years ago. "She called them Mai. It's the pathways that carry the body's vital energy from the core to the extremities. Sun Ai said every healer learned them first because you couldn't treat the body without understanding it. Needle a point along the Mai and you could redirect the flow to speed up the healing process. Block a point and the limb went numb. Sever a major pathway..." She trailed off. Nothing more needed to be said.

  Meridians. She's describing meridians.

  Every cultivation novel I'd ever read treated meridians as spiritual architecture. Abstract channels for abstract energy, mapped by ancient immortals and accessible only through cultivation techniques passed down through sect lineages. But Mother was describing them as a healer's tool. Physical pathways with physical locations on the body, known to village herbalists and used for medicine.

  "How many mai did Sun Ai teach you?" I asked.

  "She showed me twelve primary pathways. She mentioned that there were more, but that the twelve were essential for healing work." Mother paused. "She also said that some people had stronger flow through their mai than others. That you could feel it when you took their pulse. She said some bodies carried more than others."

  That's aptitude, and the difference between someone who can cultivate and someone who can't.

  "Could you show me the twelve pathways?" I asked her.

  "Why?"

  I'd prepared for this question. "If I'm going to assess the village's health, I should understand the basics of how the body works. You're the closest thing Hekou has to a medical practitioner."

  It was true enough. The wellness checks were still my cover for scouting cultivation aptitude, but the medical knowledge was genuinely necessary. A village with no healer, no doctor, and a Prefect who didn't care whether his conscripts came back healthy or in pieces needed someone who understood basic anatomy. If that someone also used the knowledge to map how qi moved through the human body, well...dual purpose. As usual.

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  Mother studied me for a long moment. Then she set down her tea and held out her left arm, palm up.

  "Here." She pressed a fingertip to the inside of her wrist. "The lung mai starts here. Runs up the inner arm to the shoulder, crosses the chest, descends to the diaphragm." Her finger traced the line on her own skin, and I watched with a memorized gaze. "The heart mai runs parallel but deeper. You can feel both in the pulse if you know what you're looking for."

  She spent the next two hours teaching me what Sun Ai had taught her.

  Twelve primary pathways. Each one a channel running between the core and the extremities, each connected to a specific organ system, each with a defined set of pressure points where the pathway surfaced close enough to the skin to be manipulated by needle or finger pressure. Mother knew the locations by touch. She pressed my arm, my neck, the space between my ribs, and at each point I felt a faint warmth budding beneath the surface.

  Because I was also feeling the qi.

  Wherever she pressed along a pathway, my internal qi responded. It was as if her pressure was opening valves I hadn't known were closed, letting the energy flow through channels it had been sitting beside without entering.

  I pressed the lung mai point on my own wrist after Mother had finished and gone to rest. The warmth was there. I pressed the heart mai point and the sensation was even warmer. Each pathway had its own quality, its own resonance, and when I sat still and softened my attention the way I'd practiced for weeks, I could feel all twelve as a network. The shape was like seeing a river system from high altitude with each major channel being visible to the naked eye, as well as the tributaries.

  I pulled out bark and started mapping.

  Refugees arrived in the afternoon.

  There were nine of them, three families from Tongshan, the same village that Wang Su had mentioned, the one with half rations that had sent a delegation to the Prefect begging for relief.

  I saw them from the drying rack as they moved up the northern road, loaded down with whatever they'd been able to carry. Children were stumbling forward and there weren't any carts or livestock.

  By the time they reached the gate, half the village had gathered around them. Hao was already out front because Hao was always out front, and I watched from the hillside as he met the lead man — a farmer in his forties with dust-grey skin and a limp that favored his right side.

  I came down and stood at the edge of the crowd. I was close enough to hear but far enough to observe.

  "—took everything." The man's voice was flat, scraped clean of emotion. "The Prefect's collectors came for the tax quota and our village couldn't pay. We told them about the harvest shortfall, the men we lost, and the fields we couldn't plant. They didn't care. They seized the grain stores and when the village elder protested, they beat him in the square and left him there." He swallowed. "He died the next morning. After that, anyone who could leave did."

  Murmuring arose from the Hekou villagers. Zhao Ping's face had gone rigid.

  Tongshan is twenty li north. If the Prefect's collectors hit them, they'll work south. Every village on this road is on the same tax register.

  Hao turned to the crowd and said exactly what I knew he would say. "They're staying here. We have room and we have food for everybody/ Nobody walks away from our gate hungry."

  Nobody argued. A few faces looked uncertain since it was nine more mouths to feed, but Hao's words had conviction and the village had learned over the past month that when Hao committed to something, it happened.

  I found Hao's eyes in the crowd and gave him a small nod. He returned it. Then I slipped away while the village organized bedding and food, walked back up the hillside, and looked north.

  The road was empty, so it was safe to assume that these were the extent of the amount of refugees that we were getting today. But I was still sure that more refugees would follow. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon, and each group that arrived would stretch Hekou's resources thinner and raise our profile within the Prefect's administration.

  Nine new people. Three families. At least four working-age adults among them who'll need to be integrated into the labor rotation immediately or they become a drain instead of an asset. Their children will need feeding. Their skills will also need assessing, and every one of them needs to be checked for aptitude.

  I pulled the bark sheets from my belt. They had the village map, my cultivation notes and the labor schedule.

  The Tongshan man's words replayed. The Prefect's collectors hadn't even pretended to negotiate. They'd taken the grain and beaten an elder to death for protesting. That was the system working as designed — extract compliance through violence, replace spent resources with fresh conscripts, and keep the cycle turning until the Lord of Qinghe's borders reached wherever he'd decided they should stop.

  The question isn't whether that system reaches Hekou. It's whether Hekou will be the same kind of village when it does.

  I started rewriting the labor rotation to accommodate the nine new residents. The Tongshan families would need plots assigned, tools distributed, and housing arranged. I'd put them on the east-side fields where the soil was underworked. I'd also need to Integrate them with the existing rotation through Hao's natural gravitational pull. It will give them a stake in the village's productivity so that their presence increased our total yield instead of diluting it.

  I added the new families to the map and started counting again.