The lead refugee's name was Gao Ren, and he was lying about something.

  Don't get me wrong, the story about Tongshan was real, the hollow eyes on his children confirmed it, and nothing could fake that. The Prefect's collectors had done exactly what he'd described. But Gao Ren himself didn't move like a farmer. He planted his feet too wide when he stood, kept his weight centered, and when Hao had offered to help him unload his pack on the first night, the man had shifted his body to keep his right hand free without thinking about it.

  It was a trained reflex.

  I gave it two days before I approached him. I had let the families settle into the temporary housing the village had arranged within the empty Chen shed that had been cleaned out and patched up, as well as space in the Liu compound's overflow room. I let Hao do what Hao did best, which was make the Tongshan families feel welcome with a speed that bordered on supernatural. By the second morning, their children were playing with the village kids and their wives were trading recipes with the Liu women.

  On the third morning, I found Gao Ren alone at the river fork, washing clothes.

  "Your leg," I said, crouching beside him. "How long has it been like that?"

  He glanced at me with the same wariness he'd shown since he had arrived here. "Took an axe handle to the knee during the conscription three years back. It never healed right."

  "You were conscripted?"

  "Yes for two campaigns. The first one was south against the border clans. The second one was east when the Lord tried to take the river crossings at Jiankou." He wrung water from a shirt. "The knee got me sent home from the second one since I could no longer march on it. The Prefect's captain decided a limping spearman was worth less than the rice it took to feed him."

  "Were you only a spearman?" I probed for more information.

  "Spearman, then runner, then they put me in the supply line because I could count and the quartermaster couldn't." He looked at me directly for the first time. "You're the younger Pei brother right? The quiet one."

  I nodded. "That's what they tell me."

  "You have the look of a quartermaster about you as well." He said it without flattery.

  "What else did you do in the supply line?"

  "Inventory and logistics mainly. I had to decide which cart goes where, which unit gets fed first, how much grain you need per man per day on a forced march..." He paused. "And I learned the forge. The campaign smith needed an extra hand and I have steady fingers. I worked on straightening bent spearheads, patching armor rivets, and keeping the tools functional."

  A quartermaster with forge experience and two campaigns of military logistics knowledge, living in my village because the Prefect's tax collectors beat his elder to death...

  "What can you tell me about the Prefect's forces?" I asked. No preamble, no easing into it. Gao Ren wasn't the type who responded to delicacy.

  His hands stilled on the wet cloth. "Why would a kid like you want to know about the Prefect's forces?"

  "Because the Prefect's collectors worked Tongshan and they're moving south. Hekou is on the same road and within the same tax register, and we lost the same percentage of men in the last conscription. I'd like to know what's coming before it arrives."

  He studied me with a piercing gaze, and I held it without flinching.

  "The Prefect keeps a garrison of forty men at Meishan," Gao Ren said. "They have thirty infantry, six mounted scouts, and four cultivators."

  I kept my face still. "Cultivators?"

  "They're from the hill clans and the border tribes. They aren't as trained as the ones in the southern kingdoms, but they are strong enough to break a shield wall by themselves. They can hit harder, move faster, and take wounds that would kill a normal man." He resumed washing. "The Prefect uses them as enforcers. One cultivator riding with a tax collection squad means nobody argues. Two means nobody survives arguing."

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Four cultivators in the Prefect's garrison. Brute-force practitioners with no formal training, operating on raw aptitude and violent conditioning. In a proper xianxia novel, these would be bottom-tier fodder. In a world with no sects and no organized cultivation, they're the equivalent of tanks rolling through a medieval village.

  "How strong are they?" I asked.

  "The weakest one I saw could punch through a wooden gate. The strongest could crack stone with his hands and move fast enough that you'd lose sight of him for a step or two." Gao Ren's voice was carefully neutral, but it was still shaky nonetheless. "They are undisciplined, but they don't need to be. When the Prefect points them at a problem, the problem stops existing."

  I sat with that information for a while.

  "Your village," Gao Ren began, pivoting to a different subject. "Someone's been making preparations, this village is more advanced than Tongshan was."

  I couldn't help but smile at his words. "We like to think ahead."

  Gao Ren gestured to the fence. "That fence is a good barrier for the northern approach, and that grain dryer is high enough to double as an observation platform." He gave me a once over and a bemused smirk crept up his visage. "Seems like your kind of work, I take it."

  He sees it. All of it. A career logistics man with forge skills and military intelligence, and he read my infrastructure in three days.

  "Hekou could use a blacksmith," I said, eager to make use of his skills.

  "It seems like this village could use a lot of things." He hung the shirt on a branch. "I'm not going anywhere, young man. The Prefect's men took everything I had. My children eat because your brother opened his gates to us. So whatever you're building here, I'm not going to get in the way of it."

  "I'm not asking you to stay out of the way. I'm asking if you'd be willing to set up a forge."

  His hands paused again. "You have iron?"

  "I have a merchant coming in five weeks with a supply list that includes iron tools. Some of those tools could be repurposed. And the hill behind the village has a creek bed with ore deposits. I found rust-colored stones in the sediment last week during a water survey."

  That was true. I'd cataloged the creek bed during one of my morning circuits and noted the iron-rich sediment without knowing exactly when it would become relevant. Now I knew.

  "A forge needs more than ore," Gao Ren said corrected. " It needs coal, bellows, and an anvil, or something close to it."

  "I know, that's why I'm asking you instead of trying to figure it out myself."

  He looked at the river for a long time. Then he stood, bad knee and all, and brushed the water from his hands. "Show me the creek bed."

  I stood up and lead him to the creek.

  After I showed Gao Ren the creek and we had a provisionary discussion on the lay of the land, I sought out Hao on the hillside.

  He was sitting on the drying rack platform with his legs hanging over the edge, watching the last light drain from the sky. I climbed up and sat beside him. The village spread out below us, small and warm, cook fires sending thin columns of smoke into the dusk.

  "I need to talk to you about something," I started.

  "Is it about Qi?"

  I turned to look at him. He kept his eyes on the horizon.

  "I'm not stupid, Liang. I know you sit behind the house every night. And I know the feeling that you're searching for, the heat, the pressure." He flexed his right hand open and then closed it into a fist. "I've had it since I was thirteen. Maybe earlier. It comes when I'm angry or scared or when I'm working hard enough that my body forgets to hold it back."

  Four years. He's had active qi for four years and never told anyone.

  "Father knew," Hao said, reading my silence correctly. "He sat me down when I was fourteen and told me to never show anyone what I could do. He said the Prefect's men would take me and turn me into one of their..." He searched for the word. "Weapons. So I buried it and pretended it wasn't there."

  I searched for the right words. "You've been suppressing it?"

  "Every day." He clarified with a nod. "Do you know how hard it is to push something down that wants to come out every time you feel anything? I can't get angry without the air going thick. I can't lift something heavy without Qi flooding into my arms. At father's funeral, when we argued, I almost lost control of myself. I felt it pour out of me and I couldn't stop it."

  "I'm tired of burying it," he said. "And I don't think we can afford for me to keep burying it. Not with what's coming."

  He was right. I'd been planning to convince him, rehearsing arguments about necessity and survival and the Prefect's cultivators. I hadn't expected him to already be there.

  "What can you do?" I asked. "Right now, with what you have."

  Hao looked at me. Then he climbed down from the platform and stood on the packed earth of the hillside. He pressed his palms together in front of his chest — a prayer sign, fingers aligned, hands flat — and he closed his eyes.

  I felt the air around him thickened the way it had at the funeral, but this time it was controlled. Qi gathered around him and I watched it occur with my newly trained senses. I had felt the energy concentrate from his core down through his torso, into his hips, further down his legs.

  Hao opened his eyes and stomped his right foot into the ground.

  His foot left a crater the size of a washbasin into the hillside. It was three inches deep with fracture lines radiating outward in a web. Dirt and small stones sprayed in a ring around his foot. The drying rack shuddered on its posts.

  I stared at the hole in the ground.

  Then I stared at my brother, who pulled his foot free, shook the dirt off, and drew in a restorative breath.

  "I've been practicing," he said. "Alone at night in the forest where nobody could hear me."

  He found a focus technique on his own without a manual or a teacher. He figured out that pressing his hands together concentrated his intention, and then he directed the qi where he wanted it to go.

  What would happen when I give him the framework?

  "We need to talk," I finally said.

  Hao sat down next to the crater he'd made and waited for me to begin.