The dead waited in the rain.
They lay where the Celestial Gate had cast them down: half-buried in mud, tangled in torn blankets, curled beneath broken branches, or stretched on their backs beneath the unfamiliar sky. Some still wore hospital gowns. Some clutched emergency packs emptied by the crossing. One man had died with his arms wrapped around a child who had survived. One woman's fingers were locked so tightly around a wedding ring that no one could remove it.
At first, the living had been too frightened to look at them.
Then the rain lessened.
Then the smell began.
It was faint, but unmistakable. Blood, loosened bowels, wet cloth, and the first sour warning that flesh did not care whether the world had ended. The body obeyed its own laws. Grief could delay burial. It could not delay rot.
Ji Yuan stood near the medical stones, feeling the cracked seal heavy in his palm.
Li Qingluan had stopped glowing. Her hands were normal again—if trembling fingers, blood-crusted nails, and skin pale from exhaustion could be called normal. She was still working, still deciding which breath could be saved and which had already wandered too far from the body.
A few steps away, Qin Moxuan knelt over his bark ledger, copying names from one rough list into another. Rain had blurred some of the charcoal marks. He pressed harder, as if force could make order permanent.
Han Yue returned from the forest edge carrying wet branches. Behind him, Zhang Bei and two others dragged more wood, their faces gray with effort and anger.
But the dead still lay everywhere.
A woman's cry rose from the lower side of the clearing.
"You cannot leave him like that!"
Ji Yuan turned.
Three survivors had gathered around the body of a young man. His mother—or perhaps his aunt—knelt in the mud beside him, clutching his face between both hands. Two others tried to pull her away.
"He needs burial," she sobbed. "He needs earth. He cannot lie like an animal."
Others heard her. Their own grief, held back by shock and labor, surged toward the opening.
"My wife too!"
"My brother is over there!"
"We have to bury them before night!"
"Before the beasts come!"
The word beasts passed through the clearing like a blade.
Ji Yuan looked toward Qingmu Forest.
The trees watched in silence.
Qin Moxuan rose from his ledger. "We cannot devote the entire population to burial."
The grieving woman turned on him. "You cold thing."
His expression did not change. "If we spend the day digging proper graves for every corpse, we will have no shelter, no firewood, no confirmed water, and no food prepared. More people will die before morning."
"They are people!" she screamed.
"Yes," Qin said. "And so are the living."
The words were true.
That made them crueler.
Li Qingluan looked up from a patient. Her voice was hoarse. "The bodies can't remain exposed. Qin is right about the labor, but leaving them in the open risks disease. Blood draws animals. Rot draws worse."
Qin gave her a sharp glance. "Then shallow pits. Fast. No ceremonies."
"No ceremonies?" The woman in the mud looked as if Qin had struck her. "You want to throw them into holes?"
Han Yue's grip tightened around the wet branches in his arms. "We don't have time for rites."
"We have time to count us," someone shouted, "but not to bury us?"
Ji Yuan felt the clearing shifting again.
Not physically. Socially.
A settlement was not only walls and food. It was the agreement that the living would not treat the dead as refuse. Break that, and fear would become disgust. Disgust would become rebellion. Rebellion would become splintering, and splintered people would not survive the first night under an alien forest.
Yet Qin was right.
Li was right.
The grieving families were right.
The world had become a place where all truths demanded incompatible actions.
The Record opened before Ji Yuan's eyes.
Corpse exposure increasing.
Sanitation risk: rising.
Labor availability: limited.
Priority conflict detected: burial rites / survival logistics.
The last line appeared slowly.
A lord's first cruelty is allocation.
Ji Yuan almost cursed aloud.
He stepped into the center of the clearing.
"Listen."
Few did.
He raised his voice.
"Listen!"
This time, Han Yue turned. So did Qin. So did Zhang Bei, still holding an armful of wood. The grieving woman did not stop crying, but even she looked toward him with eyes full of hatred and pleading.
Ji Yuan pointed to the dead.
"They will be buried."
A shudder of relief moved through some of the crowd.
Then he continued.
"Not all at once. Not with full rites. Not before water, fire, and shelter are secured."
The relief died.
"You dare—" someone began.
"I dare because if we use every able hand to dig, more children will join them before dawn."
Silence did not follow. Anger did.
"Easy for you to say!"
"You woke with a lord's seal!"
"Who gave you the right to decide how our dead go into the earth?"
Ji Yuan looked at the cracked jade in his hand.
"No one you would trust."
The answer startled them.
He raised his head again.
"So do not trust the seal. Trust the task. We divide now. One group digs. One group gathers water. One group brings wood. One group prepares fire and food. One group helps Doctor Li. One group moves the living away from the tree line. If you want your dead buried, keep the living strong enough to dig."
Qin Moxuan's eyes sharpened. He understood at once and began speaking over the murmurs.
"Groups of ten. No, eight. Smaller groups are easier to assign. Han Yue takes physical labor. Ma Shicheng marks burial ground above the wet slope. Yin Meiniang manages fire. Xu Lianhua assists with water search if she can walk. Luo Qingshu records names."
The mention of names changed the air.
The grieving woman looked up.
Ji Yuan seized it.
"No one goes into an unnamed grave," he said. "If you know a name, tell Luo Qingshu. If you know no name, describe them. Clothes, face, where they were found. We mark them until we learn."
Li Qingluan, from the medical stones, added, "Keep burial ground downhill from the water search. Away from the clinic. Do not bury near the roots."
Yue Lingxi had not yet returned from the forest, but her warning lived in all of them now. No one questioned the part about roots.
Ma Shicheng limped forward. "I can mark pits. Shallow now, deeper later. If the soil holds."
"Do it," Ji Yuan said.
The grieving woman clutched the dead young man's sleeve. "His name is Lu Wen."
Luo Qingshu, standing with charcoal and trembling hands, repeated, "Lu Wen."
The woman's face crumpled.
"He hated onions," she whispered.
Luo Qingshu hesitated.
Then he wrote that too.
Something shifted again, quieter this time. Not forgiveness. Not acceptance. But a thread had been tied between the body and the world.
The first burial group began to move.
They had no shovels. Mo Tieheng distributed fragments of metal, broken boards, anything that could cut wet soil. Men and women knelt side by side, scraping pits into the earth with tools unworthy of the dead and necessary for the living.
Ji Yuan watched them work.
He did not feel wise.
He felt filthy.
A small boy stood near him, staring at one of the bodies. "Will they wake up?"
Ji Yuan crouched with difficulty. "No."
The boy nodded as if he had known. "Then why do we put them in the ground?"
Ji Yuan looked toward the forming graves.
"So the living remember they were not mud."
The boy accepted this with the solemnity only children could give to terrible answers and walked away.
Near the slope, the first shallow grave opened.
Rainwater gathered at its bottom.
Someone sobbed.
Then, from the far side of the clearing, a new voice spoke.
"Do not bury them all."
The words were soft, yet they carried.
Ji Yuan turned.
A woman stood near the line between clearing and mist. She was thin, soaked, and barefoot. Her hair hung over one shoulder in black ropes. In her arms she carried a bundle wrapped in gray cloth, held with the careful reverence of one carrying an infant.
But the shapes beneath the cloth were wrong.
Hard angles.
Curves.
Bones.
Qin Moxuan took one step toward her. "Who are you?"
The woman's eyes lifted.
They were dark, fever-bright, and fixed on the graves.
"Bai Suyin," she said.
The cloth in her arms shifted slightly, though no wind touched it.
She looked at Ji Yuan, then at the cracked seal in his hand.
"Do not bury them all," she repeated. "Some are still speaking."