Pei Desheng laced his sandals in the dark.
The straw was fresh, braided the night before by his wife's hands even though her fingers shook worse each morning. He tied them tight because a loose sandal on a march caused blisters, and a blister on a march caused a limp, and a limp in a battle meant a body on a cart.
The conscription order had come three days ago. The Prefect's men rode through the village on horses, read names from a wooden tablet, and left. The Lord of Qinghe needed bodies for his southern campaign, and bodies he would have.
Desheng stood and looked at his sons on the shared mat.
Hao slept on his back with his arms thrown wide, mouth open, one leg kicked free of the blanket. He was seventeen and already broader across the shoulders than most grown men in the village.
That was why Desheng had given his own name when they asked for volunteers. One Pei on the tablet was enough.
Liang slept on his side, curled inward, one hand near his face. He was fifteen years old and he'd been quieter these past few months. He used to run with the other village children, shouting, throwing rocks at birds, and coming home with scraped knees and someone else's stolen radish. But something had settled in the boy recently. Desheng had caught him watching the village elder speak last week, studying the old man's face the way a merchant studied a scale. It was odd considering the boy had never before cared for such things.
He would keep Hao steady. Desheng believed that. The younger one had a head for thinking through problems, even if it was new, and between the two of them their mother would be looked after.
He touched the doorframe on his way out and kept walking.
Rice doesn't care about your past life.
That's the first useful thing I learned after waking up in this body.
Rice doesn't care that you seem to have transmigrated into the kind of setting that most xianxia stories blow past in a single paragraph of backstory.
I pressed another seedling into the paddy mud and straightened up to stretch my back. The water sat at the right level today. Took me four months to figure out that the irrigation channel on the east side was slightly higher than the west, which meant uneven flooding if I didn't pack the divider walls properly.
Welcome to the Pre-Sect Warring States experience.
Hao was on the other side of the field, hauling a sack of nightsoil to the compost heap. He made it look easy. Everything physical came easy to my brother. He could carry twice what I could and work twice as long and still have the energy to joke with the neighbors on his way home. People liked Hao. Old women saved him food and the other young men in the village looked to him when decisions needed making, even over men ten years older.
It was, frankly, a problem I hadn't figured out how to solve yet.
Sure, Hao was a good guy. He was warm, generous, trusting, and completely incapable of seeing the worst in people. If a stranger walked into our village tomorrow and said he needed help, Hao would feed him before asking his name.
In a normal world, that made someone good. In a world where cultivators existed and warlords conscripted farmers to die in territorial skirmishes, it made someone a target.
I pushed the next seedling in.
Six months in this body and the best I've managed is better rice yields. Truly, the cultivation world trembles.
The genre-savvy part of my brain, the part that had absorbed hundreds of xianxia novels across a lifetimes' worth of late nights, kept running scenarios. In a proper cultivation story, I'd have stumbled into a cave by now. Found a dying immortal or an ancient manual or a sentient artifact that called me "young master" and kickstarted my path to ascension. But this world didn't work like that. Cultivation existed here the way swords existed. People had them. People used them. Nobody sat down and wrote a curriculum about it. The strong took what they wanted, the weak gave what was demanded, and the distance between the two was measured in bodies.
Our father was adding to that measurement right now, somewhere south.
I didn't think about it. There was nothing to think about. He went so Hao wouldn't have to, and that was simple enough that even a transmigrator with no farming skills could understand it.
The men came back.
I saw the dust from the north road while I was checking the irrigation channels and stopped. I quickly counted the figures as they came closer. Fourteen had left. I could see ten walking, maybe eleven. It was hard to tell at this distance.
There was a cart behind them.
Hao was already moving toward the road, dropping his hoe, and I followed at a walk because there was no point running toward something you couldn't change. The other families poured out of their homes, wives and children and the elderly, all pressing toward the road with desperate hope.
I couldn't see Father walking.
The men filed in through the village entrance, and the sounds split apart. Crying that meant joy on the left where a woman threw herself at her husband. Wailing on the right where a young wife saw her husband's face in the cart instead of in the crowd. Hao pushed through to the front and I watched his shoulders lock when he reached the cart and looked down.
He didn't make a sound. Just stood there with his hands at his sides, staring.
I looked at the cart. Father lay on his back with his arms folded across his chest. Someone had closed his eyes and cleaned most of the blood from his face, but his tunic was stiff and dark on the left side. A blade wound, probably.
He went so you wouldn't have to, Hao. Both of us know it.
I touched my brother's arm. "Let's bring him home."
We buried Father behind the house where Mother could see the grave marker from her bed.
She didn't cry. She was too tired for that, and the cough that had been building since winter took most of her breath. She knelt with us and placed a bundle of dried herbs on the packed earth because we couldn't afford incense, and her hands trembled through the whole thing, and none of us spoke for a long time.
Hao broke the silence. "I'll go to the Prefect tomorrow."
"No," I spoke up.
He looked at me with red grief stricken eyes. "Our enemies killed our father, Liang."
"The Prefect will come recruiting within the month." I kept my voice level. "He lost men in that skirmish, which means he needs replacements. It won't be long before he comes here and recruits you next."
Hao gritted his teeth. "What would you have me do, brother? Refuse to fight our Lord's enemies, the very same enemies that took our father away from us?!"
"I just want you to think."
"I am thinking. I'm thinking about what kind of son stands over his father's grave and doesn't shed a tear!"
That one landed, and it forced a sigh to escape from my lips.
"If you go to the Prefect, you fight his war. You die in his war or you survive and he sends you to the next one. That's how it works. That is all you are to him." I looked at the grave marker. It was a single flat stone because we didn't even have wood for a proper one. "Father knew that. That's why he went instead of you."
Hao's fists clenched, and I felt something shift in the air.
It was faint. Like standing near a fire you couldn't see. The hairs on my arms prickled. The air around my brother thickened for just a moment, and then it passed and Hao let out a breath and his shoulders dropped.
He didn't notice what had just happened.
"Enough." Mother's voice called out to us from the doorway. "Not tonight. Please."
Hao went to her and guided her back inside with both hands on her shoulders and murmuring something I couldn't hear. The warmth in him came back that fast. Anger to tenderness in the space of a breath. He'd always been like that.
I stayed by the grave a moment longer.
Qi. That was qi. It was leaking out of him like heat from a cracked furnace.
My brother had spiritual aptitude. In a world with sects, someone would have scooped him up years ago. Tested him, ranked him, and slotted him into a system designed to turn raw talent into power.
Unfortunately we served a warlord and a Prefect who fed farmers into border skirmishes like kindling, and were in a village full of people with no idea that the charismatic young man who carried their grain and laughed at their jokes could level a hillside in ten years if someone taught him how.
I pressed my palm flat against the grave marker. The stone was still warm from the afternoon sun.
And when I reached for that feeling, that pressure in the air, that heat Hao threw off without knowing...
I realized that I could feel Qi too.
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...
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
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."
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.