The fifth bell's echo hadn't even finished dying when the village went still in a way Lin Yue had never seen it go still before.
Not the wary, watchful silence of the afternoon. Something deeper. Something rehearsed.
Through the gaps in the Rest Courtyard's gate, he watched the villagers drop to their knees in the road, one after another, like a wave breaking backward, starting near the well and rippling outward until every visible figure was kneeling in the dirt, foreheads bowed, hands pressed flat against the ground.
Hundreds of incense sticks bloomed to life in the same instant, planted in the road, in doorframes, in the cracked bowls of ancestral shrines that hadn't been touched in fifty years. The smoke rose in perfectly vertical lines, undisturbed by wind, thick enough that the crimson moonlight filtering through it turned the entire street the color of old blood.
