The village slept.

  The word makes it sound gentle. It wasn't. The village slept the way exhausted things sleep: deeply, gratefully, without the luxury of choosing comfort over collapse. The cooking fires had burned out. The last conversations had trailed off into the silence of people who had said everything useful and lacked the energy for what wasn't. The windows were dark. The doors were closed. The night had the village to itself.

  I was on the hilltop.

  My hilltop. The one with the flat stone and the view and the grass that remembered my shape. The wind was warm — still warm, always warm, the drought's insistence on consistency extending to the air itself. It carried dust. It always carried dust now. The valley was drying at the cellular level, the soil releasing its last moisture into a sky that accepted it without acknowledgment.

  Somewhere below, a dog gave one warning bark and then stopped. Even the animals had learned to conserve sound.

  Above me, the stars.

  I'd been watching them for — I stopped counting millennia ago, but the habit persisted. The constellations were different now. Shifted. Stellar drift, the slow migration of bodies across distances so vast that the movement was imperceptible on any human timescale. On mine, it was a calendar. Stars that had been fixed points in my early years had migrated, dimmed, vanished. New ones had appeared — young, bright, burning with the intensity of objects that hadn't yet learned that intensity was finite.

  I'd watched stars die. Slowly, across centuries. A gradual dimming, a reddening, a fading to nothing. The death of a star was less dramatic than the death of a sandstone library or a rooftop garden or a child holding a burned scroll.

  Footsteps in the grass. Light ones. The third-step pattern, bare feet, the slight rightward drift I'd failed to correct.

  "You should be sleeping," I said without turning.

  "So should you." He sat on the stone beside me. Not close — he'd learned the distance by now. Close enough to share the view, far enough to share the silence.

  "I don't sleep."

  "I know, but you could try."

  "I don't want to."

  He pulled his knees up. Looked at the sky. The stars reflected in his eyes — small, bright, the same ones I'd been watching for millennia reduced to twin points in a twelve-year-old's gaze.

  "Something's wrong," he said. Not a question.

  "Something is always wrong."

  "No." He tilted his head toward the eastern horizon, where the qi-pulse had settled into its final rhythm. "Something is wrong there."

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I said nothing. He was right and the rightness of it sat between us like a stone neither of us wanted to pick up.

  "Go to sleep, Wei."

  He stayed for another minute. Then he stood, brushed grass from his legs and walked down the hill. At the bottom, he turned.

  "You're not leaving, are you?"

  The question landed in my chest.

  "Go to sleep," I said again.

  He went.

  The horizon pulsed.

  Xu Ran. His qi-signature had settled into a final rhythm — dense, compressed, regular. The consolidation was nearly complete. The energy he'd gathered from the spirit beast cores, from the environment, from the valley itself, was coiling inward, tightening, preparing for the expansion that would come when the structure reached its limit and the boundary between what he was and what he was becoming dissolved.

  Days.

  The math was simple. Five li, possibly six. The village: two li from his position. Inside the zone.

  My barriers would take the edge off — stone walls, trenches, redirected flow — and then the rest would arrive anyway. The well water would sour into something you could drink only if you didn't have a choice. The well that Mrs. Liu had dug deeper with such practical determination would sour permanently. Roof beams that had held through drought would decide they'd had enough. Children would wake with headaches and bile and call it sickness because that's the only word they'd have.

  The village would survive the breakthrough.

  It would not survive the winter.

  I could leave.

  The thought arrived with its old familiarity — comfortable, worn, the mental equivalent of a coat I'd been putting on and taking off for, what feels like forever now. I could leave. Walk down the hill, cross the valley, follow the river south until the pulsing faded and the air cleared and the village became another place I'd been. Another valley. Another collection of warm lights in the dark, growing smaller with distance, growing easier to forget with each step.

  I'd done it before. Hundreds of times. The mechanics were simple: stand up, walk, don't turn around.

  I could leave.

  The thought sat in my chest. I held it there, examining it with the care of someone inspecting an artifact that used to be functional and now was merely historical. It still fit. It still had its old weight, its old logic, its old promise of unburdened existence.

  But it didn't produce the old certainty.

  The almost-laugh. The rooster. The boy asking the fire what I was, because the fire was safer to ask than me.

  "Still counts," he'd said. And meant it.

  I stood up. The grass released my shape reluctantly — the impression stayed, a negative of my body, an absence with boundaries. The wind pushed at me from the east, carrying Xu Ran's qi and the dust and the smell of a valley that was dying slowly and would die faster soon.

  I didn't leave.

  Not because staying was noble. Nobility was another coat people put on when they wanted to feel warmer than they were.

  I didn't leave because leaving was the one thing I'd always been good at and I was tired of being good at it.

  You know how this ends. But I didn't know, then. Not yet.

  I didn't leave because Mrs. Liu was deepening the well with bare hands and Mrs. Zhao's rooster was plotting its next escape and Elder Li was chewing his cheek and the village was surviving, stubbornly, impossibly, in the face of forces it couldn't see and couldn't fight and couldn't understand.

  I didn't leave because soon something was going to happen and the barriers weren't going to be enough and I was going to have to choose between the woman I'd been for thousands of years and the woman who drank congee and replaced roof tiles and chased roosters and almost laughed when a twelve-year-old boy told her she was in a bad mood.

  I stood on the hilltop. The stars turned overhead — slowly, imperceptibly, the ancient machinery of the universe grinding through its cycles without urgency or awareness or the slightest interest in the decisions of a woman standing on a hill.

  Soon.

  The wind blew. From the east, carrying ozone and dust and the future.

  You're not leaving, are you?

  I did not leave.