Smoke coated the back of my throat before I even reached the wall.

  Jiānyún sat under its own filth—damp wood burning, rancid oil, sweat, dung, piss in alley corners, and that sour sweetness of too many sick bodies packed into too little space. The noise came with it: carts complaining on bad wheels, mules braying, hawkers yelling as if volume could create food, a baby crying until the sound went hoarse.

  The palisade rose out of the mud in front of the gate—thick logs driven into the earth, dark with rain and age, their tops jagged where they’d been cut and sharpened. Repairs were everywhere: mismatched timbers nailed across weak spots, rope lashings where iron should have been, a watch platform above the gate leaning slightly like it had given up on pride years ago.

  The gate doors were heavy wood bound with rusted iron straps. Mud had splashed high enough to stain the lower half permanently.

  Two guards stood in front of it, and they looked like men who’d been handed spears because the town needed bodies more than it needed competence. Worn leather and patched hide, one with a rusty lamellar vest that didn’t fit his ribs right. Their helmets didn’t match—one dented cap, one cheap rim over a cloth hood. Their feet were wrapped in cloth and straw, soaked through, calves caked in mud.

  A line crawled forward: farmers, porters, women with bundles, a boy leading a thin mule. Everyone kept their eyes down. Everyone tried to look like they weren’t carrying anything worth taking.

  I joined the line and let it pull me toward the gate. Mud sucked at my straw soles. Cold water pushed up through the layers and bit my toes. A cart wheel lurched through a puddle and sprayed filth across my pant legs; the stink hit my nose hard enough to make my eyes sting.

  At the front, the guard with the bruised eye was doing the talking. He had the bored, mean tone of someone who’d found a small job that let him feel big.

  “Keep it moving,” he barked at the line, shoving a man forward with the butt of his spear. “If you’ve got a fee, have it ready. If you don’t, don’t waste my morning.”

  The other guard watched hands and bundles, scratching at his beard as if it itched all the way down to bone.

  When I reached them, bruise-eye looked me over slowly—mud-stained clothes, hollow face, bundle strap digging into my shoulder. His gaze didn’t linger on me as a person. It lingered on me like he was deciding if I was worth the trouble.

  He held his hand out, palm up, casual as if asking for directions. “Gate fee.”

  “I don’t have any coin,” I said.

  The words came out rough, but clear.

  Bruise-eye’s expression didn’t change much. His eyebrows rose just enough to say of course you don’t. His partner shifted his spear a little, the point drifting closer—not a thrust, not a threat that needed shouting, just a quiet way of tightening the space around me.

  Bruise-eye stepped in closer until I could smell him: onion, stale wine, old sweat trapped under leather. He glanced at my bundle, then back at my face.

  “No coin,” he said, repeating it like he was tasting whether it sounded true. “So what are you carrying?”

  “My bedding. A little food,” I replied.

  He made a sound in his nose that could have been a laugh if he’d had joy in him. “Food,” he echoed, and his eyes went sharper. “Open it.”

  I lowered my gaze as if I was obedient and loosened the knot, slow enough that it didn’t look like panic, fast enough that it didn’t look like stalling. I folded the top cloth back to show what I wanted him to see: thin blanket, old rags, a couple of hard cakes, dried meat tied with twine. Nothing shiny. Nothing that screamed take me.

  His fingers went in anyway, pawing through the top layer with dirty nails. He wasn’t searching for valuables; he was searching for the satisfaction of making me comply. His hand pressed down, prodding deeper, trying to find something worth claiming.

  I shifted the bundle slightly—just enough to make the rummaging awkward without turning it into resistance. The strap bit into my shoulder. I didn’t flinch.

  The second guard chuckled and leaned in, voice low with amusement. “Look at him. Thinks he can stroll in for free.”

  Bruise-eye’s hand withdrew, disappointed. He tightened the cloth back down with a rough shove and stared at me again, weighing.

  “You here for the sect nonsense?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer immediately. The pause was honest—I didn’t know what I was supposed to say.

  He took the pause as confirmation. “That’s what I figured. Every year, you strays crawl in and stare at the sky like the mountain’s going to solve your lives.”

  His partner spat into the mud beside my foot. “They’ll solve it, alright. Half of ’em leave with nothing but bruises.”

  Bruise-eye hooked his spear butt onto the ground and leaned on it, eyes narrowing. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You walk in, you keep your head down, you don’t steal, you don’t pick fights, and you don’t make me come looking for you. If you do, we don’t drag you to a magistrate. We drag you behind the wall and let the river take what’s left.”

  He said it like he was talking about weather.

  Then he jerked his chin toward the gate opening. “Go on. You’re not worth the paperwork.”

  I tied my knot again properly, fingers stiff, then stepped through the gate without looking back.

  Inside, Jiānyún pressed in immediately—leaning buildings, dripping eaves, streets turned to churned muck. People shoulder-to-shoulder in places, carts forcing through, hawkers shouting, animals bleating, the air thick with incense and sweat. It wasn’t a town built to welcome anyone. It was a place that swallowed you and decided what you were worth after.

  I kept moving with the crowd, head down, ears open, letting other mouths tell me what I needed to know without me asking.

  Two women squeezing past with baskets were arguing—half hissed, half whispered, the way people talked when they didn’t want strangers to join in but didn’t care if strangers listened.

  “They’re all in the square already,” the first one said. “I saw it with my own eyes—kids packed like fish. Been standing there since dawn.”

  The other woman snorted. “Standing in mud doesn’t make you special.”

  “It does if they’re watching who lasts,” the first shot back. “My sister’s boy went last year. Came home shaking so bad he couldn’t hold chopsticks for days.”

  “And did he get picked?” the second asked, voice sharpened by the only question that mattered.

  The first woman hesitated. That hesitation told the answer.

  A man pushing a cart behind them heard enough to shove his opinion in, voice loud and bitter. “Picked? Only the ones with luck or money get picked. The rest get a story and a bruise.”

  “Keep your voice down,” the first woman snapped at him. “You want a disciple to hear you?”

  He rolled his eyes but lowered his tone anyway. “Fine. Fine. I’m just saying—everyone’s waiting for that immortal to float down on clouds like he’s a god. He’ll come when he wants, if he comes at all.”

  The second woman’s voice dropped, practical again. “They said he’ll descend today. Noon, maybe. The youngsters are all staring up like their necks won’t break.”

  Their words carried on as they disappeared into the press, and the rumor repeated around me in other mouths, with different details but the same hunger: the square was filling, the trial was near, and somewhere above the mud, an immortal might appear as if the sky belonged to him.

  I followed the flow toward the widening streets and the thicker incense, listening to the town talk itself into a frenzy.

  Smoke and incense hit me together as soon as the streets opened toward the square.

  The smoke was the usual—damp wood, cheap oil, the greasy smell of something frying in a pan that had never been scrubbed clean. The incense was different. Sweet and thick, threaded through the air like someone was trying to stitch holiness over filth. It didn’t work. It just added another layer to the stink already hanging low between buildings.

  The closer I got, the more the ground changed under my feet. The packed earth turned into churned muck, rutted by carts and hooves and hundreds of shoes. Water ran down from dripping eaves and collected in low spots, turning the road into puddles that reflected broken rooflines and moving legs. My straw soles drank it up. Cold seeped through the layers and bit into my toes until they went numb, then stung when the blood tried to return.

  Noise grew as the lane widened. Not one sound, but many—voices overlapping, a mule braying, a cart wheel squealing, a hawker shouting until his throat went raw, someone arguing over a handful of coins. I didn’t look at faces for long. I watched hands, shoulders, the way people moved when they were looking for weakness.

  When I reached the mouth of the square, the crowd’s heat and stink rolled out like breath from an open mouth.

  Mud covered the ground in a thick, trampled layer. Straw had been thrown down in patches, but it was soaked and flattened now, slick as wet cloth. People stood in it ankle-deep, and in some places the churn dipped lower and the muck lapped at calves. Every time the crowd shifted, shoes made sucking sounds as they lifted free.

  Bodies pressed tight. Damp sleeves brushed my arm. Someone’s shoulder bumped mine and kept going without apology. Warm breath hit my cheek when a man turned his head to shout at someone behind him. The smell of unwashed skin, sour sweat, and wet wool sat in my nose, mixed with garlic breath, cheap wine, and the sharp edge of urine trapped in the corners of nearby alleys.

  I stayed near the edge where a broken stall frame and a leaning pole gave me something to stand behind. The center looked like a place where people got stepped on and nobody noticed until the screaming started.

  Stalls crowded the perimeter—boards on barrels, cloth awnings sagging with damp. A vendor held up bundles of incense sticks and called out to anyone who would listen, promising protection and luck. A woman sold hot water in chipped cups, charging extra if you wanted it warm enough not to freeze your teeth. Someone was boiling eggs in a pot that smelled faintly sour, and the steam carried into the crowd. A man with a basket of paper charms shouted about warding off bad spirits, his voice sharp and practiced, but his eyes kept flicking toward the center like he didn’t believe his own words.

  The youngsters were gathered there.

  I could tell without anyone pointing. Their bodies held tension differently. They weren’t relaxed into the press the way older villagers were. Their eyes kept lifting toward the sky, then snapping back down to the crowd, then lifting again as if their necks were tied to an invisible string. Some stood in little clumps—boys from the same village, cousins, friends—but the pressure of bodies kept forcing them into a single mass. They were mostly thin. Some had better cloth, cleaner sleeves, hair tied neatly. Some were barefoot with toes red from cold and mud. Many carried small bundles. A few held sticks, gripping them too tightly, as if wood could make them less afraid.

  A woman near me had her hand locked around a boy’s sleeve so tight her knuckles were pale. She spoke close to his ear, not quite whispering, not quite loud—just urgent.

  “Don’t stare,” she said. “Don’t open your mouth. If they tell you to kneel, you kneel. If they tell you to run, you run. You hear me?”

  The boy nodded, swallowing hard. His eyes were fixed upward anyway, and his chin trembled slightly like he was trying to be brave and failing.

  An older man beside them leaned in with the kind of confidence that came from having nothing to lose but pride. “They’ll break him,” he said, half to the woman, half to anyone who wanted to listen. “That’s what they do. Break them and see what’s left.”

  The woman snapped her head toward him. “Shut up.”

  He shrugged, spit gathering at the corner of his mouth. “You think the Heavenly Sword folk care about your feelings? They care about bodies that don’t quit.”

  Another man answered him, voice rough, eager to add his own piece. “It’s not just bodies. My cousin’s boy went two years ago. Said they made them stand in a stance until their legs shook like reeds. Then they had them carry water up a slope until half of them collapsed.”

  The first man snorted. “And then an immortal comes down from the clouds and points at who he wants. That’s the story.”

  The second man glanced around as if the sky might hear. “Don’t say it like a joke.”

  “Why?” the first man replied, and his tone sharpened. “You think he’s going to land and feed us? He’s going to do what he wants. That’s the whole point.”

  The woman tightened her grip on the boy’s sleeve and turned her face away from the men, as if refusing to let the words touch her.

  In the crowd, rumors moved like smoke. People passed them hand to hand, adding details, twisting them, trying to make the waiting feel less helpless.

  “I heard the immortal descends today.”

  “Before noon, they said.”

  “They’re already lining the youngsters up.”

  “They’re watching who lasts. That’s what matters.”

  A boy not far from me kept wiping his palms on his pants over and over, leaving dark streaks of mud. He looked up, squinted hard at the pale sky, then looked down again as if he couldn’t bear to look too long. His lips moved soundlessly, repeating something I couldn’t hear.

  The sky above the square was ordinary—thin cloud, pale light, nothing dramatic. That didn’t stop the crowd from acting like it was about to split open. Every so often someone would gasp at nothing, and heads would tilt upward in a wave, bodies leaning as if the entire square might rise on tiptoe.

  A bell rang from somewhere on the far side of the square, dull and heavy. The sound rolled over the crowd and made voices dip for a heartbeat, then surge back louder, impatient and hungry.

  Mud sucked at feet as people shifted. Someone cursed when a shoe got pulled half off. A child cried and got dragged closer to an adult. A man shoved forward to get a better view and earned an elbow in his ribs. Nobody apologized. Nobody looked back.

  I stayed near the edge and listened to the noise and the breath and the wet shuffle of soaked footwear. The incense kept burning, sweet and choking, drifting into my eyes until they watered. The crowd’s heat rose in waves, damp and sour, and the square kept filling with youngsters pressed together in the center, all of them staring upward as if the sky was the only door left.

  The square kept breathing and shifting in the mud as the light began to change.

  It wasn’t sudden. The day simply thinned, color draining out of the town like water from cloth. Smoke turned greyer. Faces became flatter. The pale sky above the roofs darkened by a shade, then another, and the first lamps along the stall edges were lit—small flames cupped in paper and glass, trembling in the damp air.

  People noticed the change without agreeing on what it meant. Voices tightened. The youngsters in the center stopped jostling as much, not because they’d learned discipline, but because something in the air had begun to press on them. Even the hawkers lowered their voices, calling less like predators and more like men who didn’t want to be slapped for speaking at the wrong time.

  I stood half behind the broken stall frame, shoulders loose, eyes forward, and listened for the moment the crowd would decide something was happening.

  It came as sound.

  A clarion bell, bright enough to cut straight through mud and breath and shouting. It wasn’t a temple bell’s dull, tired boom. This was clean metal and authority—one long note that struck the square and didn’t just echo, it rang, reverberating off walls and roofs and wet ground until it felt like the sound was inside my ribs.

  The crowd went still in a way I hadn’t seen since the wilds went quiet before something moved.

  Heads turned as one. Chins lifted. Even the men who’d been laughing a moment before shut their mouths mid-breath. The bell’s note stretched and stretched, and the air seemed to sharpen around it, the way air sharpened right before a storm broke.

  Then light began to appear where there shouldn’t have been light.

  At first it was faint—thin threads of color slipping through the dusk, barely there, like oil on water. Then the threads thickened into bands. A myriad of rainbow hues refracted across the square, crawling over mud and straw and wet clothing, turning filth into something unreal.

  The colors didn’t sit still. They moved like living things, drifting and folding as if they were cast by something above that wasn’t fire, wasn’t lantern, wasn’t moon. Reds and greens and blues slid over the crowd’s faces, over open palms and clenched fists, over the backs of heads. The mud itself shimmered, puddles catching the light and throwing it back in fractured patterns.

  People gasped—not one gasp, but dozens, the sound spreading like ripples in water.

  A woman near me whispered something and crossed her hands in front of her chest. A man muttered a name under his breath and then bit his tongue as if the name could punish him.

  The sky changed next.

  Clouds that had looked ordinary a moment ago began to glow at the edges, as if dusk had caught fire inside them. The rainbow light climbed from the ground into the air, and suddenly it wasn’t just the square that shimmered—it was the space above it, the whole slice of sky framed by crooked rooftops and the shadow of the mountain.

  And then a figure stepped out of the cloud.

  One foot placed forward onto nothing, and nothing held him.

  My breath stopped. I didn’t mean for it to. It just did, like my body had decided the only safe reaction was stillness.

  He descended slowly, as if the air had become a staircase only he could see. Each step was measured, unhurried. The rainbow light gathered around him, clinging to the hem of his robes, sliding over his sleeves like water over smooth stone.

  He looked like he didn’t belong in a place built from mud and hunger.

  His robe was pale—white that wasn’t stained by smoke, edged with faint embroidery that caught the shifting colors and turned them into thin, moving lines. The cloth fell perfectly, not wrinkled, not damp. Even from a distance I could see it held its shape like it had never been worn by a sweating body. A sash crossed his waist, the knot clean, the hanging ends symmetrical as if they’d been arranged with intention rather than habit.

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  His face was… wrong for this world.

  Not wrong in shape—human, handsome, calm—but wrong in finish. Skin too smooth, too even, as if it had been fired and glazed. A proud porcelain look: pale, unblemished, with a cool sheen that made him seem more crafted than born. His hair was ink-black, bound high and neat, not a peasant’s rough tie, not a soldier’s practical knot. His eyes were dark, steady, and when he looked down at the crowd it wasn’t with curiosity.

  It was with certainty.

  As he descended, the air around him felt different. Not wind, not pressure like a storm—something cleaner and sharper, like the space itself had been washed. The stink of the square didn’t vanish, but it dulled at the edges, as if the air had decided to behave in his presence.

  The crowd stayed silent, stunned into obedience by beauty and fear stitched together.

  The youngsters in the center stood with their necks craned up, mouths slightly open, eyes shining. Some looked like they might cry. Some looked like they might faint. No one laughed now. No one jostled. Even the hawkers had shut up.

  He continued stepping down through thin air until he was low enough that the colors painted his shadow across the crowd.

  Then, with the same controlled inevitability, he came to a stop above the square—still not touching ground—hovering a man’s height above the mud as if he refused to acknowledge it.

  The rainbow light intensified for a heartbeat, bright enough to make my eyes sting. It turned every wet surface into a mirror. It turned the edges of the roofs into glowing lines. It made the smoke look like silk.

  And standing there, half-hidden at the edge of the square with mud on my shoes and hunger still living in my bones, I realized something with a cold clarity that didn’t feel like thought so much as fact:

  This was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

  Not just in this life.

  In both lives.

  My chest tightened in a way I didn’t have a name for. My throat felt thick. I didn’t understand what he was. I didn’t understand how a man walked on air and stepped out of cloud like it was a doorway. I didn’t even have the right word to put on him.

  All I knew was that the world had been nothing but filth and fists and cold for so long that seeing something this clean, this impossible, felt like looking at a different kind of reality.

  The man’s gaze swept the crowd, slow and indifferent, and when his eyes passed over the mass of youngsters gathered in the mud, his voice carried without strain—clear, level, as if the bell’s note had become speech.

  “Those who came for selection,” he said, and the words cut through the square like a blade, “step forward.”

  For a heartbeat nobody moved.

  Then the youngsters began to peel out of the crowd like a tide finding its channel. Parents grabbed sleeves and let go. Friends clutched at each other’s wrists and then separated when the press demanded it. Mud sucked at ankles as bodies pushed through, and the center of the square opened into a rough space full of shaking breath and wet hems.

  They tried to make order out of panic.

  It happened the way everything in this world happened: not because people were noble, but because they were afraid to be noticed in the wrong way.

  A few older youths—ones who looked like they’d been here before—started shouting directions to each other, not official, just survival. “Two across!” “Make room!” “Don’t bunch up!” Someone tried to shove forward and got elbowed back. A girl slipped in the mud and caught herself on another’s sleeve; both nearly went down, and the one she grabbed hissed a curse through clenched teeth, then steadied her anyway because falling would draw eyes.

  Columns formed. Rough at first. Then straighter as the crowd corrected itself, each person adjusting their feet in the muck, aligning shoulders with the person ahead.

  Young men mostly, but women too—some with hair bound tight and sleeves rolled, some with faces set hard, some with eyes wide as if they couldn’t believe they’d actually stepped forward. A few looked well-fed enough that their cheeks still held softness. Most didn’t. Most were lean, hungry, and tense, their hands either clenched or hovering near the small bundles they’d carried.

  I moved without thinking.

  Not because I understood the words fully, but because the crowd’s motion pulled me, and because standing still in the wrong place had always been dangerous. I found myself edging forward with the rest, sliding around bodies, stepping into the churned center where the mud was deeper and colder.

  The rainbow light still painted everyone, but it didn’t feel pretty anymore. It made the sweat on faces glisten. It turned eyes into bright wet beads. It made the mud look like it was moving.

  I ended up in a line with strangers, shoulder behind shoulder. My scarf was still damp and stiff around my neck. My straw shoes sank and held. I could feel cold seep into my toes again, but my attention stayed fixed upward.

  The man in the air waited.

  He didn’t fidget. He didn’t shift his weight. He stood on nothing as if nothing had ever held him in the first place. His porcelain-smooth face remained calm, eyes half-lidded, watching the arrangement of bodies like a farmer watching livestock sort itself into pens.

  The bell’s last vibration finally faded into silence.

  Only then did the square’s human sounds return in small pieces—swallowed coughs, a sniff, the wet sound of someone wiping their nose on a sleeve, the quiet whimper of a boy trying not to cry.

  The man lifted one hand, slow, almost lazy.

  The gesture wasn’t grand, but it drew every eye the way a knife draw drew attention to itself.

  The crowd—parents, vendors, gawkers—dropped to their knees first. The movement spread inward like wind flattening grass. Cloth hit mud. Palms pressed down. Foreheads bowed. The sound was a soft, wet thump across the entire square.

  The youngsters in the lines followed a heartbeat later, knees sinking into muck, hands flattening in front of them. Heads dipped low. Foreheads lowered until they nearly touched the ground.

  I didn’t move at first.

  My knees stayed locked. My spine stayed straight. It wasn’t defiance. It was delay—my mind slow to process that this was expected now, that the whole square had obeyed a silent rule I hadn’t been taught.

  Then I saw it—line after line of bowed backs, and my own legs still upright like a post sticking out of a field.

  Heat crawled up the back of my neck. My stomach tightened.

  I dropped down fast, knees hitting mud with a cold slap that shot pain up my legs. The muck swallowed my shins. I set my palms down like the others and lowered my head.

  My forehead hovered a fraction above the mud before I forced it down.

  Cold filth touched skin.

  The smell hit close: wet straw, dung, sour sweat, incense trying to pretend it wasn’t there. My breath fogged against the ground. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes down.

  Around me, the youngsters kowtowed—foreheads pressed, lifted, pressed again—three times, the movement synchronized by fear more than instruction.

  I lifted my head at the wrong moment and caught a glimpse upward.

  The man smiled.

  Not wide. Not friendly. A small curve of the mouth like he’d enjoyed seeing mortals fold themselves into the dirt. His eyes swept the kneeling lines and the smirk stayed, polished and cold.

  He let the silence stretch until it hurt.

  Then he spoke, voice still effortless, carried over the square without strain.

  “You have come to beg for a path,” he said. “You have come to kneel for a name.”

  His gaze moved slowly across the columns as if counting us.

  “Two days,” he continued. “That is what you have.”

  The words settled heavy. People’s shoulders tensed. A few heads lifted slightly, then dipped again.

  “You will bring me two cores each,” he said, and the word cores made a ripple move through the kneeling bodies—recognition for many, fear for others.

  “Not purchased,” he added immediately, as if anticipating cleverness. “Not borrowed. Not stolen from another candidate. If you do not gather them yourself, you fail.”

  A boy somewhere behind me sucked in breath too fast. A girl’s shoulders shook once, then stilled.

  The man’s eyes sharpened, and his voice turned even flatter.

  “Those who return without two cores,” he said, “will be dismissed.”

  He paused, letting that word hang like mercy.

  Then he finished, and the last word landed like a stone dropped into a well.

  “Those who do not return at all… were never fit to knock on our gate.”

  No comfort. No reassurance. Only the reality that “fail” and “die” were the same thing here, just spoken with different politeness.

  He lifted his hand again.

  “Go.”

  For a heartbeat, nobody moved. The lines held their breath.

  Then the square erupted.

  Not chaos like a riot—purposeful panic. Young men and women surged to their feet, hands slipping in mud, bundles clutched tight, eyes wide and frantic. They turned as one mass and ran—some toward the road, some toward the river, most toward the forested hills beyond town, where anything that carried a “core” could be found.

  It moved like a wave.

  Feet ripping free of mud with wet sucking sounds. Elbows thrown. Shouts. Someone falling and being stepped over. Someone screaming a name. The crowd of onlookers parted instinctively, watching the candidates spill out as if watching livestock released to wolves.

  I stood slower than the rest.

  My legs pushed me upright, but my mind stayed stuck on one phrase: two cores.

  I didn’t know what a “core” was. I didn’t know how you found one. I didn’t know how you killed what carried it, or even what “what carried it” meant.

  All I had were three small knots of cloth buried deep in my bundle—pearls I’d pulled from corpses in a clearing that still haunted my nose and tongue.

  My hands went cold.

  Around me, the last of the candidates fled, splashing mud. Their backs vanished into the streets, into the gates, toward the wilds.

  Within seconds, the center of the square was almost empty—just churned mud and dropped straw and a few trampled charms.

  I stood there, gobsmacked, breathing shallow, watching the wave disappear without me, while above, the man on thin air remained still and immaculate, as if he hadn’t just sent a crowd of hungry youths running toward death for the chance to be allowed upon a mountain.

  The square emptied so fast the mud didn’t have time to settle.

  A few onlookers still lingered at the edges—vendors half-dismantling stalls, parents staring after the fleeing backs of sons and daughters, men pretending they weren’t afraid by talking too loud. Most of the sound had moved with the wave. What remained was a wet, sucking quiet: puddles rippling, straw shifting under boots, the occasional cough, the creak of a cart somewhere beyond the square.

  Above it all, he still stood on thin air.

  The rainbow light had softened with the deepening dusk, but it still hung faintly across the square and the low clouds, as if the sky hadn’t fully decided to go dark while he was here. His robe remained clean in a world that stained everything. His face remained smooth and pale, the porcelain look making him seem carved rather than born.

  I stayed in the churned center, alone enough that every movement felt exposed.

  My bundle was heavy on my shoulder. Not with weight—just with the fact that it contained the only thing I could think of that matched the word he’d used.

  Cores.

  My fingers moved before my brain finished arguing with itself. I slid the bundle off my shoulder and crouched, using my body as a shield. Mud soaked into my knees immediately, cold finding cloth and climbing. My hands were still cracked and rough, the skin split in places from cold and work, and the knots in my bundle were stiff with old dirt.

  I loosened the top layer quickly, not fully opening it to the square. The thin blanket shifted. The dried food sat like dead weight. Under it, deeper, the small cloth knots pressed against my fingertips.

  I hesitated.

  The smell of the clearing flashed in my nose—the burnt-sweet rot, the metallic thickness of blood. My stomach tightened as if it remembered even when I didn’t want it to.

  I pulled two knots free and held them low in my lap.

  My fingers shook, not with fear, with fatigue and cold and the sudden pressure of doing something that would put a powerful man’s eyes on me.

  I unwrapped the first cloth.

  The warm one.

  The pearl inside still held a muted orange-yellow glow, not bright enough to paint the mud, but bright enough to look wrong in my palm. It felt dense, heavier than its size. When I turned it slightly, the light shifted inside as if it followed my movement rather than reflecting it.

  I unwrapped the second.

  The colder one.

  Smoky green, threaded with fine crack-like lines. Its light wasn’t warm. It flickered faintly, like moonlight behind cloud. It made my fingertips feel colder where it rested, as if it drank heat.

  Two small, impossible things.

  I stared at them too long, my mind trying to connect them to the word he’d spoken, trying to make sense of why they were small when everything in that clearing had been huge.

  I stood.

  Mud tried to keep my shoes when I lifted my feet, straw soles sucking free with wet sounds. My knees protested. My shoulder ached where the bundle strap had bitten earlier. I kept the pearls wrapped loosely in cloth, cupped in my hands like I was holding fragile glass, and I started walking forward.

  Toward him.

  Every step felt like stepping into colder air. The space under him looked clean compared to the mud, even though it was the same air everyone breathed. The crowd at the edges noticed me moving against the flow and turned their heads. I felt eyes prickling on my back. Someone muttered something. Someone laughed once, uncertain, then shut up when nobody joined in.

  I stopped beneath him, close enough now that I could see details that had been blurred by distance: the embroidery along his cuffs, the clean line of his fingernails, the calm in his eyes that didn’t belong to a man standing over a town full of hungry mortals.

  My throat tightened.

  I forced words out anyway.

  “I… have these.”

  It sounded stupid the moment it left my mouth.

  His gaze drifted down, lazy at first, as if he expected nothing worth noticing. One eyebrow lifted slightly, the expression almost bored.

  Then my hands opened enough for the pearls to catch the remaining rainbow light.

  The change in his face was immediate and small—only the kind of shift someone confident would allow themselves. His eyes sharpened. His eyebrows arched a fraction higher, and the bored look drained away like water poured out.

  His gaze locked onto the pearls.

  For a heartbeat, the square didn’t exist for him. Only what I held.

  A clean, pale hand reaching down through air as if distance was just etiquette.

  He simply took them.

  His fingers closed around both cloth-wrapped pearls with a quick, practiced motion—snagged them from my palms as easily as a man plucks coins off a table. My hands stayed open a moment longer, empty, feeling the sudden absence like a cold spot.

  He lifted the pearls closer to his face and turned them under the fading light. The orange-yellow one glowed against his skin. The smoky green one looked darker in his grip, the crack-lines catching faint color.

  He examined them without expression, then gave a small nod as if confirming something he’d already suspected.

  His voice carried across the square when he spoke, clear and calm.

  “Low-tier, Level Two beast cores,” he said, and the words made the lingering crowd ripple. People leaned in, hungry for meaning. “One carries corruption qi. One carries earth qi.”

  I didn’t understand most of that, but the way he said it made the phrase beast cores land in my chest with a hard weight.

  So this—this small pearl—was what he meant.

  He looked down at me again. His eyes were calm, but there was something sharp behind them now, a faint interest that hadn’t been there before.

  He gave me a small, approving nod, like a master acknowledging a tool that had surprised him by working.

  Then he lifted his voice again, turning slightly so the square could hear.

  “The first attendee has passed.”

  The words struck the remaining crowd like a stone thrown into water. A few people gasped. A vendor’s mouth fell open. Somewhere a mother made a sound like she’d been punched with jealousy and relief at the same time. Men muttered, disbelief and hunger mixing in the air.

  He didn’t care about their reaction.

  His gaze stayed on me as if they were background noise.

  “You,” he said, and the single word pinned me harder than any shout. “Return to the square before noon, two days from now.”

  He didn’t say if you live. He didn’t need to. That condition lived inside every instruction in this world.

  “The second part of the test will be administered then,” he continued, tone as effortless as breathing. “Do not be late.”

  I swallowed. My throat was dry again. My hands had started to shake, now that they were empty and had nothing to focus on.

  “Yes,” I managed.

  He didn’t dismiss me with a wave. He simply shifted his attention past me, back to the emptying streets where the last candidates had vanished, as if I was already filed away.

  I stepped back carefully, boots sucking in mud, eyes down, because staring felt dangerous now that I’d been noticed.

  Behind me, the square’s edge had become louder again—people talking fast, voices sharp with envy, confusion, and sudden calculation. But the center remained hollowed out, churned mud and crushed straw under dimming rainbow traces.

  I walked back toward that center because he told me to.

  Because in this town, a man who stepped on air didn’t ask twice.

  And because I had just traded two small pearls for time—two days of it—without understanding how I’d done it, or what the next test would demand, or what it meant that he’d named the things I’d pulled from corpses as if they were ordinary. if they were ordinary.