Chapter 2 – Taking Inventory

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…

Stolen story; please report.

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.