Chapter 3 – The Woman Who Raised Two Wolves

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.”

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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.