Chapter 9 – What The Brother Knew

The lead refugee’s name was Gao Ren, and he was lying about something.

Don’t get me wrong, the story about Tongshan was real, the hollow eyes on his children confirmed it, and nothing could fake that. The Prefect’s collectors had done exactly what he’d described. But Gao Ren himself didn’t move like a farmer. He planted his feet too wide when he stood, kept his weight centered, and when Hao had offered to help him unload his pack on the first night, the man had shifted his body to keep his right hand free without thinking about it.

It was a trained reflex.

I gave it two days before I approached him. I had let the families settle into the temporary housing the village had arranged within the empty Chen shed that had been cleaned out and patched up, as well as space in the Liu compound’s overflow room. I let Hao do what Hao did best, which was make the Tongshan families feel welcome with a speed that bordered on supernatural. By the second morning, their children were playing with the village kids and their wives were trading recipes with the Liu women.

On the third morning, I found Gao Ren alone at the river fork, washing clothes.

“Your leg,” I said, crouching beside him. “How long has it been like that?”

He glanced at me with the same wariness he’d shown since he had arrived here. “Took an axe handle to the knee during the conscription three years back. It never healed right.”

“You were conscripted?”

“Yes for two campaigns. The first one was south against the border clans. The second one was east when the Lord tried to take the river crossings at Jiankou.” He wrung water from a shirt. “The knee got me sent home from the second one since I could no longer march on it. The Prefect’s captain decided a limping spearman was worth less than the rice it took to feed him.”

“Were you only a spearman?” I probed for more information.

“Spearman, then runner, then they put me in the supply line because I could count and the quartermaster couldn’t.” He looked at me directly for the first time. “You’re the younger Pei brother right? The quiet one.”

I nodded. “That’s what they tell me.”

“You have the look of a quartermaster about you as well.” He said it without flattery.

“What else did you do in the supply line?”

“Inventory and logistics mainly. I had to decide which cart goes where, which unit gets fed first, how much grain you need per man per day on a forced march…” He paused. “And I learned the forge. The campaign smith needed an extra hand and I have steady fingers. I worked on straightening bent spearheads, patching armor rivets, and keeping the tools functional.”

A quartermaster with forge experience and two campaigns of military logistics knowledge, living in my village because the Prefect’s tax collectors beat his elder to death…

“What can you tell me about the Prefect’s forces?” I asked. No preamble, no easing into it. Gao Ren wasn’t the type who responded to delicacy.

His hands stilled on the wet cloth. “Why would a kid like you want to know about the Prefect’s forces?”

“Because the Prefect’s collectors worked Tongshan and they’re moving south. Hekou is on the same road and within the same tax register, and we lost the same percentage of men in the last conscription. I’d like to know what’s coming before it arrives.”

He studied me with a piercing gaze, and I held it without flinching.

“The Prefect keeps a garrison of forty men at Meishan,” Gao Ren said. “They have thirty infantry, six mounted scouts, and four cultivators.”

I kept my face still. “Cultivators?”

“They’re from the hill clans and the border tribes. They aren’t as trained as the ones in the southern kingdoms, but they are strong enough to break a shield wall by themselves. They can hit harder, move faster, and take wounds that would kill a normal man.” He resumed washing. “The Prefect uses them as enforcers. One cultivator riding with a tax collection squad means nobody argues. Two means nobody survives arguing.”

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Four cultivators in the Prefect’s garrison. Brute-force practitioners with no formal training, operating on raw aptitude and violent conditioning. In a proper xianxia novel, these would be bottom-tier fodder. In a world with no sects and no organized cultivation, they’re the equivalent of tanks rolling through a medieval village.

“How strong are they?” I asked.

“The weakest one I saw could punch through a wooden gate. The strongest could crack stone with his hands and move fast enough that you’d lose sight of him for a step or two.” Gao Ren’s voice was carefully neutral, but it was still shaky nonetheless. “They are undisciplined, but they don’t need to be. When the Prefect points them at a problem, the problem stops existing.”

I sat with that information for a while.

“Your village,” Gao Ren began, pivoting to a different subject. “Someone’s been making preparations, this village is more advanced than Tongshan was.”

I couldn’t help but smile at his words. “We like to think ahead.”

Gao Ren gestured to the fence. “That fence is a good barrier for the northern approach, and that grain dryer is high enough to double as an observation platform.” He gave me a once over and a bemused smirk crept up his visage. “Seems like your kind of work, I take it.”

He sees it. All of it. A career logistics man with forge skills and military intelligence, and he read my infrastructure in three days.

“Hekou could use a blacksmith,” I said, eager to make use of his skills.

“It seems like this village could use a lot of things.” He hung the shirt on a branch. “I’m not going anywhere, young man. The Prefect’s men took everything I had. My children eat because your brother opened his gates to us. So whatever you’re building here, I’m not going to get in the way of it.”