The wind had changed.
Not in temperature, nor direction—but in tone. It carried with it a hush that didn't belong to spring. Even the crows had gone quiet.
Li Yao noticed it first while fetching water from the stream behind the old millet terrace. The trail—usually worn soft by foot traffic and cartwheels—was disturbed. Not just by weight, but by intention. The leaf litter had been cleared in too precise a way. Stones overturned. Branches snapped at sharp, unnatural angles.
He knelt beside a mangled pine sapling, its bark scored with five deep furrows that oozed amber sap. The cuts were too wide for a lynx, too clean for a wild boar, and too purposeful for any farmer hauling firewood or foraging bark. These were made by claws—heavy, sharp, and deliberate.
Li Yao pressed two fingers to the sap, lifted them, and watched it drip slow and gold.
The forest was supposed to be theirs—Green Pine Village's shared shadow, its quiet cradle. But something had shifted. The silence no longer felt peaceful.
It felt like breath being held.
By the time he returned to the village, there were whispers in the square. Chickens missing. A goat killed behind Elder Shen's shed, throat torn clean through. The butcher's dog refused to leave the cellar. Shen Guang, the potter's oldest boy, swore he'd seen something crouched under the thornbush near the grain stores—yellow eyes, he said, too low to be a man, too steady to be a cat.
Uncle Wei stood at the edge of the conversation, chewing the inside of his cheek, arms folded, saying little. But when Li Yao approached and spoke, the old man listened.
"Something crossed the northern trail," Li Yao said. "It marked a tree. Fresh. Clawed. Deep."
Uncle Wei didn't laugh. "Then it's no longer just strays."
"No."
"It's testing."
Li Yao nodded.
He left the village by the western orchard, where the path forked toward the hills. A satchel hung over his shoulder, filled with odds and ends: coiled wire, old carpenter's nails, fishing hooks, stones soaked in resin. Nothing blessed. Nothing refined. Just tools.
He laid traps in a wide ring around the outer reaches—carefully placed where the villagers didn't tread: gullies, animal trails, and the unused slope beyond the herbalist's plot. He didn't want to hurt anyone by accident. Most of the snares were designed not to kill, but to catch. A knotted line strung between two trees at shin height, camouflaged with loose pine needles. A weighted deadfall perched above a bend in the trail, triggered by the pressure of a single root. Pits camouflaged with brush, shallow but jagged.
He marked some of them—not with flags, but with subtle signs only he would recognize: a branch bent the wrong way, a stone turned edgewise in the moss.
He didn't intend to rely on these traps alone. They wouldn't stop a beast.
But they might give him a breath. A chance to strike. A moment to run.
That was enough.
By dusk, his hands were scratched and sap-stained. He returned to his hut just as the mist began to roll down from the ridge. The sky was streaked orange, but the trees remained dark, unmoving, like they were listening.
He found Auntie Mu waiting by his door.
"I heard you were walking the treeline," she said.
"I was setting precautions."
"I figured." She held out a cloth-wrapped bundle. "You'll want this."
Inside was a rough vest, its shoulders padded with tightly packed wool stuffed between strips of boiled cloth. The seams had been reinforced with a thick glue that stank faintly of old bone and salt. "From the lynx," she explained. "Not the hide—it's still curing—but the sinew and paws. It won't stop a blade, but it'll keep something's claws from opening your ribs like a melon."
He looked at her, surprised.
"Don't be thick, boy. You gave me the kill. Just returning a piece of it." She turned to go, then paused. "I hope you're wrong. But I've learned not to bet against that look on your face."
Li Yao offered her a nod, then went inside.
He fitted the vest tight across his chest. It creaked when he twisted, but it moved well enough. Not armor, exactly. But it made him feel less bare.
That night, the village felt like a sealed jar. Still, tense, waiting for something to rattle it.
The torches around the outer paths were lit early, though no one said why. Uncle Wei had taken to walking the streets again, axe in hand, muttering about the year the snow came in summer and how the birds had flown wrong. Old stories. Ominous ones.
Li Yao sat near the well, cross-legged in the dark. The blade lay across his knees. He didn't try to cultivate. He didn't meditate. He simply listened—to the wind, the breath of the trees, the soft creak of distant shutters.
His body was stronger now. His senses clearer. He didn't yet move qi the way he imagined true cultivators did, but he could feel the world brushing past him, the weight of air, the hush of things that ought to rustle and did not.
The quiet stretched.
And then the bell sounded.
One deep, aching note. Then another. Then three more.
It wasn't the temple chime. Not the handbell used for dinner or announcements.
It was the old bronze bell—green with age and half-eaten by rust—that hung on the northern ridge above the watchpost. No one had rung it in his memory. Most thought it wouldn't ring at all.
But it rang now.
Doors slammed. Dogs barked. Voices cried out. Uncle Wei shouted for men to arm themselves, and Auntie Mu pulled a cleaver from her kitchen with hands that didn't shake.
Li Yao was already running when the sixth toll rang.
He didn't know what waited beyond the trees. He didn't need to.
The forest no longer whispered.
It watched.
And whatever was watching—
—it had finally decided to move.