Green Pine Village had always been a place of quiet resilience—but not strength.
By design.
Those born with spirit roots—no matter how faint—were sent away before their twelfth year. The larger sects in Redleaf, Moonwell, and the distant Cloudfang Mountains were always searching for new blood. Most of the children from Green Pine Village didn't become cultivators. The roots were too shallow, too slow to draw qi. But they could serve—sweeping courtyards, feeding beasts, drawing water from wells cut deep into mountain stone. A lucky few advanced. The rest never came back.
Those who returned were the elderly, discarded after failing to break past the first stages of Qi Refining. Broken joints, dulled senses, rusted meridians. Some came back with empty eyes, their cultivation crippled by internal deviation or the punishments of distant masters.
The rest—those who never left—were weaker still. Born without the spark. Their fates were set: to till fields, fish rivers, bind kindling, and die forgotten.
Li Yao was worse than forgotten. He had no root at all.
But now, as the second wave broke against the village walls, none of that mattered.
Not root. Not past. Not destiny.
Only survival.
The second wave struck just before dawn.
It began with a shriek—not human, not beast. Something primal and furious, echoing from the forest like the cry of a hornet queen.
Then came the swarm.
Dozens of beasts, all leaner and faster than the first, tore through the treeline with terrifying precision. These weren't strays or malformed scouts. They moved with intent. They ran in patterns, flanking the north and east gates simultaneously. Some even circled through the gully by the old orchard, where no defenses had been raised.
Li Yao was already there.
He'd seen the pattern forming—felt it in the pause between the attacks. It wasn't just instinct. It was the same sensibility that let him recognize a fault in stone, a weak knot in a sapling's growth. Things built poorly always broke along the same lines.
He'd planted sharpened stakes in the gully's narrowest pass, half-buried beneath woven mats and loose brush. When the first beast stumbled onto them—a six-legged hound with bone tusks—the scream it let out was cut short by a swing of his blade.
Others came, leaping over their wounded kin. He didn't retreat. He didn't have time to check if anyone was behind him. He fought alone, and the blade thrummed in his hand like a living thing.
A wave of heat rose in his chest. He welcomed it. He let it guide him.
Every beast that fell under the edge of his blade seemed to deepen the hum—subtle, like the way a tuning string remembers a melody. But Li Yao didn't hear music.
He felt purpose.
Elsewhere in the village, things were falling apart.
The east barricade collapsed under the weight of a tusked beast the size of a cart. Elder Shen was trampled, his ribs crushed beneath hooves that never paused. A group of women and children tried to flee toward the well, but were cut off by a pack of low-skulking fanged creatures that darted between gaps like smoke.
Uncle Wei, wounded but still upright, held the square with a handful of villagers. Blood soaked his tunic. His axe had broken. He now fought with a butcher's hook in one hand and a heavy kitchen pot in the other, swinging with the slow, terrifying rhythm of a man too angry to die just yet.
Li Yao arrived just as another beast—a lizard-like thing with mottled scales and a jaw full of twitching teeth—lunged at Tao, one of the village boys.
Li Yao's foot hit the thing in mid-air, redirecting it just enough to miss its mark. He followed with a clean downward stroke, the blade shearing through its spine. Tao screamed anyway, not from pain, but from sheer animal terror.
"Get inside," Li Yao barked. "Now."
Tao ran. Li Yao didn't watch where.
Another came at him—a malformed ape-thing with too many joints in its arms. Li Yao caught it low, then turned with a pivot of his heel, guiding it into a broken fence corner where a trip-line lay waiting. The beast fell into a row of buried caltrops.
It thrashed. He ended it.
Around him, the fighting thinned. There were fewer beasts now. But fewer villagers too.
And not all the bodies were whole.
Auntie Mu was slumped beside the well, her cleaver still clenched but unmoving. The blood on her neck looked black in the half-light. Li Yao didn't check for breath. He moved on.
By the time the last beast fell, the sky had begun to gray. Not with peace, but with ash.
Half the village was gone.
The walls were broken. The square slick with blood. Fires crackled in three separate places, none set by human hands.
Uncle Wei leaned on a shattered doorframe, breathing like a bellows. His eyes met Li Yao's.
"We held," he said.
"No," Li Yao replied quietly. "We bled. The beasts will be back. You know it."
Wei nodded, slowly. "They always come back."
Li Yao looked down at the blade in his hand.
It was vibrating, just barely—so faintly he thought he might be imagining it. But when he thought of death, of killing, of that strange moment before a strike landed—
—it stirred.
He didn't understand what it meant.
But he would.
He had to.