Day 214
The village leader stumbled in again this evening, smelling of sour millet wine and false piety.
He poured silver on the altar tray. Not for the spirits. For me.
A bribe.
He wants a blessing again. Wants me to declare the barley fields "spirit-kissed," the land blessed. Wants to present this lie to the southern province council at the seasonal bartering moot.
He is grasping a smoldering ember, feigning it as fire.
Xinhui has been abandoned. The jade trade routes have changed. Cultivators no longer pass this way. What remains is hollow pride, and men like him clinging to titles already buried by time.
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Day 267
The mice are brazen now. Clever little things. They chewed through my sealed rice once again. Now they're sneaking candle stubs into the floorboards, leaving them in a row like sacrifices.
One of them blinked at me today. I swear it looked..... curious.
I roughly sketched a pair of simple repulsion glyphs.
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Day 298
He has opened a beetle today.
A goldwing—rare, and considered to be lucky. They are said to contain dream-larvae in their stomachs, which give visions to spirit-keepers if they are burned correctly.
He didn't consume it.
He removed its wings with a bamboo spine needle. He didn't crush them. He set them on a rock, in a neat row. Clean and exact, like a doctor.
He then cremeted the beetle body with a clump of dry grass and memorialized its passing with a shattered sundial.
The moment it curled inward, he laid it to rest beneath the soil.
Then he murmured, "Even death requires categorization."
It wasn't cruelty.
It was taxonomy.
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Day 325
Da Mo came again, shouting at the chief. The harvest quotas are absurd. Even an immortal couldn't summon grain from dead dirt. Da Mo, ever the blunt sword, wants to halt religious offerings—says the spirits don't need barley, says it's waste.
He's not wrong. But truth has never been enough in this village.
He also vowed to expose the chief's shame. The baby in his wife's womb—everyone knows it is not his. The shame is not that she has committed adultery. The shame is that she thought he wouldn't.
Meanwhile, the chief begged me—yes, begged me—to name his infant grandson as a Heaven-Favored Seedling.
The spirits laughed. A dry, faraway laugh, like crows around a long-forgotten corpse.
Then they fell silent.
I told him they refused. I did not tell him they found it amusing.
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Day 350
The boy stole Widow Yuan's two yams. Slipped by her blind dog like fog through reeds. Stole nothing else. Didn't even knock the chipped bowl that sat beside the door.
He gave one yam to a squirrel.
The other he entombed under the elm root where the old shrine gate fell three years ago.
Why?
He may have eaten both of them. He's clearly starving. But he didn't even bite. Just... buried it. Made a triangle of sticks to mark where it was.
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Day 370
I asked the spirits about him tonight. And for the very first time in all the years that I've ever witnessed smoke, I was frightened at what I saw.
The incense burned red. Not orange. Not white. Red, like warning or marrow.
The spirals reversed direction. And the ash came from the bowl.
I heard the distant howl of something that had never been human.
Then silence.
Complete silence.
Even the mice in the rafters stopped moving.
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Day 380
I dreamed of the Earth-Chained One last night.
I haven't dreamed about him since I was initiated.
He stood at the foot of the mountain, his neck stretched back, his eyes filled with broken constellations. He replied: "One walks beside fate. Not in. Not against. Beside. That is what he is. The boy.
He is a fracture. A correction.
Not possessed. Not corrupted. Simply… unmade in the places where others are whole."
I penned his shadow today. Drawn on paper with chalk dust. It did not have a center.
Just edges.
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Day 400
This entry may outlive me, so let it tell the truth straight.
I was Shi Ren of the Moon-Refining Pavilion. I bore the Virtue Brand of Endurance, and I wore it with the pride of a blind fool. But I overstepped the bounds of our teachings.
I once encountered a child from the Southern Expanse who displayed signs of a Temporal Reversal Constitution—an impossibility from the Empyrean Eras. The Grand Oracle Council forbade intervention, but I saw in that child the seeds of ruin. He stole years from his own mother.
I acted without permission. I bound his karmic threads and sealed him away. I believed I had saved us from catastrophe.
I was cast out. They sealed my Mystical Splendor Mirror, lowered my soul rank, and exiled me—erased from the Pavilion's records. I found refuge in Xinhui, a village abandoned even by the gods, where I now tend to an empty shrine.
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Day 420
The evening grows cold, and I couldn't help but be drawn to my Mystical Splendor Mirror again. The mirror—bound to my soul for thousand long years—has been sealed ever since the incident. I vowed that I would never touch it again. But the boy. I needed to know what fate he possessed. I exhausted my lifespan and gazed into its surface.
What I saw was not darkness or hidden truths, but emptiness. A void—a void where destiny was supposed to be written. I realized then that the mirror could not read him. There are only two kinds of people where the Mystical Splendor Mirror cannot reach - True Saints or True Aberrations. He is no Saint.
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Day 442
Tonight, the spirits whispered a question I've long avoided, "Will you kill it?"
I wept bitterly. I am no longer that proud cultivator. I am but a ghost in withered human skin, trembling at the thought of taking a life—even if that life may be a twisted aberration.
I have written these words in moon-ink, only visible under the soft light of the moon. I have concealed this journal beneath the altar—but I know someone, sometime, will discover it. Maybe she, maybe a student from the old Pavilion, or maybe… him.
If you're reading this, listen.
Don't attempt to control him. Don't attempt to annihilate him.
He is neither child nor monster. He is a correction of a failure. He is what is created when meaning itself fails.
Burn it if you will. Bury it deep. But remember: The sky never gave him a place—so he will make one for himself.
— Shi Ren, Moon-Refining Pavilion, Exiled Spirit-Watcher. Died prior to the first spring thunder. Two thousand twenty four year old. Too old to doubt. Too sane to ignore.
......
The Xinhui village forest lacked an origin. The forest was still that morning, wrapped in a silver hush of mist. Dawn was only just breaking, casting pale light through the tall spires of ash and cedar. The ground was damp and uneven, clumps of old leaves rotting under moss-covered roots.
The boy moved silently through the woods. Feet pushed between bare soles and leaves, cool but not wet. Soles were hard enough now not to mind the pebbles or the splinters anymore. The air was thick with the scent of wet bark, fungi, and the distant musk of animal paths. Insects hummed under rocks. The fog curled low, hanging around the base of trees like frayed ghosts too weary to ascend.
The boy moved quietly. He had ventured further than he normally did today. Further than the others who were brave. But nobody would stop him. Nobody ever did.
He had no name that people called him out of affection. Not in the village. Not even the old woman who raised him. The boy moved carefully amid brambles, every step thought out. His snares had been laid since morning.
Five of them. None more, since that was how many strings he'd pulled apart from an old reed mat spread out outside the communal hall two moons ago.
The rest he'd fashioned out of strips of bark, hair off his own head, and a bit of the pigweed fiber he soaked behind the abandoned Spirit-Watcher's hut.
He knelt beside the third trap, where he'd laid a dead root-fruit coated with a slice of stinking ratberry and fish scales—foul enough to entice scavengers, acidic enough to cover the bloodied iron filings he'd added to the meat.
Predators despised the odor. Prey did not. It was for something like a badger. Maybe, if luck smiled, a duskfox whelp. The trigger mechanism—a bent thorn branch lodged under a piece of shale was subtle.
The trip line, a knotted braided string, was only visible if you knew where to find it. The boy ran his fingers over it once, feeling for tension, then reset the bait gently.
His hands did not shake. They had finally ceased shaking last winter.
A soft rustle. His hold on the stone-handled knife at his waist clenched. He held his breath steady. A tree-hare sniffed its way to the bait, twitching ears and low-slung body.
Hesitated, sniffed. Stepped forward again. The boy did not blink. Its front paw lay on the trigger vine.
Snap!
The branch sprang back, the snare entwined, and in an instant, the creature was ripped from the ground. It thrashed, its eyes bulging in horror. The boy leaped ahead. In one swift motion, he placed a hand on the hare's chest and cut its throat. It became lifeless after two seconds.
The ground filled with blood. He let out a breath. He cleansed the blade with a leaf and muttered, so softly that he could scarcely hear it himself, "Thank you. You'll feed me another day."
He sat beneath the branch of a bent ash tree, leaning against the trunk with his head. His breath left white clouds in the air. The first spring cold still hadn't left. His belly rumbled, but he pushed it aside. He'd eat later. Tonight.
His eyes wandered upward through the green canopy. It swayed gently. He glanced at his own hand. Thin. A bit grubby. Scars from thorns that had nipped him the day before. One knuckle still bled.
Seven years old.
He didn't feel like seven. He didn't feel like anything.
Just tired.
"I don't want to live like this."
He hadn't spoken aloud, but the thought was so full it almost trembled in his chest.
"I don't want to die as a weed whose removal nobody ever remembers."
Nobody from Xinhui claimed him. The old men in the courtyard looked at him like a dog that hadn't yet been killed. The women pulled the children away when he came near. The other child, Yun'er, was pleasant but too soft—too full of light to hold on to him. They called him odd.
Wrong.
He called himself alive.
An elderly widow had found him seven winters before—naked, red, and stiff, left on the riverbank on the night of the frost moon. Not crying. Not wincing. Just watching.
She said he had the eyes of something that should have already died. She had adopted him. Her own children were years in the ground. Her husband went off to the mines and was never seen again. She had fed him scraps for years, taught him to scavenge, to distinguish poison from edible, rot from ripe.
But she never called herself his mother. And he never dared to call her so. Even with that, she had been everything. He did not know if she loved him. He did not know what love was. But she gave him food when others did not. Covered him with cloth when it was cold. Let him sleep in her hut, even though the remains of her sons were still buried under the floorboards.