When the immortal announced I’d passed, the noise in the square surged almost immediately. People who’d been holding their tongues started talking over each other, and the sound spread fast—first the ones close enough to hear clearly, then the ones repeating it to those farther back. I could feel eyes turning toward me as I stepped away from the open center. The mud tugged at my straw soles, and the damp scarf clung to my neck, but it was the attention that made my skin tighten.

  I stepped away from the space beneath him with my eyes lowered, boots tugging free of mud with soft, wet sounds. My hands felt wrong at my sides—too empty, still remembering the weight of the two pearls that were no longer mine. The air around me was thick with incense and breath and jealousy turning hot in damp cold.

  At the edge of the square, people had been holding themselves in check the way starving men held themselves in check around a pot. That restraint snapped.

  A woman’s voice cut through first—high, sharp, outraged.

  “Impossible!”

  Heads turned. Bodies shifted. Wet sleeves brushed wet sleeves. Someone shoved for a better look. A vendor’s stall frame creaked as it was bumped.

  The woman who’d shouted was dressed better than most—still poor by any real standard, but her coat had fewer patches, and the cloth at her wrists was clean enough to show she didn’t scrub laundry in lye water herself. Her hair was pinned neatly, and her face was flushed red with the kind of anger that came from believing the world owed her something.

  Beside her stood a boy—about fourteen, maybe—thin but not starving, with a new sash at his waist and hands that didn’t look like they’d ever split open from winter work. He stared toward the spot where I’d stood, eyes wide, mouth slightly open, as if he didn’t know whether to copy his mother’s fury or swallow it.

  A man near her laughed—too loud, too pleased to have a spark to feed. “Why impossible? The immortal said it, didn’t he?”

  The woman snapped her head toward him. “He’s a stray! Look at him! Mud on his shoes, dirt under his nails—he walked in with nothing!”

  Someone else answered from behind a shoulder, voice low and sour. “That’s exactly why it’s suspicious.”

  Another voice piled on, a man with a rough scarf and a face carved by wind and cheap wine. “He cheated. He must’ve bought them.”

  The first woman seized that word like a blade. “Yes! Bought them! Or stole them! How else would a nobody bring two cores while my son—” She dragged the boy forward by the sleeve as if presenting proof. “—while my son is out there risking his life!”

  The boy winced at the tug but didn’t pull away. His eyes flicked toward the forest road, then back to the square, then down. His throat bobbed as he swallowed.

  A different woman, older and hard-faced, snorted. “Your son’s out there because you pushed him. Don’t cry now because someone else got ahead.”

  The well-dressed woman rounded on her instantly. “And what do you know? You sell turnips!”

  The older woman stepped closer, chin lifted. “I know mud. I know hunger. And I know a mother’s mouth doesn’t make her son stronger.”

  A few people laughed. Not kindly. The kind of laughter that wanted blood.

  The first woman’s face went a shade brighter. “Watch your tongue! You think you can speak to me like that?”

  The older woman’s smile was thin. “I just did.”

  The crowd’s noise swelled in waves—people repeating the immortal’s words, twisting them, adding poison.

  “First attendee…”

  “Passed already…”

  “How?”

  “Two cores…”

  “Corruption and earth—did you hear?”

  “Level Two!”

  “Where would he get those?”

  A man with a basket of incense waved his sticks like a banner, shouting over everyone. “It’s fate! Fate favors the one with Heaven’s eye!”

  Someone shoved him. “Fate my ass—he’s hiding something!”

  A vendor selling hot water leaned toward a customer, eyes wide with greed. “If he can pass, maybe anyone can. Maybe next year my boy—”

  The customer spat. “Your boy? He’d cry if you made him carry a bucket.”

  The words hit like slaps and landed everywhere.

  I moved through the edge of the square without lifting my head, but the crowd’s attention followed me anyway, tugging like hands.

  A young man—older than the boys in the center, maybe seventeen or eighteen—stepped into my path. He wore a short coat with a stitched emblem on the sleeve, and his hair was tied tight. His face had the hard look of someone who’d practiced being better than other people.

  He looked me up and down slowly, then smiled.

  It wasn’t friendly.

  “You,” he said, loud enough for those nearest to hear. “Where’d you get them?”

  I didn’t answer.

  My silence made him grin wider, as if he’d trapped me.

  “Can’t speak?” he mocked. “Or you don’t want to say because you’ll be dragged out and beaten?”

  A second youth drifted closer, trying to look casual, eyes sharp. “Maybe he stole from the ones who already left.”

  A third voice—female, cold—came from behind them. “A thief is still a thief, even if he smiles at the immortal.”

  They weren’t speaking to me to learn anything. They were speaking to perform outrage, to build a story that made my existence less offensive.

  I kept walking.

  The first youth stepped sideways again, blocking me more fully. Mud sucked at his shoes as he planted himself.

  “Hey,” he said, voice dropping into something uglier. “You think you can stroll into Jiānyún and embarrass the proper candidates? You think a stray can—”

  A hand grabbed his sleeve and yanked.

  A thick-fingered hand, hard with work, belonging to an older man with a crooked nose and a face that looked like it had been punched into shape.

  “Move,” the man growled. “Or I’ll move you.”

  The youth jerked back, offended. “Who are you?”

  “Someone who’s not stupid enough to start a brawl under a cultivator’s eyes,” the older man snapped. “You want to die? Do it somewhere else.”

  The youth’s face worked—anger swallowing pride. He opened his mouth, then glanced upward toward the dimming rainbow light and the man still standing on air.

  He shut up.

  He stepped aside with a glare and let me pass.

  That was the reality here: bravado lasted until it met something that could crush it.

  The crowd continued to boil behind me. Mothers were gathering in clumps, voices sharp with fear disguised as certainty.

  “My daughter better come back.”

  “My son knows the woods. He’ll be fine.”

  “Heavenly Sword wouldn’t make it deadly.”

  “They said two days—two days! How can a child—”

  “They’ll die, that’s how.”

  Someone said it too bluntly, and the clump went momentarily silent. Then another voice, softer, tried to cover it.

  “No, no, the sect watches. They won’t let them all die.”

  A man laughed without humor. “The sect doesn’t care if a hundred die, as long as one with good root walks back.”

  That sentence landed like a slap even on the people who already knew it.

  You could see it in their faces: the terror of admitting the truth, and the necessity of pretending otherwise because their children were already running into the dark.

  The square smelled worse as dusk deepened. Wet wool held body heat and sweat. Mud splashed higher as people shoved and repositioned. Someone spilled a bucket of something hot—tea or broth—and it ran through the muck, steaming briefly, then cooling into another stain.

  Somewhere near the edge, a woman began wailing—not the clean grief of a funeral, but a loud, performative keening meant to summon attention.

  “My son! My precious son!”

  Another woman grabbed her arm. “He isn’t dead yet. Shut up.”

  “He will be!” the wailing woman screamed, eyes wild. “Because of that—” She pointed, not at the sky-man, but at the direction I’d gone, as if I were the cause of all misfortune. “Because of that cursed stray!”

  The people around her murmured, hungry for a target.

  “Cursed…”

  “Stray…”

  “Too fast…”

  “Too lucky…”

  I didn’t turn around.

  I kept moving through the town’s press, letting the noise and stink fade behind me as I found a narrower lane where the crowd thinned. The rainbow light above softened further, the colors thinning like dying embers in smoke.

  Behind me, the square continued to roar and spit, a mass of mortals packed in mud, arguing and blaming and bargaining with fear while their sons and daughters ran into the black forest because a man who walked on air had told them to.

  And above them, he hovered, clean and calm, as if none of it mattered.

  I moved away from the square as soon as I could without looking like I was running. The sound behind me had shifted from stunned silence to angry chatter, and even without turning my head I could feel the crowd beginning to choose a target for its confusion. My bundle strap cut into my shoulder where the cloth was already worn thin, and my straw soles kept drinking the mud. I held my face still and let my pace stay ordinary, because the quickest way to become someone’s problem in a town like this was to look like you had something to hide.

  A cart tried to force its way along the square’s edge, the mule stumbling in the churned ground while the driver shouted and yanked its rope. People cursed and shoved aside to avoid the wheels, and the press opened in a ragged line for a moment. I slid into that gap and walked alongside the cart, keeping one hand on the wet wood of its sideboard as if I belonged there. The mule’s stink and the driver’s yelling drew eyes away from me, and the cart’s slow crawl gave me cover without making me stand out. When the cart reached a narrower lane and lurched forward, I let it go and stepped off into the side street, continuing as if I’d always intended to take that turn.

  Jiānyún’s alleys felt tighter than the square, not safer. The buildings leaned close enough that dripping eaves fed the puddles in the lane, and the air held onto smells instead of letting them blow away. I passed a doorway where two men argued over a sack of grain with hands already half raised, and I passed a woman with a bruised cheek hauling a bucket as if she’d forgotten how to look up. A boy sat on a low stool scraping at a fish head with a dull knife, his hands quick and practiced, his eyes watching ankles and pockets more than faces. I kept moving in the same steady pace, making small turns whenever a street offered two directions, because staying predictable was an invitation. I also kept listening for any footsteps that held the same rhythm as mine, and although I heard plenty of feet in the mud and water, none stayed with me long enough to make me change into a run.

  I found a narrow gap between two buildings where a fence had collapsed inward and left a passage choked with broken boards and refuse. The stink was worse in there—old piss, rotting vegetable scraps, damp cloth—and that made it useful, because most people avoided places that clung to them. I turned sideways, pulled my bundle tight, and eased through without scraping more than I had to. A nail snagged my sleeve and I freed it slowly instead of yanking. The mud in the passage was deep and black, and it tried to hold my straw soles with every step, but I kept my weight forward and stayed quiet until the passage opened into a small back yard.

  The yard was just another patch of trampled dirt and wet straw, with chopped wood stacked under a sagging lean-to and a half-frozen trough near a door that hung crooked on its hinges. A dog under the lean-to lifted its head and growled once, low and warning, and I froze with my hands open at my sides. The dog didn’t charge, but it watched me with hard eyes, and I took that warning seriously. I backed out of its line without sudden movement and continued along the edge of the yard until I found another gap that led into a lane behind a row of stalls.

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  The smell back there was food-adjacent and ugly—spilled broth, rancid oil, fish, damp grain sacks—and the ground was littered with scraps that had been tossed aside because they weren’t worth anyone’s time. I moved like a worker and not like a thief, keeping my head down and my hands close, and when I crouched I did it as if I were fixing my shoe ties. Behind a stall that sold dried herbs, I found wilted greens and cabbage cores that were still edible if you didn’t care about taste. I slid two leaves and a handful of onion skins into my sleeve, taking only what would disappear into the general filth of refuse.

  I still needed water, and I still needed a place where I could vanish for two days without being dragged out and beaten for someone’s entertainment. Fire would have been useful, but fire drew eyes, and anything that drew eyes would eventually draw hands. I followed the town’s low channels downhill, using the stink and the trickle of grey water as a guide, because where people dumped waste they also kept wells, and even a town like this couldn’t survive without water that didn’t poison you outright. I found a stone-ring well in a small pocket between buildings, waited until two women filling jars finished their argument and left, and then drank with my hands cupped. The water was cold and tasted of stone and rope. I forced myself to drink slowly and filled the skin only partway so it wouldn’t slosh, because sound and attention were linked in my mind even when I tried to tell myself that sloshing wasn’t a crime.

  For shelter, I went toward the poorer edge of town where the palisade met scrub and broken stone. There, behind stacked timber and leaning reed walls, I found half-collapsed outbuildings that no one repaired because they weren’t worth the effort. One of them still had enough roof to block rain, and the inside smelled of damp straw and mouse droppings, which meant it hadn’t been claimed as someone’s sleeping spot yet. I dragged broken boards across the entrance in a way that left gaps and didn’t look deliberate, because a sealed door suggested valuables while a trashy, half-open mess suggested nothing worth stealing. I laid my thin blanket in the deepest corner where the wind cut less and sat with my back to the wall until my breathing slowed.

  Two days was not a long time, but it was long enough to die if I made a mistake. I planned it the same way I planned everything now, in simple pieces I could execute without debating. I would drink from the well at hours when fewer people were there, and I would eat small amounts at a time so my stomach didn’t revolt. I would use the candle only if I absolutely had to, and I would keep the knife close because a blade could mean the difference between being robbed and being left alone. I would also avoid the square and any place where people gathered, because I had already felt how quickly a crowd turned curiosity into cruelty.

  When night came, I listened to the town through the boards: distant shouting, a dog barking once and falling quiet, someone coughing wetly, the occasional burst of laughter that sounded more like relief than joy. I kept my eyes open longer than my body wanted and forced myself to sleep in short pieces, waking whenever footsteps passed too close or a voice rose outside. The immortal had told me to return before noon two days from now, and I didn’t know what the second test would be, but I knew I had to still be breathing when that time came.

  I stayed tucked in the rotting shed until the noise from the square stopped rolling over the roofs like a storm. Jiānyún never truly quieted, but the kind of sound changed when people stopped staring up and started talking at each other again. That was when trouble usually found its feet, and I didn’t want trouble to remember my face.

  I kept my bundle in my lap and my hands on it as if it could keep me from disappearing.

  Inside it, wrapped in cloth and buried under everything else, was the last pearl. I didn’t have a name for it. I didn’t know why it mattered. I only knew the man in the sky had taken two from my hands and then said I had passed, and that meant these little stones—pearls, cores, whatever—were tied to the only reason I was still breathing in this town.

  That made them dangerous.

  Not because I understood value, but because anything important to powerful people was always dangerous to touch.

  I didn’t look at it.

  I just checked the knot by feel, making sure the cloth was still tight and the shape still there, then pushed it deeper and retied the bundle until it looked like nothing but rags and hunger.

  Two days.

  He had said two days, and he had said before noon. I didn’t know what the second test was, and I didn’t know what would happen if I failed, but I knew how this world worked: if you didn’t do what you were told by someone who could crush you, the crushing came sooner.

  So I focused on the things I understood.

  Water. Food. A place to sleep where hands wouldn’t find me.

  I waited until full dark to move, because I’d learned that people watched less when they were busy with their own desperation. The town’s lamps were weak, paper and glass with small flames that made more shadow than light. In the alleys, the mud turned colder, and the smell turned sharper—piss, refuse, rotting greens, damp wool. My straw soles whispered wetly as I walked, and every time one foot pulled free of a puddle it made a soft sucking sound that made my shoulders tighten.

  I kept my head down and moved like I belonged. Not like I was hiding. Hiding drew the wrong kind of attention.

  I went for water first because thirst made me stupid, and being stupid got you hurt. I slipped toward the small well pocket I’d found earlier, then stopped short when I saw two men there filling jars, voices low and rough. One had a club tucked into his belt. They weren’t guards. They were the kind of men who didn’t need permission. I waited behind broken crates until they finished and left, then moved in and drank with my hands cupped, slow enough that I didn’t cough. The water was cold and tasted like stone and rope. I filled the skin partway, not because I was measuring coin or travel, but because a full skin sloshed and a sloshing sound carried.

  When I left the well, I kept walking for a while instead of going straight back to the shed. The instinct to go “home” was an old trap. Going straight anywhere made you predictable. I made two extra turns through lanes that stank worse than the main streets, then doubled back through a gap between buildings where broken boards and refuse made the path narrow. I moved carefully, because stepping on a loose plank would crack loud enough to make someone look, and looking was the first step toward hands.

  Food came the way it always had for me.

  Not bought. Found.

  I didn’t know prices. I didn’t know how the town worked in coin. I just knew people threw things away, and thrown-away things kept you alive.

  Behind a stall line, I found a pile of cabbage cores and wilted greens and onion skins. Most of it was slime and rot, but some pieces were still edible if you peeled away the worst layers. I crouched as if adjusting my shoe ties and slid a couple of leaves into my sleeve. My hands stung where the skin was cracked, and cold wet seeped in immediately, but I didn’t stop. I took only what would go unnoticed as trash, then moved on. I didn’t linger in one place long enough for a stall owner to decide I was a nuisance.

  I didn’t light a fire.

  Not because I was brave about eating cold, but because fire meant smoke and smoke meant questions. Questions meant getting dragged somewhere, and if that happened in a town like this, you didn’t get to control what came next. I chewed the cabbage raw and swallowed slowly, letting the bitterness sit in my mouth while my stomach tightened around something that wasn’t empty air. I ate a small piece of the farmer’s grain cake later, then stopped before my hands could keep going on their own.

  That first night I slept in broken pieces, curled against the back wall of the shed with my bundle under my arm like it could be taken if I let go. Town sounds came through the boards: distant shouting, a dog barking, someone laughing too loud, someone coughing deep and wet. Every time footsteps passed too close, my eyes opened and my body went rigid until the sound moved on.

  Morning came grey and damp.

  My body felt less dizzy than it had at the farm, but it still wasn’t right. Hunger sat in my belly like a stone. Cold lived in my toes because the straw soles never dried. My hands shook a little when I tied knots. I forced myself to drink early, before the day got crowded, and then I moved again because staying still all day made a man a target.

  I walked the poorer lanes like I was supposed to be there, copying the pace of other workers and porters. I kept my bundle strap settled and my face blank. I didn’t stare at stalls. I didn’t stare at guards. I listened.

  People talked about the selection everywhere, and I couldn’t escape it even when I wanted to. They talked about the boys and girls who had run into the forest. They talked about who would come back. They talked about the man in the sky as if he was weather.

  A woman hauling water muttered to another that her nephew would be chosen, because he was strong and had “good bones.” The other woman answered that strong bones broke all the same. A man sitting on a step laughed and said half of them would come back with nothing but bruises, and the other half wouldn’t come back at all. Nobody spoke like they cared. They spoke like they were gambling.

  I didn’t join the talk. I just let it wash over me while I kept doing what I knew: drinking, scavenging, staying unnoticed.

  That afternoon, I caught myself touching my bundle too often. It wasn’t greed. It was anxiety. The pearl hidden inside felt like it could burn through cloth just from being important to someone stronger than me. I didn’t understand why it mattered, but I understood this: if someone saw it, they would want it, because people wanted anything that made other people bow.

  So I didn’t take it out.

  I didn’t show it.

  I didn’t even look at it again.

  I spent the second night the same way as the first, only hungrier because my body had started to trust food again and wanted more. I gave it less than it wanted. I drank enough to keep my head clear and kept my eyes open longer than was healthy, because a town full of desperate people was a worse forest than any pines.

  When the second day thinned toward evening, I counted time the only way I could: by the light through cracks in the boards, by the bell sounds that drifted faintly from the square, by how many times I’d eaten and drunk and slept in short pieces.

  I didn’t know what the next test would be, but I knew I had to be standing in that square again when the time came, because the man who walked on air had spoken, and in this world, that was the kind of sentence you didn’t survive by ignoring.