The final week before the Awakening Ceremony descended upon the village with a palpable weight. A tense, hushed anticipation replaced the usual monotonous rhythm of survival. The labor assignments grew lighter for the youths of age; even the Elder understood that exhausted bodies made for poor prospects. An asset must be in prime condition before its value is determined.
Meng Ru's work on the palisade was declared complete. He was granted three days of rest, a fallow period to let his hardened muscles recover. But Meng Ru did not rest. For him, this was not a reprieve, but an opportunity.
He became a shadow, his presence quiet and unobtrusive. He spent the hours observing. He watched Gu Moon Bo and his followers practice their clumsy combat forms in the training yard, their movements full of wasted energy and bravado. He noted their strengths, their weaknesses, and their reliance on predictable patterns. He watched the guards at the gate, tracking their patrol times and the subtle shifts in their vigilance. He spent an entire afternoon near the edge of the forest, studying the behavior of the wild beasts whose calls haunted the night, learning the boundaries they respected and the scents that agitated them.
He was not merely seeing; he was gathering data, compiling a mental ledger of the world around him. Every observation was a potential variable in a future calculation.
On the eve of the ceremony, as dusk painted the sky in shades of bruised purple, Feng Yin found him sitting near the western fence, his gaze fixed on the distant, jagged peaks of the mountains.
She stood beside him for a long moment, the silence stretching between them.
"You are calm," she finally stated. It was not a question.
"Is there a benefit to being otherwise?" he replied, not looking at her.
A faint, humorless smile touched her lips. "No." She paused, then offered a piece of advice, her tone as transactional as ever. "Tomorrow, the first trial will be a test of will. They will use a pressure gauge to weed out the weak-minded. Do not fight it head-on. Let it flow around you. A direct confrontation is a foolish waste of stamina. Do not die in the first trial. It's inefficient."
She was not wishing him well. She was optimizing a process. His failure would be a mark against their generation, a minor but irritating debit on the clan's ledger.
"I will remember," Meng Ru said.
She gave a curt nod and walked away, disappearing into the growing twilight.
Meng Ru remained as darkness consumed the village. He felt the thrum of anticipation in the air, but inside him, there was only a profound stillness. He had no past, no memories to anchor him to fear or hope. He had only the present moment and the cold, clear certainty of the future. The ceremony was not a trial to be feared but a threshold to be crossed. It was the moment the scales would be balanced, the moment his own ledger would finally be opened.
He returned to his hut and lay on the straw mat for the last time as a mere burden. He did not sleep. He simply waited, his mind a still, dark lake.
The first sound to break the dawn was not the crowing of a rooster, but the deep, resonant boom of the clan's great drum.
BOOM.
It was a summons. A beginning.
Meng Ru opened his eyes. The echo of the drum vibrated through the earth, a signal that his old life, the life of a nameless river rat, was now officially over.