The panic in the bamboo grove had subsided into a low, worried hum. The wreckage of the blue shuttle smoldered, a dark scar in the moon-dappled bamboo. The villagers, led by a fiercely determined Wei Tiezhu, had formed a protective cordon around the ancestral hall. They stood with farming tools and a few old, spirit-infused weapons—a rusted sword that had belonged to Wei San's father, a spear that could allegedly never miss a rabbit—their faces set in grim lines. The festive lanterns from the Lazy Immortal Festival still hung in the square, their cheerful light now feeling mocking and out of place.
Inside the hall, the atmosphere was thick with unspoken fear. The young woman with the violet eyes had drunk the restorative tea, and a faint blush of color had returned to her cheeks. But the terror in her eyes had not abated. It had sharpened, focused on the old floorboards beneath which the black-lacquered box lay hidden.
"The Crows of the Unending Shadow," she repeated, her voice a trembling whisper. She looked from Wei San's carefully neutral face to Aunt Hong's concerned one. "You have it. I can feel its… silence. It screams into the void, and they hear it. They are drawn to its emptiness."
Wei San knelt beside her pallet, his movements slow and deliberate, projecting a calm he did not feel. "Child, you speak of things we do not understand. Our clan are simple rice farmers. We have no treasures that would interest such… Crows."
"Lies," she said, but there was no anger in it, only a bone-deep exhaustion. "The bloodline knows. Even diluted over ninety-nine generations, the bloodline remembers. My name is Yun Lian. My ancestor was the younger sister of the one who asked the Twelfth Question. Our branch fled west, to the Salt-Scarred Wastes, to hide. We thought we were safe. We were wrong." She clutched the broken jade slip tighter. "They found us a week ago. They took everything. I was the only one who escaped. I used my family's last treasure, the Sky-Cutter Shuttle, to follow the pull, to come here. It was the only place left to go."
Aunt Hong's hand flew to her mouth. The story was too grand, too terrible, to be a fabrication. It resonated with the oldest, vaguest legends of the Wei clan's fall from grace.
"The Twelfth Question…" Wei San breathed, his mind reeling. The family lore only ever spoke of the Thirteenth. The questions before were myths within myths.
"What was it?" Aunt Hong asked, unable to contain her curiosity.
Yun Lian's violet eyes grew distant. "He asked, 'What is the price of a memory?'" She looked directly at Wei San. "And the Answer broke him. He spent the rest of his eternal life trying to forget the Answer he had been given. Our branch carries that curse. We remember everything, especially the things we wish to forget."
The weight of her words settled in the incense-heavy air. The blank page in the box suddenly felt less like an empty promise and more like a gaping mouth, a hunger that had consumed a man's sanity.
"These Crows," Wei San said, his voice low and urgent. "What do they want?"
"They are scavengers. Servants of a greater darkness," Yun Lian explained, her voice gaining a sliver of strength. "They feed on lost things, on forgotten knowledge, on silenced echoes. The Thirteen Questions… they are the ultimate lost knowledge. The ultimate silence after a cosmic sound. To possess one of the Answers, or even the vessel that held it, would grant them power beyond measure. They will not stop. They are here. I can feel one of them. Close. Its presence is like a splinter in the world's mind."
As if on cue, a dog in the village began to bark, a frantic, fearful sound. Then another. A wave of canine alarm spread from the southern edge of the settlement.
Wei Tiezhu, standing guard at the door, gripped his axe tighter. "Something's out there."
—
Wei Xiao'ou moved through the spirit fields like a wisp of thought. His usual amble was gone, replaced by a predator's glide. The moonlit world was not dark to him; it was a symphony of energy. The silver threads of lunar Qi, the deep, pulsing greens of the plant life, the warm, sleeping auras of the villagers—it was all a vibrant, living map.
And cutting across this map was a single, discordant line of pure black. It was the signature from the watchtower. It didn't absorb light; it negated it. It was a walking void, a hole in the spiritual fabric of the world. A Crow.
He reached the base of the southern ridge. The old watchtower was a skeletal silhouette against the starry sky, a forgotten finger pointing at the heavens. The path up was overgrown with thorny spirit-brambles, but Xiao'ou didn't take the path. He moved vertically up the sheer rock face, his fingers and toes finding infinitesimal holds with an uncanny, spider-like grace. He made no sound, dislodged no pebbles.
As he ascended, he parsed the Crow's energy. It was cautious, patient. It had been observing the village since the shuttle crash, assessing the defenses. It had seen the commotion, the gathering of mortals and low-level cultivators at the hall. It had judged them as no threat. Its attention was fixed entirely on the ancestral hall, on the faint, almost imperceptible hum of the black-lacquered box that even Wei San could not perceive.
Xiao'ou reached the top of the ridge, melting into the shadows of the tower's crumbling foundation. The Crow was above, on the wooden platform that circled the top. He could feel its cold, focused intent. It was preparing to move.
He could have confronted it then. A single, precise thrust of the umbrella, channeling a sliver of the Heaven-Sundering Genesis Lance's power, and the Crow would be a dissipating stain on the night air. But that was messy. It was also uninformative.
A lazy genius did not swat a fly. He let the fly lead him to the manure pile.
So, Wei Xiao'ou did what he did best. He prepared to nap.
He found a deep patch of shadow in a corner of the foundation where the stone had collapsed in on itself. He settled into it, arranging his body into a posture that looked perfectly, comfortably asleep. His straw hat was low over his eyes, his rusty umbrella leaning against the stone beside him. To any observer, he was just the village lazybone, who had, in his somnambulant wanderings, chosen the most absurd and inconvenient place in the entire village to sleep.
He regulated his breathing, slowing his heart until his vital signs were indistinguishable from the surrounding rock. He became a stone. A dreaming, deeply attentive stone.
Minutes ticked by. The canine cacophony in the village below began to die down, the dogs whining themselves into a confused silence.
Then, a faint scraping sound came from above. A whisper of cloth on rotten wood. The Crow was descending.
It moved from the tower's platform, not by the rickety internal ladder, but by flowing down the outside wall, its dark cloak making it look like a patch of night detaching itself. It landed on the ridge path without a sound, a dozen paces from Xiao'ou's shadowy nook.
It was a tall, gaunt figure, its features hidden deep within a hood that seemed to swallow the moonlight. In one hand, it held a long, needle-like dagger that was not made of metal, but of solidified shadow. This was a Soul-Thorn, a weapon designed to kill without leaving a physical wound, severing the spirit from the body with a pinprick.
The Crow paused, its head turning slowly, scanning the area. Its gaze, a sensation of cold pressure, swept over the shadow where Xiao'ou lay. It lingered for a moment on the seemingly sleeping form, the rusty umbrella. A cultivator? No. The boy's spiritual aura was faint, muddled. Essence Condensation, at best. And he was asleep. A non-factor. The Crow's assessment was swift and dismissive. It turned its back and began to move with liquid silence down the path towards the village.
The moment its back was turned, Wei Xiao'ou's eyes opened beneath the hat. They were not the eyes of a sleepy youth. They were the eyes of a mathematician who has just solved for X.
He had seen what he needed to see. The way it moved—not with the flamboyant grace of a Lin Proudcrane, but with the efficient, soulless economy of a tool. This was not a master. This was a probe. A scout. The real threat was still out there, waiting for this one to report.
He couldn't let it reach the hall. The villagers, for all their courage, were chaff before a Soul-Thorn. But he also couldn't kill it here, on the ridge. That would alert its master that the prey was dangerous.
He needed an accident.
Xiao'ou stood up, as silently as he had lain down. He hefted his umbrella. He didn't channel its power. He simply threw it.
It wasn't a mighty throw. It was a casual, underhand toss, as if he were discarding a stick. The rusty umbrella spun lazily through the night air, its arc seemingly clumsy and ill-aimed. It flew past the Crow, clattering noisily into a thicket of spirit-brambles further down the path.
The Crow froze instantly, melting into the deeper shadows of a large boulder. Its head snapped towards the sound. It had been made. By what? It saw the umbrella lying in the thorns. It looked back towards the tower, but Xiao'ou had already re-melded with the shadows, his breathing once again that of a sleeping stone.
The Crow was perplexed. An umbrella? Had it fallen from the tower? Had the sleeping boy tossed it in his sleep? It was an anomaly. Anomalies were to be investigated or avoided. Its mission was the box. It decided on avoidance. It would give the brambles a wide berth.
It stepped off the path, intending to circle through a patch of tall, silver-feathered spirit grass. This was exactly what Xiao'ou had calculated.
The grass, known locally as "Weeping Widow's Hair," was beautiful but notoriously unstable. Its root systems were shallow, and the ground beneath it was a honeycomb of old rabbit warrens and rain-softened earth.
The Crow, its attention split between the hall below and the anomalous umbrella, took a confident step onto what looked like solid ground.
Crrrrunch.
The earth gave way with a soft, muffled crumble. It wasn't a dramatic collapse. There was no yawning chasm. It was just a hole, perfectly sized to swallow a leg up to the hip. The Crow's forward momentum did the rest. There was a sharp, sickening crack that echoed far louder than the crumbling earth—the sound of a femur snapping under torque.
A hiss of pain, shock, and pure fury escaped the hooded figure. It was a sound like steam escaping a grave. It clawed at the ground, trying to pull its leg free, but the pain was blinding, the broken bone grating.
Wei Xiao'ou chose this moment to "wake up."
He sat up in his shadowy nook, rubbing his eyes and yawning theatrically. "Hmm? Who's there? Is that you, Tiezhu? I told you, the Qi up here is excellent for…" He trailed off, squinting into the darkness. "Oh. You're not Tiezhu."
The Crow froze, its pain forgotten in a new wave of confusion and rage. The boy was awake. And he was… walking towards it?
"Are you stuck?" Xiao'ou asked, his voice laced with a lazy concern. He ambled closer, stopping a safe distance away. "That's Weeping Widow's Hair. Very tricky. You have to know the path. Did you fall? Here, let me help you."
He reached out with his umbrella, which he had somehow retrieved without the Crow noticing. He didn't offer a hand. He used the tip of the umbrella to poke experimentally at the Crow's shoulder.
The Crow flinched back, hissing again, its hand tightening on the Soul-Thorn. It tried to lunge, to stab this infuriating mortal, but the movement sent a fresh wave of agony from its broken leg, and it slumped against the edge of the hole, gasping.
"Oh, dear," Xiao'ou said, his head tilted. "You seem to have hurt yourself. That looks painful. You know, Granny Mo makes a poultice for bone breaks. It smells like a wet dog, but it works wonders. I could go get her?"
The Crow was now utterly disoriented. This was not how operations were supposed to go. There was no fight, no flight. There was only this… this bumbling, sleepy boy and his unbearable, condescending pity. It was a form of psychological warfare it had no defense against.
It gathered its dark energy, preparing to unleash a wave of spiritual corruption that would wither this boy where he stood, consequences be damned.
Xiao'ou saw the gathering darkness in its core. He sighed. "You're not very friendly, are you?"
He tapped the ground once with the tip of his umbrella.
It was a gentle tap. But it was a tap that resonated with a very specific frequency. It was the frequency of the unstable honeycombed earth beneath the entire patch of Weeping Widow's Hair.
The ground shuddered.
With a final, groaning sigh, the entire section of hillside upon which the Crow was trapped gave way. It wasn't a landslide, just a localized subsidence. A slide of earth, grass, and one very surprised and injured Crow tumbled down the steep slope in a cloud of dust and debris.
The Crow tumbled end over end, its broken leg flailing, its cloak tangling around it. It lost its grip on the Soul-Thorn, the shadowy dagger spinning away into the darkness. It came to a jarring stop at the bottom of the ridge, half-buried in dirt and uprooted grass, unconscious or too dazed to move.
Wei Xiao'ou walked to the edge of the newly created small scar on the hillside and looked down. He shook his head with a click of his tongue.
"Tsk. Clumsy."
He then turned and looked out towards the darkness beyond the village, towards the Jade Mist Hills.
"Your scout failed," he said softly, though there was no one to hear. "It fell down a hill. A pathetic, laughable end. Nothing to see here. Just a backwater village with bad landscaping and a lucky idiot."
He was sending a message. To the master out there, watching through some remote means, the spiritual signature of its scout would have just violently destabilized and then faded into unconsciousness amidst a minor geological event. It would look like incompetence, not confrontation.
Satisfied, Wei Xiao'ou turned and began his slow, ambling descent back towards the village, whistling a tuneless, off-key version of the Lazy Immortal Festival theme song. He had neutralized the immediate threat, protected the secret of his involvement, and fed the enemy a narrative of farcical misfortune.
It was, all things considered, a good night's work.
—
Back in the village, the tension was at a breaking point. The barking had stopped, but the silence that followed was somehow worse.
Then, from the southern ridge, they heard it. A distant, rumbling crunch, followed by the sound of sliding earth.
"What was that?!" Tiezhu yelled, his knuckles white on his axe handle.
Before anyone could speculate, a familiar, languid figure emerged from the path that led to the spirit fields. Wei Xiao'ou, looking rumpled and sleepy, yawned as he entered the circle of lantern light.
"Where have you BEEN?" Tiezhu roared, his fear and frustration erupting. "We have a crisis! An invader! And you were off… napping!"
Xiao'ou blinked slowly. "Crisis? I heard a noise. Sounded like the hillside near the old watchtower gave way. Probably just the spirit-rabbits digging too deep again. You know how they are this time of year." He spotted the unconscious Yun Lian on the pallet. "Oh. Hello. Who's she?"
The sheer, breathtaking normalcy of his demeanor was a splash of cold water on the village's panic. They stared at him, their fear momentarily short-circuited by his absurdity.
It was at that moment that two children, who had been dared by their friends to investigate the southern ridge, came running back into the square, their eyes wide with excitement.
"Elders! Brother Tiezhu! You have to see! There's a man in a black cloak! He fell down the hill! He's stuck in a pile of dirt and he's not moving!"
The village erupted into a new kind of chaos. Wei Tiezhu and a group of men, their weapons held high, charged towards the southern ridge. They found the scene exactly as described. A gaunt, terrifying-looking figure in a black cloak was half-buried in a fresh slide of earth, out cold, his leg bent at a nauseating angle. A few feet away, lying in the grass, was a dagger that seemed to be made of pure darkness, making the eyes ache to look at it.
They hauled the Crow out of the dirt, bound him with spirit-suppressing ropes used for unruly spirit-beasts, and carried him back to the village, dumping him unceremoniously in a storage shed under heavy guard.
The mood had shifted from terror to triumphant confusion. They had captured an assassin! Without a fight! He had just… fallen down a hill!
Wei Tiezhu stood over the bound Crow, then looked back towards the square, where his cousin was now casually accepting a bowl of congee from a relieved Aunt Hong.
The sequence of events replayed in Tiezhu's mind: the crash, the tension, the barking, the sound of the landslide, and Xiao'ou's timely return with a perfectly mundane explanation.
Coincidence.
It had to be coincidence.
But as he looked at the perfectly broken leg of the Crow, and remembered Xiao'ou's precise, infuriating comment about the resonant frequency of the fence, the dent in the stone of his mind deepened into a fissure.
He looked at his lazy, sleepy, congee-eating cousin, and for the first time, a terrifying, wonderful, impossible thought began to form.
What if the laziness wasn't the point?
What if it was the weapon?
—
In the ancestral hall, Wei San had watched the entire drama unfold from the doorway. He had seen Xiao'ou return. He had seen the Crow captured. He had seen the look on Tiezhu's face.
He walked back inside and knelt beside Yun Lian. "The Crow. It's been taken care of."
Her violet eyes widened. "Taken care of? By whom? That muscle-bound boy? The one with the axe?"
"No," Wei San said, a strange, proud smile touching his lips. "I believe it was the rabbits."
Yun Lian stared at him, unsure if he was mocking her. But the old man's eyes were sincere.
"The world works in mysterious ways, child," Wei San said, patting her hand. "Especially here in Fragrant Rice Village. Now, rest. You are safe. For tonight."
As the old man rose and left her to her thoughts, Yun Lian lay back, her mind racing. The pull of the box was a dull throb in her soul. The Crows were here. One was captured, but more would come.
And this village… these people… they were not what they seemed. The air here was thick not just with the scent of rice, but with something else. A feeling of immense, sleeping power. A laughter that echoed from the very foundations of the world.
She closed her eyes, and for the first time since her family had been slaughtered, she felt a flicker of something other than despair.
She felt curiosity.
—
Wei Xiao'ou finished his congee, handed the bowl back to Aunt Hong with a word of thanks, and walked to his sleeping mat in the family compound. He lay down, folded his hands on his chest, and closed his eyes.
The immediate threat was contained. The narrative was established. The village's spirit was bolstered.
And he had learned three crucial things:
The box was part of a larger set.
The enemy was an organization, not an individual.
They could track the box's "silence."
It was a good start.
As he drifted into a genuine, well-earned sleep, his final thought was not of Crows or boxes or ancient questions.
It was of the spirit cola. He really would have to get the recipe from Fatty Lu. The fizz was… inspiring.
Outside, the moon passed over the village, its light falling on the captured Crow in the shed, on the sleeping form of Yun Lian in the hall, and on the lazy, smiling face of the boy who had, without throwing a single punch, won the first battle of a war no one else knew was being fought.