The wooden eye in the roots did not blink. It simply watched him like a year marking another ring.
Pressure pressed the back of Rat's knees. He bent because standing was suddenly a rich man's hobby. He put one hand on the ground and felt it move under his palm, slow and tired as an old lung.
"Kneel, thief," the roots had whispered.
"I pay when I eat," Rat said. "I am very behind."
The chamber brightened without light. Sap veins within the roots gave off a faint green, like moonlight remembered through leaves. In that glow, the center revealed itself. Not a heart, not flesh. A knot of woven roots, braided and braided again until they formed a fist the size of a barrel. It pulsed too slow to be alive and too stubborn to be dead.
The Bell's presence ticked behind his teeth. Not ringing. Waiting.
He touched the knot. It was cool and sticky. Somewhere deep, he felt a pull, not violent, but steady. Sucking on a cracked lip.
The Codex lifted a clean page.
[Site function: Sap-heart depleted.]
[Protocol: Caretaker Trial initiated.]
[Requirement: Donate Qi to restore minimum flow.]
Rat rolled his eyes at the roots. "Of course Heaven runs shrines like blood banks."
He sat cross-legged on the damp floor. His legs remembered the frost mark and twitched. He smoothed a hand down the scar. It hummed faintly under his skin, hungry and neat.
He set the staff across his lap. He hooked the coin at his sash with a finger and let it rest on his tongue for a breath. Copper taste. Old stories.
"Do not be a hero," he told himself. "Be correct."
He lined his spine, drew his shoulders down, and found the familiar ladder of breath. In on one. Hold and compress on two. Out on three. Leave a piece behind. Horizon Flow wanted to run like water down slope. He convinced it to run like an irrigation ditch. Slow. Useful. Less pretty.
With two fingers, he pressed a shallow crease into the root-knot and placed his palm over it. The crease fit his hand as if it had been waiting.
Heat left his belly in a little line. The knot drank. He felt the drink as cold under his palm and as a hollow inside his chest.
"Feeding plants with my soul," he muttered. "The Basin really hates farmers."
The first minute went clean. The knot pulsed a little faster. The sap-light brightened the way dawn brightens, not obvious until you remember the dark. He kept the rhythm steady. Three-breath cadence, then three again. On every ninth breath he changed nothing. He listened. Roots told slow truths.
On the twelfth count, the pull grew teeth. Not biting. Hooking. It wanted to make his flow its flow. It forgot he was a visitor.
He smiled without humor. "You like rent so much you want the deed."
He shifted the shape of his breathing a hair. He shaped his Qi into threads, not one stream. He taught the knot to drink a braid instead of a rope. If it learned the braid, it might not swallow the whole thing if he had to yank.
Sweat ran down his back. He let it. He took the pain of hollow lungs and folded it under the rhythm where it could not cry loudly.
With the corner of an ear, he heard the Bell hum. Faint. Approving. Not to him. To the balance.
The Codex made a noise like a stamp hitting paper.
[Qi transfer acceptable.]
[Risk status: moderate. Sustained donation beyond 180 breaths will degrade foundation.]
"I am aiming for ninety," he said through his teeth. "One for every mistake I will make raising a shrine."
He counted. Thirty. Forty-five. The sap-light in the walls thickened until he could see his hands clearly, pores and dirt and the scar's white fern. Threads within the knot woke and began to carry the drink onward, through the chamber's ribs, into the cradle where the Green Bell hung. The Bell did not ring. It breathed deeper. The whole place inhaled on his inhale. Exhaled on his exhale.
He smiled, soft and a little cracked. "You teach breathing better than the sect."
On sixty, the knot tried to pull his breath into its rhythm. He let it. He set his body like a boat in a slow current. He adjusted his keel. He did not force. He matched tone to need.
Pain narrowed the world to the size of his palm. His hands shook. He pressed harder. The skin over his sternum felt thin as paper.
The Wraith's frost mark licked his calf. Hunger within hunger. He grunted once and fed that too, a sliver, to keep it quiet. The mountain always taxed.
On seventy-eight, ghosts arrived. Not spirits. Memories of futures he could have had if he had said different words as a child. One was dead in a ditch. One wore a neat robe and sneered at a beggar who looked like him. One knelt just like this, older, hands scarred more, calm as a pond before stone.
He blinked them away with sweat.
"Nine more," he told the knot. "We will be polite about it."
Eighty-four. The roots above his head shivered like hair in wind. There was no wind. Sap lines in the walls brightened to something almost pretty. He felt the Verdant Stag's absence again, but its thread ran nearby now. Watching.
Eighty-nine. He swallowed and tasted iron. He smiled at the taste. "Rent paid."
Ninety.
He pulled his hand away.
The knot pulled back.
He let it have one more breath and no more. It tugged with a fisherman's stubbornness. He answered with a gutter boy's patience. He did not fight. He waited past the peak of the tug, then rolled his wrist and lifted his palm an inch with the grace of a thief palming a coin on market day.
The knot relented. It knew hunger and time. It did not know the joy of winning small.
He fell backward onto the damp floor and let the staff clatter. He lay still and counted fast breaths until the walls stopped moving. He rolled onto his side, coughing, and spat a thin line of spit that glittered green in the sap-light.
"Fancy," he said, hoarse. "I expect better perks with future jobs."
The wooden eye half-closed, satisfied. The chamber's glow settled into a steady radiance, brighter than before. The cradle that held the Bell swelled a shade, vines tightening their weave as if they had remembered the right way to hug.
Rat sat up carefully. The world swam a little, then steadied. He tested his limbs like cheap furniture and found a few bolts loose. He could stand. He did not, yet.
He glanced at the Bell. "Do we shake hands or is that forbidden without a chaperone?"
The Bell answered with a low breath. Not a chime. A tone so soft it lived in bones, not ears. Leaves in the walls quivered and laid down flat.
The Codex unfolded neat lines.
[Codex: Green Bell - Caregiver Bond (Initial).]
[Effect: Low ring accelerates growth of proximate flora and pacifies low-level beasts within 30 paces. Efficiency scales with caretaker's breath-synchronization.]
[Note: Bond is resonance-based. Coercion reduces effect.]
Rat squinted. "So not a leash. A lullaby."
He got to his knees and tried the smallest of chimes. Not striking. He set the staff's tip against the stone beside the cradle, found the breath he had learned, and let the exhale ease into the wood. The cradle took it. The Bell carried it like a mother carries a sleeping child. The chamber sighed again.
The roots around the door loosened. The filaments that had licked his ankle withdrew and went to work strengthening little threads. In his mind's edges, the sense of pathways sharpened. Root Listening drew a sketch of lines leading out and lines that ended in old wounds. He would not get lost if he stayed gentle.
He crawled to his feet like a man dressing humility. He bowed to the wooden eye because not bowing would be loud. It did not move. It did not need to.
"You took," the wood said without speaking. "You gave. You owe."
"Story of my life," he said. "Leave me a tab."
He turned toward the lip of the chamber and froze. The Verdant Stag stood in the doorway without space to stand. The air made room.
Its antlers were branches hardened into art, each tine like charred wood after rain. Its coat was the color of deep moss and iron. Its eyes held a night that had learned sunlight. It smelled like fresh bark and old blood. It lowered its head a fraction. Approval or a warning, he could not tell.
The Wraith's echo drifted somewhere behind that shape and fled like mist before noon.
"Senior," Rat said, very soft. Instinct bowed. Pride pretended it was stretching.
The Stag's breath came and with it a whisper of green wind that should not have fit in this room. The Bell in the cradle answered with one invisible tone that passed through everyone like a hand smoothing a wrinkle.
The Stag tilted its head, looking not at Rat but through him, at the line that tied him to the shrine. It stepped once, hooves whispering on wood. It did not kill him.
Blessing. Trial passed. Caretaker, low grade.
Rat let out a breath he did not know he had saved.
"Payment plan established," he told the Bell for courage. "I will now faint in a dignified manner."
He did not faint. He laughed once without humor and leaned a shoulder to the wall until his legs remembered standing. He turned toward the tunnel that had brought him and felt, for the first time since entering, a thread of path tug at his ribs as if the shrine was saying, this way is cleaner.
He took it. The chamber closed behind, not seal, just hush.
The path offered him choices. He took the ones that hummed under his soles. Root Listening sketched as he moved, the way street maps unfold in your head when you have walked them hungry. He went slow. He did not kick anything that could be chewing.
The pressure eased as he climbed. The air thinned a little. Sap-light faded to suggestion. He tilted his head and heard, faint through earth, shapes moving above. Not his people. Too many feet trying to become one. The sound of orders passed by men who cost money.
He reached a shoulder of stone where the roots had grown thinner and knotted. He pressed his ear to a hard place and listened. Voices bled through as if underwater.
"…charges placed…"
"…on my mark…"
"…Rooted Stone claim…"
He opened his mouth to ask the Codex for good news and received authenticity instead.
[Timer: 2 nights, 11 hours to relocate Green Bell before pattern collapse.]
[External Qi disturbance detected above. Source: Organized detonations!!!]
"Of course," he said. "They brought shovels that explode."
He took two fast breaths to steady his legs and slipped into a narrower vein. The way bent and rose. It smelled of wet clay and iron. When the tunnel flared out to a low domed space, he paused.
The dome held a second knot. Smaller. Healthy. A feeder station. A good sign. He laid a palm to it and sent a thread of warmth to say hello. The knot answered with a ripple that ran through the wall, into the tunnel ahead, and beyond.
The ripple reached the next chamber and met a different pulse.
He felt the Verdant Stag lift its head.
He felt something like a string being drawn to the corner of a bow.
The mountain paused. Listening.
Rat looked up as dirt fell in polite sprinkles from the roots overhead.
The first explosion was not sound. It was the absence of it. A drop in pressure that inverted his breath. Then sound arrived, thick and close, slamming through the wood like a fist through cloth. The roof trembled. Dust turned to a fine rain. Roots stressed and groaned. The Bell behind him answered with a low note that tried its best to be calm.
Another detonation. Closer. Controlled. Rooted Stone was not guessing.
Rat bared his teeth. "You could knock."
He set his feet. He gathered what warmth he had and shaped it to push into four ribs of root around him to keep the way from sagging. The pressure eased. The Codex scribbled.
[Unscheduled buttressing applied. Efficiency: poor, but acceptable.]
"Flattery will get you strangled."
Above, shouts. Clatter. The brittle snap of traps tripped early. He heard Wei Yun's voice, distant, clipped. He heard Ruo's, one word you used to stop animals and men.
Then something larger than an argument woke.
It moved like a tree deciding to walk.
The Verdant Stag stepped. His bones knew it before the roots did.
"Intruders," the Stag said.
The word did not need a mouth. It needed the idea of antlers. It needed the Bell.
Rat's grin came late and thin.
"Good. I needed a quiet day."
The roof dropped dust like light rain. The wall to his left shivered. The roots under his palm swelled. Somewhere ahead, stone threw sparks when hoof met it.
The mountain inhaled.
He bent his knees and breathed with it.
"Caretaker, tenant, target. Nice to be versatile."
[Codex of Strands of Fate - Status Update]
Vitality: 5
Qi Sense: 5
Comprehension: 3
Fate Entanglement: 19
Realm: Foundation Establishment
New Bond: Green Bell — Caregiver (Initial)
Effect: Low ring accelerates nearby growth, pacifies lesser beasts, scales with breath-synchronization.
Note: Shrine pattern stabilized above minimum.
Timer: 2 nights, 11 hours to relocate.