The protection of a village is not made by walls alone. It is consolidated by loyalty, and loyalty is forged in trials. After the failed assault the elders decided they needed more than brave hands; they needed proof that their people would stand by each other even when the price rose.
Shi Yi was asked, with the casual cruelty elders sometimes use to teach a stubborn youth humility, to take the lead on a local negotiation—a test of nerve rather than blade. A band of traders bound to Lord Runan's influence had set up a market just outside the valley, and the elder wanted a guarantee that the traders would not be used as a backdoor for further machinations. Shi Yi's task was simple: walk into the market, negotiate peaceful trade terms, and return without bloodshed.
Shi Yi accepted with the reckless confidence of youth that borders on charm. He went dressed in his best cloak and a grin that had seduced more than one awkward lover. He found the market loud with lanterns, the air heavy with spices and the talk of goods. The traders were polished men, each one practiced at the thin art of smiling while concealing knives in their sleeves.
Negotiations began with words and smiles. Shi Yi spoke with the easy insolence of someone who expected the world to be pliable. For a time it seemed to be: he bartered grain for cloth, promised protection for honest taxes, and charmed a market woman who rolled her eyes and then laughed.
Then a man with a face like a flat stone approached and whispered: "These traders have been marked by Runan. If your village accepts the trade to my lord's terms, we will place agents inside your goods." Shi Yi's jaw tightened. He could have sealed the deal; it would have brought immediate resources. The elder's plan, however, required him to decline, to force the traders out and send a stronger message of autonomy. Shi Yi refused the hidden terms and walked away with only a sack of low-grade tea and a face reddened with anger.
The traders felt the refusal as a slight they did not expect and moved to make an example. Shi Yi found himself surrounded in a shadowed lane by men whose eyes belied their polite trade masks. Words failed. The first fist landed. He fought like a cornered animal—not elegant, but effective; he had been raised to fight. He was not alone in his method. A half-remembered trick from a fight in his youth—a feint, a tumble, a brush against a vendor's cart—left him on top. He rose with bruises and a story, and when he returned with the traders routed, the village cheered not for victory but for the proof that he would stand.
It was in the exhaustion after that the village saw something bloom. When Shi Yi came back, Captain of a peasant-lad with bruised knuckles, he did not place his own needs first. He had noticed during the scuffle an old crippled man who had been shoved aside by the traders. Shi Yi had given the crippled man the extra tea he had bargained. The man's eyes shone.
"You fought for our trade," the old man rasped. "And for the small place where some of us sleep. Thank you."
Shi Yi's chest swelled with something he would later call pride, but in that tired moment it became something softer: a feeling of being needed. People celebrated him, but more important, he learned that loyalty is not always hammered in battle; sometimes it is patched in small acts that the world forgets to record.
Liu Shen watched him with a leafy patience that had no judgement. "You have been tempered," she murmured, and though the words were small, they meant a world. Shi Yi slept that night with a hand pressed to the pendant at his chest—a small token Granny Cheng had given him—and dreamed not of glory but of standing guard at quiet hours.
---