Li Wei arrived after the third bell stopped ringing. The sound had not faded; it had been eaten. That discrepancy mattered.
The village of Qingshui lay inside a shallow basin, its houses arranged without symmetry. The road entering it bent twice for no reason and ended at a granary no one used. Li Wei noted all three failures and stepped inside anyway.
The pocket watch in his palm resisted opening. Spring tension had increased by twelve percent since the last ridge. Mana pressure was rising faster than the reports predicted.
A child stood in the road and did not move. Her shadow lagged behind her body by a measurable fraction. Li Wei walked around her and did not look back.
The first scream came from the well. It lacked rhythm, pitch, and lungs. Abyssal manifestations often borrowed human sounds because humans noticed them.
The watch clicked once. Internal tension spiked, then stabilized. The Abyss had anchored.
Li Wei crouched and pressed two fingers to the dirt. The ground vibrated at irregular intervals, like breath failing to find a pattern. This was not a large incursion, only an early one.
That was the problem.
Reports described a slow onset. This was accelerating.
A villager ran past him carrying a shovel. The shovel's metal edge had already dulled. Abyssic contamination had reached the tools.
Li Wei stood. He counted seven seconds between pulses. Then six.
He moved toward the well.
The stone rim had cracked outward, not inward. Structural failure indicated pressure release, not collapse. Something below was expanding without mass.
A shape climbed out.
It had too many joints and not enough hierarchy. Its surface refracted light incorrectly, bending shadows into angles that did not repeat. Li Wei labeled it an Abyssal node, immature.
It did not attack him.
It turned toward the eastern fields.
Li Wei frowned.
The watch tightened further. Spring tension exceeded safe thresholds for a Tier 3 environment. The village should already be dead.
The node dragged itself forward . Each movement stripped color from the ground behind it. Grass did not wither; it simplified.
Li Wei stepped aside and let it pass. He followed at a distance that kept the watch from screaming. The villagers' panic followed him, not the thing.
A second scream erupted, this one from a house . Then, a third node ignored them.
Li Wei stopped counting seconds. He began counting directions.
The eastern fields sloped gently downward. Irrigation channels cut through them in a grid that did not match the terrain . Old work. Poor work.
The node reached the first channel and paused. Its surface rippled, confused. Then it sank.
The water blackened. The corruption flowed with it.
Li Wei exhaled.
[SYSTEM STATUS: ABYSSAL MANIFESTATION DETECTED]
The confirmation came late.As always.
The ground shuddered once more, then settled. Mana pressure dropped by three percent.
Partial containment.
Li Wei did not relax.
He walked the channels.
Each trench had been dug at a slightly wrong depth. Ater flowed inefficiently, pooling where it should not. Farmers cursed it every season.
The corruption followed those same inefficiencies.
Li Wei stopped at a broken sluice gate. The wood was swollen, warped beyond repair. Water leaked sideways into an unused culvert.
The pocket watch loosened.
Not time.Never time.
The Abyss did not spread evenly. It followed pressure gradients like any fluid in a constrained system. Someone had given it constraints.
A villager grabbed his sleeve."Sir, the fields—"
"They will grow better next year," Li Wei said. The man did not understand the words, only the tone.
The watch clicked again.
[SYSTEM STATUS: LOCAL STABILITY INCREASED]
Cold.Unimpressed.
Li Wei walked back toward the well. The stone rim had stopped cracking. The air smelled wrong but held its shape.
He knelt and dropped a pebble. It took longer to hit water than it should have. Dimensional depth had thinned, but only here.
The Abyss had been given an exit.
Li Wei stood slowly.y He looked at the road, the granary, the bent angles of the villa. Failures layered atop failures.
A memory surfaced, uninvited.
—Three months earlier.
The magistrate had laughed."Your design wastes stone," he said. Li Wei nodded and submitted it anyway.
The road bent to avoid nothing. The granary sat empty by order of a forged ledger. The irrigation channels were dug by untrained labor with explicit instructions not to correct mistakes.
It had cost less than proper work. That was why it was approved.
—End fragment.
Li Wei's hand tightened around the watch. He had expected weeks before ore first contact. The Abyss had arrived early.
Which meant something else had attracted it.
The child from the road stood near the well now. Her shadow had realigned. She blinked, confused.
Li Wei met her eyes for half a second. There was no corruption left in them.
Good.
He turned east again.
The irrigation channels led away from the villa. They converged not on fields, but on an old quarry abandoned decades ago. A pit no one visited.
The ground there was already wrong.
Li Wei adjusted his path.
[SYSTEM STATUS: UNORTHODOX RESOLUTION CONFIRMED]
He ignored it.
The Abyss had not been contained. It had been redirected.
Infrastructure was not the defense. It was an instruction.
Li Wei reached the edge of the quarry and stopped. Mana pressure spiked again, but this time in a controlled curve held.
Below, something moved in the dark that was larger than a node. Smarter, too.
Li Wei asked the empty air a question that did not belong to anyone present."Who taught you to follow the cheapest path?"
The ground answered by sinking another inch.
The village behind him was tabbedabb... The board in front of him had changed.
And someone else had just revealed their move.