The Barren Vale Reclamation Project began not with a fanfare, but with the dry, choking cough of dust. Fifteen men, a mix of the hopeful and the hopeless, stood at the edge of the vast, sun-blasted bowl under a sky bleached of colour. Their tools—rough-hewn picks, heavy mauls, and baskets woven from willow—seemed like toys against the scale of the task.
Lin Yan stood before them on a flat rock, Zhao He a grim statue at his side. He had divided them into three crews, each with a Lin brother or Zhao He at its head. There were no inspiring speeches left. The land itself was the argument.
"Crew One," he said, his voice cutting through the sighing wind. "You are the water hunters. Your task: follow the dry bed. Map it. Find every dip, every rock shelf where water might pool. Then, under Lin Zhu, you will build. Not dams, not yet. Wecks. Small walls of stone and brush to slow the runoff, to trap silt, to whisper to the water to stay awhile." He pointed to the piles of gathered scrub and the quarry site. "That is your arsenal."
"Crew Two. You are the earth makers." He gestured to the vast, empty flats. "Your enemy is this crust. You will break it. Not to plant, but to breathe. You will dig pits for compost. You will gather every scrap of organic matter—the dead scrub, the leaves that blow in, the manure from the camp mules. You will mix it with crushed rock and what little soil we can find. You will not see a green shoot for months. You are building the womb where the green will grow. Lin Tie leads you."
"Crew Three. Scouts and suppliers. With Zhao He, you will walk the hills. You will find the seeps, map the springs, identify any patches of living soil or hardy plants we can transplant. You will also be our line to the home ranch, bringing supplies, moving the compost we produce there."
It was a strategy of siege. They would surround the barrenness with patience, choke it with organic matter, and infiltrate it with captured water.
The first month was pure, unrelenting hardship. The sun was a hammer. The dust infiltrated everything—food, clothes, lungs. The work was brutally physical. Crew Two's picks rang against the iron-hard crust, often yielding mere inches of progress. The compost pits they dug seemed like graves in the vastness. Crew One's first wecks, crude assemblages of stone and bundled brush, looked laughably small in the wide riverbed. The first rainless thunderstorm sent a terrifying wall of water and debris crashing down the dry channel, sweeping half of them away as if they were twigs.
Morale, fragile to begin with, frayed. Two men quit, walking back to the county in the night. Others grumbled, their movements sluggish with despair.
Lin Yan didn't preach. He worked. He spent his days with Crew Two, his own pick rising and falling, his hands blistering and callusing anew. He showed them how to layer the compost pits—brown, green, mineral, manure—turning them into slow-burning underground fires of fertility. At night, by the flickering campfire, he pointed to the stars and spoke not of the valley's emptiness, but of its geometry—where the water would flow, where the terraces would someday hold soil, how the healed land would provide for their children.
Zhao He, meanwhile, worked a different kind of magic with Crew Three. He taught them to read the land's subtle language: the way certain rocks retained coolness, hinting at water below; the types of birds that gathered at dusk, indicating a hidden seep; the stubborn, grey-green lichens that were the first conquerors of stone. He found a few patches of a tough, deep-rooted fern clinging to shaded northern cracks. They carefully transplanted these pioneers near their developing seeps, the first voluntary residents of their new world.
Back at the home ranch, the rhythm adjusted. The heart of the operation was now split. Wang Shi and the girls, with Lao Li's steady help, managed the daily chores—the cattle, the horses, the chickens, the ever-crucial hay production. The home ranch was the fortress, the secure base supplying food, tools, and the constant, precious stream of nutrient-rich compost hauled down to the vale in slow, creaking carts. It was a delicate, two-front existence.
One afternoon, a familiar, sleek carriage arrived at the home ranch. Undersecretary Wen emerged, his fine robes looking out of place amid the dirt and animals. He had come, he said, for a "progress update on the satellite reclamation project."
Wang Shi, wiping her hands on her apron, received him with calm grace. She did not try to be what she was not. She showed him the compost operation, the healthy herds, the records of hay yields. "My sons and Zhao He are in the vale," she said. "The work is hard. The land is… reluctant. But they are persistent men."
Wen's expression was inscrutable. "Persistence is a virtue. But the magistrate's reports require results. Measurable results."
"What is the measure of a stone moved?" Wang Shi asked, her voice gentle but firm. "Of a water drop saved? The land keeps its own time, Undersecretary. We are learning its language. It is a slow conversation."
Wen left, seemingly unsatisfied, but he had seen the order and productivity of the home base. The fortress was holding.
In the vale, the breakthrough came not from a grand effort, but from a small, accumulated truth. After the second, less destructive rainstorm, the men woke to find their remaining wecks had done their job. Behind each small barrier, a shallow pool of muddy water lay, glittering in the dawn light. It was not much. But it was water that had not vanished. It seeped slowly into the thirsty ground.
A week later, Lin Yan, checking one of the first and largest compost pits, found a startling sight. The layered material, cooked by the sun and activated by the scant moisture they'd added, had sunk and transformed. It was no longer a pile of trash and manure; it was a dark, crumbly, sweet-smelling humus. He called the men over. He took a handful and let it sift through his fingers.
"This," he said, his voice thick with emotion, "is the first victory. This is the ghost of future soil."
They began the painstaking process of spreading this precious black gold onto the broken crust of the flats, a thin, almost insulting layer. It felt like sprinkling pepper on a stone plate. But it was a start.
The true turning point was born of exploration. Zhao He's scouting crew, pushing higher into the skeletal hills than they had before, found a canyon. It was hidden, its entrance choked with boulders. Inside, the air was cooler. And there, fed by a perennial spring they hadn't detected from below, was a small, secret meadow. The grass was sparse but real, a variety so hardy it made their Tsagaan Burgas look pampered. More importantly, the soil here, protected from the wind and sun, was a thin, precious layer of actual earth over the rock.
"We don't take the grass," Zhao He decreed. "We take the seed." They spent days carefully collecting the tiny, hard seeds from the mature stalks.
That night, around the campfire, Lin Yan had an idea. "We don't just spread the compost. We make seed bombs." He showed them how to mix the precious compost with clay from the riverbank and water, form it into fist-sized balls, and embed them with a few seeds of the canyon grass, the hardy clover they'd brought from home, and a single seed of the white feather grass. "We let the sun harden them. Then, before the next rain, we spread them. The clay shell protects them from birds and wind. The rain melts the clay, the compost feeds the seed, and the seed… does what it knows how to do."
It was a tiny act of faith, weaponized.
They made hundreds of these rough, earthy marbles. As the sky darkened with the promise of the season's first genuine, soaking rain, the men fanned out across the treated flats and gently tossed the seed bombs, letting them roll and settle into the cracks and hollows of the broken ground.
Then they waited. The rain came, a steady, drumming downpour that lasted two days. The vale became a lake of mud. The wecks in the river channel sang with the sound of captured water. The men huddled in the barracks, listening.
When the clouds cleared and the sun returned, they emerged into a world washed clean. For days, there was no change. The mud dried to a new, harder crust. Despair began to creep back.
Then, a morning came when one of the younger workers, on his way to the quarry, stopped and knelt. He called out, his voice cracking with disbelief.
A fine, almost invisible fuzz of green had appeared in a sheltered dip near one of the seeps. Not the grey-green of the old scrub. A tender, defiant, luminous green. A few days later, more appeared, wherever a seed bomb had landed in a favourable spot. Tiny, brave spears of life, pushing through the cracked mud, fed by their hidden core of compost.
It wasn't a pasture. It was a miracle measured in square inches. But it was alive. It was green where only dust and stone had been.
The men gathered around each tiny patch as if around a newborn. The hardened, cynical expressions on some faces softened. They had not just moved stone. They had conjured life. The siege was working. The barrenness was yielding, micron by micron.
When Lin Yan rode back to the home ranch to report, he carried a small, mud-caked clay pot. In it, growing in a mix of vale compost and gravel, were three blades of the new grass. He presented it to his family.
Wang Shi touched the blades with a reverence usually reserved for ancestors. Lin Dahu's eyes grew damp. "You did it," he whispered.
"We did it," Lin Yan corrected, the collective effort solid in his heart. "The vale is still stone. It will be stone for years. But now… now it has a heartbeat."
The news, when it filtered back to the magistrate and to Undersecretary Wen, was met with quiet interest. A green shoot was not a tax revenue. But it was a symbol. It was a narrative of success they could report. The Lin family was not just digging holes; they were performing a kind of alchemy.
Standing once more on the rim of the valley, Lin Yan looked down at the tiny, scattered emeralds of life against the vast grey canvas. The war was far from over. The labour would be endless. But the first, most important battle—the battle against the very idea of barrenness—had been won. The land had whispered back. And in that whisper, he heard the future: the lowing of Blackcloud cattle on rich pasture, the thunder of hardy horses, the deep, quiet satisfaction of a promise wrested not from an empire, but from the stubborn, beautiful heart of the earth itself. The siege would continue, but now, they fought with hope as their ally.