Old Wei saw them first.
He was in the northern terraces with his hands in mud, working a stone back into the irrigation channel where it had shifted overnight. The morning was cold and his fingers were stiff and the stone would not sit right. He had been farming this terrace for forty years and the stones moved every autumn and every autumn he pushed them back and every autumn his knees hurt worse than the year before while he did it.
He looked up because the light changed. Nine figures on the road below, moving at a steady pace through the valley. Robes. Swords. The shimmer around the one in front that meant cultivator, which meant trouble, which meant get out of the way and say nothing and hope they passed through.
Old Wei's hands shook. They always shook when cultivators came. He pressed them flat against the wet earth and held them there until the shaking stopped. Then he stood, picked up his hoe, and walked toward the village. Not fast. Not slow. The pace of a man who has learned that running attracts attention.
...
Shen Qing smelled the village before he saw it properly. Wood smoke and rice steam and the thick green smell of terraced paddies in late autumn, the water in the fields turning cold as the season closed. Underneath that, something else. A warmth in the air that did not match the altitude or the weather. He had been on the road for three weeks and his nose was tuned to landscape by now. This warmth was wrong. Not dangerous-wrong. Just wrong.
The village gate was two wooden posts and a crossbeam with faded paint. Decorative. A child could have kicked it down. No formation barriers, no detection arrays, no defensive architecture of any kind. A village of roughly two hundred people with no protection besides the mountains on either side.
"Announce us," he said to Yun Xiao.
She did, with the crisp formality of someone who had been promoted three months ago and still believed protocol mattered. She believed it the way new cultivators believe in most things: completely, loudly, for about a year. Shen Qing had been that person once. He did not miss it.
The villagers gathered. They gathered the way all villagers gathered when cultivators arrived: with their bodies facing forward and their weight on their back foot. Ready to bow. Ready to run. The calculation happened behind their eyes and Shen Qing had seen it enough times to recognize it and to hate recognizing it.
But something was off. The weight was wrong. These people were not afraid enough.
A woman with a baby on her hip watched from the well with an expression that was closer to curiosity than fear. Three old men at a tile game under a canopy looked up, looked at the swords, and went back to their tiles. A child, maybe ten years old, was staring at Yun Xiao's sword with his mouth open and his body leaning forward instead of away.
Grandmother Liu came through the crowd.
She was late seventies, thin, straight-backed, with the kind of face that could cut paper. She looked at Shen Qing's robes and his weapons and the eight cultivators behind him, and she processed all of it with the speed of someone who had been assessing strangers for longer than most of his team had been alive.
"Welcome," she said. "You've come a long way for a village with nothing worth coming for."
There was a barb in that. Shen Qing noted it and filed it. A village elder who was not afraid of cultivators was either very stupid or very protected. Grandmother Liu did not look stupid.
"We've detected an anomalous spiritual reading in this area," he said. "We need to investigate the source. Your cooperation would be appreciated."
"Spiritual reading." She tasted the words. "Under our village?"
"Somewhere near. We're not certain yet."
She looked at him for a long time. She was deciding something. Whatever she decided, she kept it behind her eyes.
"You can stay," she said. "The house at the eastern end is empty since Widow Fang passed. There's rice and vegetables for your people." She paused. "The well water's warm. It's always warm. Some old blessing, my grandmother said. Hers said the same."
She turned and walked. Shen Qing followed, and as he followed he thought: *warm well water, no locks on doors, children who are not afraid of swords. What is this place?*
...
The well sat at the center of the village like a stone heart.
Shen Qing circled it twice before he touched it. Round, well-built, the stones fitted without mortar and worn smooth by generations of hands. The water inside was clear and he could see his reflection and the sky and about ten feet of stone shaft below the surface. After that: dark.
He placed his palm flat on the rim and sent a probe downward. Standard Azure Wind sensing technique, the kind he'd done a thousand times in a dozen villages. The probe slid through stone and packed earth and old rock layers, mapping as it went.
At forty feet, the probe vanished.
Not reflected. Not disrupted. It entered a space below and did not come back. Like lowering a rope into a hole and feeling it go slack. Whatever was down there swallowed spiritual energy the way dark water swallows light.
The hair on his arms stood up.
He withdrew, adjusted his technique, tried again. Same result. A third time, with a different frequency. Same. The probe went in and the probe did not return and the well sat there in the afternoon light looking exactly like every other village well he had ever seen, warm and calm and quietly impossible.
He could feel something, though. Below the silence. A vibration, deep and steady, the kind of sound that lives below hearing. It came up through the stone rim and into his palm and it felt old. Not old the way buildings are old or the way formations are old. Old the way geology is old. Old the way the mountains were old. Something down there had been vibrating for so long that the vibration had become part of the landscape, indistinguishable from the hum of the earth itself.
"Jiang He. Shu Yan. I need you here."
Shu Yan arrived with her kit already open. She was the team's formation analyst, sharp-eyed, quick-handed, perpetually irritated by formations that didn't match the academy textbooks. She lowered a sensing talisman into the well on a silk cord and watched it with the focused expression of a woman who expected to be annoyed.
The talisman swung. Then it spun. Then it stopped dead, pointing straight down, rigid on its cord.
Shu Yan's expression changed.
"There's a formation," she said. "Massive. Layered. I can resolve at least twelve layers and there are more below that. The formation language is not Azure Wind. It's not any of the three major schools." She pulled the talisman up and looked at it. The jade was warm. It should not have been warm. "The oldest formation I've ever analyzed was eight hundred years old and I could read it. This is older than that by a margin that makes me uncomfortable to guess at."
"How much older?"
"I don't know. A lot. The scale is wrong for anything in our records." She looked at the well the way she looked at things she did not understand, which was with controlled anger. "This thing has been sitting under a farming village for longer than any formation school has existed. And nobody has ever noticed."
Jiang He was standing three feet back, watching the talisman. "What's it doing? The formation. What's it for?"
"I don't know yet," Shu Yan said. "But whatever is below that well, the formation is keeping it there."
The three of them stood around the rim and looked down into the dark water. The water was warm. The sky reflected in it. Below the reflection, nothing.
Shen Qing wrote the report that night by lamplight, and as he wrote he kept glancing at the window, at the village square where the well sat with its warm water and its twelve-layer formation and its impossible depth, and he thought about his daughter. She was nine. She was at the sect compound with his wife. She liked to count things.
He did not know why he thought about her. He sent the report and waited for the reply and fell asleep at the desk.
...
Evening came. It came with the smell of rice and mushroom stew and the sound of two hundred people settling into the rhythms that two hundred people develop when they have eaten together every evening for their entire lives.
Shen Qing sat at the communal meal and ate and watched.
Uncle Bao found him. Uncle Bao found everyone. He was barrel-chested and sunburnt, with hands the size of rice paddles and a voice that carried across the square like a bell. He sat down next to Shen Qing without asking and without pause said:
"So you're cultivators. Let me tell you about the fish."
Grandmother Liu, across the square, closed her eyes.
The fish. It was a river fish. Uncle Bao had caught it last spring. Or last autumn. The season changed depending on which version you were hearing. The fish started the size of his forearm, silver-green, fast in the water. By the second telling it was the size of a dog, dark-scaled, with teeth. His hands moved further apart. By the third telling the fish was as long as a man and it had pulled his boat upstream for a quarter mile and he had held on because his father told him when the river gives you something you hold on.
"Did you catch it?" Deng Liang asked, rice on her chin.
"Catch it?" Uncle Bao looked offended. "It's still in the river. I'm waiting for it to get bigger."
Nobody corrected him. Nobody said the fish was smaller last week. They had heard this story a hundred times and the details drifted every telling and they listened with faces that said they already knew every word and wanted to hear them again anyway. A girl of about twelve was mouthing along to the part about the teeth.
Shen Qing found himself almost smiling. He stopped because smiling on a mission made you careless.
Across the square, his eyes found the girl.
She sat against the wall of the communal hall with a bowl in her hands, eating slowly, watching. Female, early twenties, plain clothes, dark hair tied back. She sat the way some people sit when they have decided that a particular spot belongs to them and the concept of moving from it has not occurred to them. She had been there since the meal began. She had been in roughly the same spot when Shen Qing arrived that morning. He was not sure she had moved.
She was not watching him. She was watching the well. He happened to be between her and it.
Grandmother Liu walked to her and set an extra portion of rice on the ground beside her. The old woman did this without speaking, without pausing, without looking at the girl's face. She set it down the way you set down something you set down every day. Routine. The girl looked at the rice. Her hands stopped moving. Something shifted in her face. Not expression. Something under expression. She picked up the portion and ate it.
A child sprinted past, full tilt, bare feet slapping stone. He caught his toe on an uneven flagstone and pitched forward. The girl's right hand shot out and caught his wrist. She caught him clean, mid-fall, with a speed and precision that made Shen Qing's breath catch. She steadied the boy, released him, and returned her hand to her lap without looking up. The boy ran on. The whole thing took less than a second.
Shen Qing had been a Foundation Establishment cultivator for fourteen years. He had trained with body-refinement specialists. The reflexes that girl had just displayed were faster than half his team could manage. In a mortal village girl with no spiritual training, no cultivation exposure, no conceivable reason for that kind of neuromuscular speed, it was impossible.
He watched her for a long time. She ate her rice. She watched the well. She did not move.
He added her to the report in his head, under the heading *anomalies*, beside the warm water and the unlocked doors and the children who stared at swords instead of running from them, and he went to bed with the feeling that he had walked into a room where the furniture was arranged in a pattern he could almost recognize but not quite, and the pattern meant something, and he was not going to like what it meant.