[Shi Ren's Secret Diary (Spirit Watcher)]

  Ashfall Season, Waning Cycle Year 274

  Day 90

  It is Ashfall again.

  The fog rolls back in, yellow-gray and bitter, hanging on the rooftops as if it were a second skin.

  The orchards of the west are dead for good, burned and salted by Heaven's Scar Sect fools in their last fit. The smoke still clings, though. The trees are dead, but the ghosts of the trees have persistent lungs.

  I can hardly glimpse the sun. It's a smeared yolk in the sky these days. Faded and weary. The village is quieter than usual. Kids whisper instead of yelling. Even the dogs are silent.

  They feel it as well.

  Day 109

  Routine is the only raft I have left.

  In the morning, I brew bitterroot tea until it scalds black. I burn dried pear rind for the fumes—they calm my nerves, though they no longer reach the spirit.

  By midday, I cleanse the shrine and mend the red-thread offerings. The spirit-silk wards hang in tatters, only humming faintly when rainwater brushes them.

  Evening calls for vigilance from beasts.

  Day 138

  There is a boy who comes to shrine.

  No name. No mother that anyone has ever known. No aura that awakens when I look at him. The villagers call him Little Rat, but rats at least leave dung and body heat.

  He is something else.

  As thin as the switch on a willow. Eyes that won't blink when they should. I've only ever seen that expression once before—and that was on a field medic during the war who had to open up his own brother's chest to remove a parasitic wasp.

  But even that man wept afterwards.

  This child does not cry.

  I occasionally leave him food. Always wrapped. Always plain. I never give him any signal, but I think he is aware that it is me.

  He never consumes it straight.

  He sniffs at it. Sizes it up. And then he bows. Not like a little child saying thank you.

  More like… an old scholar recognizing a tolerated agreement.

  And then he vanishes.

  Day 189

  The barley has shriveled within its husks, and the soil no longer sings with blessings. Still, the village head came and asked if the old rites might ensure a bountiful harvest.

  I told him what he needed to hear. I always do. It's quicker than informing a man like Bao the Boar that his hands are no longer good for anything, that the world has passed him by.

  He used to be a monster with a cleaver. Nowadays he is a coward who lingers over Yun'er for too long when her mother is not there.

  Her father ought to have survived. Yun'er is sentimental. Still sings for frogs. Still keeps her brother's old flute in her sleeve. Still holds on to village gods.

  I scraped out a charm for her from red shreds of bark and a tarnished jade bead from my wander years. Hung it beneath her window.

  I'll improve it. If I make it through the season.

  Day 214

  The village leader returned home in the evening. Drunk again, smelling of sour millet wine and false piety.

  He poured silver on the altar tray. Not for the spirits. For me.

  A bribe.

  He wants a blessing again. Wants me to declare the barley fields "spirit-kissed," the land blessed. Wants to present this lie to the southern province council at the seasonal bartering moot.

  He is grasping a smoldering ember, feigning it as fire.

  Xinhui is forgotten. The jade routes have shifted. The cultivators have moved on.

  Day 267

  The mice are brazen now. Clever little things. They chewed through my seal rice once again. Now they're sneaking candle stubs into the floorboards, leaving them in a row like sacrifices.

  One of them blinked at me today. I swear it looked..... curious.

  I roughly sketched a pair of simple repulsion glyphs.

  Day 298

  He has opened a beetle today.

  A goldwing—rare, and considered to be lucky. They are said to contain dream-larvae in their stomachs, which give visions to spirit-keepers if they are burned correctly.

  He didn't consume it.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  He removed its wings with a bamboo spine needle. He didn't crush them. He set them on a rock, in a neat row. Clean and exact, like a doctor.

  He then cremeted the beetle body with a clump of dry grass and memorialized its passing with a shattered sundial.

  The moment it curled inward, he laid it to rest beneath the soil.

  Then he murmured, "Even death requires categorization."

  It wasn't cruelty.

  It was taxonomy.

  Day 325

  Da Mo came again.

  He threatened the chief a third time this month. The quotas of harvest are madness, and he knows it. The land cannot yield what the chief has promised. The earth itself is dry under the barley.

  Da Mo wants to decrease religious offerings. Says the spirits don’t eat barley. Tells that it is wasteful.

  He is not wrong exactly. He also vowed to expose the chief's shame. The baby in his wife's womb—everyone knows it is not his. The shame is not that she has committed adultery. The shame is that she thought he wouldn't.

  Meanwhile, the chief begged me—yes, begged me—to name his infant grandson as a Heaven-Favored Seedling.

  The spirits laughed. A dry, faraway laugh, like crows around a long-forgotten corpse.

  Then they fell silent.

  I told him they refused. I did not tell him they found it amusing.

  Day 350

  The boy stole Widow Yuan's two yams. Slipped by her blind dog like fog through reeds. Stole nothing else. Didn't even knock the chipped bowl that sat beside the door.

  He gave one yam to a squirrel.

  The other he entombed under the elm root where the old shrine gate fell three years ago.

  Why?

  He may have eaten both of them. He's clearly starving. But he didn't even bite. Just... buried it. Made a triangle of sticks to mark where it was.

  Day 370

  I asked the spirits about him tonight. And for the very first time in all the years that I've ever witnessed smoke, I was frightened at what I saw.

  The incense burned red. Not orange.

  The incense had burned red. Not orange. Not white. Red, like warning or marrow.

  The spirals reversed direction. And the ash came from the bowl.

  I heard the distant howl of something that had never been human.

  Then silence.

  Complete silence.

  Even the mice in the rafters stopped moving.

  Day 380

  I dreamed of the Earth-Chained One last night.

  I haven't dreamed about him since I was initiated.

  He stood at the foot of the mountain, his neck stretched back, his eyes filled with broken constellations. He replied: "One walks beside fate." Not in. Not against. Beside. That is what he is. The boy.

  He is a fracture. A subtraction.

  Not possessed. Not corrupted. Simply… unmade in the places where others are whole.

  I penned his shadow today. Drawn on paper with chalk dust. It did not have a center.

  Just edges.

  Day 400

  This entry may outlive me, so let it tell the truth straight.

  I was Shi Ren of the Moon-Refining Pavilion—a seer, a guardian of karmic threads. I wore the Virtue Brand of Endurance with pride. But I overstepped the bounds of our teachings.

  A cultivator-child of the Southern Expanse started to demonstrate the signs of a Temporal Reversal Constitution—a phenomenon unheard of since the Empyrean Eras. The Grand Oracle Council prohibited intervention, but I saw in that child the seeds of ruin. He stole years from his own mother.

  I acted too rashly. I bound his strings and closed him up for good, believing I had averted disaster. They accused me of murder, said I was terrified of what I could not control.

  Maybe they were right. The price of my actions was steep: they sealed my Mystical Splendor Mirror, lowered my soul rank, and exiled me—erased from the Pavilion's records, left to roam for seven years. I found refuge in Xinhui, a village abandoned even by the gods, where I now tend to an empty shrine.

  Day 420

  The evening grows cold, and I couldn't help but be drawn to my Mystical Splendor Mirror again. The mirror—bound to my soul for thousand long years—has been sealed ever since the incident. I vowed that I would never touch it again. But the boy. I needed to know what fate he possessed. I exhausted my lifespan and gazed into its surface.

  What I saw was not darkness or hidden truths, but emptiness. A void—a void where destiny was supposed to be written. I realized then that the mirror could not read him. There are only two kinds of people where the Mystical Splendor Mirror cannot reach: True Saints or true Aberrations. He is no Saint.

  Day 442

  Tonight, the ghosts whispered a question I've long avoided, "Will you kill it?"

  I wept bitterly. I am no longer that proud cultivator. I am but a ghost in withered human skin, trembling at the thought of taking a life—even if that life may be a twisted aberration.

  I have written these words in moon-ink, only visible under the soft light of the moon. I have concealed this journal beneath the altar—but I know someone, sometime, will discover it. Maybe she, maybe a student from the old Pavilion, or maybe… him.

  I offer you these words both as warning and confession:

  Don't attempt to control him. Don't attempt to annihilate him.

  He is neither child nor monster. He is a correction of a failure of fate. He is what is created when meaning itself fails.

  Burn it if you will. Bury it deep. But remember: The sky never gave him a place—so he will make one for himself.

  — Shi Ren, Moon-Refining Pavilion, Exiled Spirit-Watcher. Died prior to the first spring thunder. Two thousand twenty four year old. Too old to doubt. Too sane to ignore.

  ...............

  The Xinhui village forest lacked an origin. The forest was still that morning, wrapped in a silver hush of mist. Dawn was only just breaking, casting pale light through the tall spires of ash and cedar. The ground was damp and uneven, clumps of old leaves rotting under moss-covered roots.

  The boy moved silently through the woods. Feet pushed between bare soles and leaves, cool but not wet. Soles were hard enough now not to mind the pebbles or the splinters anymore. The air was thick with the scent of wet bark, fungi, and the distant musk of animal paths. Insects hummed under rocks. The fog curled low, hanging around the base of trees like frayed ghosts too weary to ascend.

  The boy moved quietly. He had ventured further than he normally did today. Further than the others who were brave. But nobody would stop him. Nobody ever did.

  He had no name that people called him out of affection. Not in the village. Not even the old woman who raised him. The boy moved carefully amid brambles, every step thought out. His snares had been laid since morning.

  Five of them. None more, since that was how many strings he'd pulled apart from an old reed mat spread out outside the communal hall two moons ago.

  The rest he'd fashioned out of strips of bark, hair off his own head, and a bit of the pigweed fiber he soaked behind the abandoned Spirit-Watcher's hut.

  He knelt beside the third trap, where he'd laid a dead root-fruit coated with a slice of stinking ratberry and fish scales—foul enough to entice scavengers, acidic enough to cover the bloodied iron filings he'd added to the meat.

  Predators despised the odor. Prey did not. It was for something like a badger. Maybe, if luck smiled, a duskfox whelp. The trigger mechanism—a bent thorn branch lodged under a piece of shale was subtle.

  The trip line, a knotted braided string, was only visible if you knew where to find it. The boy ran his fingers over it once, feeling for tension, then reset the bait gently.

  His hands did not shake. They had finally ceased shaking last winter.

  A soft rustle. His hold on the stone-handled knife at his waist clenched. He held his breath steady. A tree-hare sniffed its way to the bait, twitching ears and low-slung body.

  Hesitated, sniffed. Stepped forward again. The boy did not blink. Its front paw lay on the trigger vine.

  Snap!

  The branch sprang back, the snare entwined, and in an instant, the creature was ripped from the ground. It thrashed, its eyes bulging in horror. The boy leaped ahead. In one swift motion, he placed a hand on the hare's chest and cut its throat. It became lifeless after two seconds.

  The ground filled with blood. He let out a breath. He cleansed the blade with a leaf and muttered, so softly that he could scarcely hear it himself, "Thank you. You'll feed me another day."

  He sat beneath the branch of a bent ash tree, leaning against the trunk with his head. His breath left white clouds in the air. The first spring cold still hadn't left. His belly rumbled, but he pushed it aside. He'd eat later. Tonight.

  His eyes wandered upward through the green canopy. It swayed gently. He glanced at his own hand. Thin. A bit grubby. Scars from thorns that had nipped him the day before.

  Seven years old.

  He didn’t feel like seven. He didn’t feel like anything.

  Just tired.

  "I don't want to live like this."

  He hadn’t spoken aloud, but the thought was so full it almost trembled in his chest.

  "I don't want to die as a weed whose removal nobody ever remembers."

  Nobody from Xinhui claimed him. The old men in the courtyard looked at him like a dog that hadn't yet been killed. The women pulled the children away when he came near. The other child, Yun'er, was pleasant but too soft—too full of light to hold on to him. They called him odd.

  Wrong.

  He called himself alive.

  An elderly widow had found him seven winters before—naked, red, and stiff, left on the riverbank on the night of the frost moon. Not crying. Not wincing. Just watching.

  She said he had the eyes of something that should have already died. She had adopted him. Her own children were years in the ground. Her husband went off to the mines and was never seen again. She had fed him scraps for years, taught him to scavenge, to distinguish poison from edible, rot from ripe.

  But she never called herself his mother. And he never dared to call her so. Even with that, she had been everything. He did not know if she loved him. He did not know what love was. But she gave him food when others did not. Covered him with cloth when it was cold. Let him sleep in her hut, even though the remains of her sons were still buried under the floorboards.

  He remembered her sitting by the fire on wet days, her hands red and stiff from grinding millet by hand. She never spoke unless he was sick. Then she'd sing something strange, neither a lullaby nor a prayer.

  One night, during the third winter, when the wind howled more fiercely than wolves, he had asked her why she received him. She'd stopped.

  For just a second.

  And she stated, "Because you were crying. And someone had to stop it."

  That was it. No grand explanation. No divine guidance. Only quiet necessity.

  He hadn't cried since.

  "Was I a burden to her?"

  "Did I remind her of the lost son?"

  "Did she love me at all, or did I just take a place in her life?"

  He would never know. She died without answers. She was pounding rice in the afternoon, sleeves rolled, braid pinned back with reed cord. She did not wake up the following morning. Her body was cold, jaw clenched, and eyes wide open.

  He stayed beside her all day. He lit the fire. He boiled the water. Did not complain once. He didn't know how to keep her alive. He didn't know what was killing her.

  He just continued to hold her hand until it grew cold. Later that night, he dug the grave manually and buried her beneath the jujube tree in the backyard. The earth was cold and firm. His fingers had been bleeding through the frost.

  The village sent no priest. No incense. No rite. Just an old woman who left rice cakes on the doorstep and didn’t look him in the eye.

  The jujube tree never bore fruit again.

  They didn't hate him.

  They just never noticed him. The village children never played with him. Not openly.

  One day, there was a girl named Yun'er who had tied a ribbon in place in his hair. But the following day, her uncle, one of the older men, prohibited her from speaking to him anymore. He didn't know why. Perhaps because he had no name. No known blood. No father in the fields or mother in the shrines.

  Just a ghost child, taken in by another ghost. They glared at him. Whispered. Once, an old man grumbled, "Ghost-thing," as he walked by.

  He didn't even protest. Just kept going. What would he say? He didn't know what he was. Only what he wasn't. But he recalled the sting of it. The loneliness that suffocated him like wet linen.