Wrapping cracked ribs with strips of linen while your hands are shaking is a particular kind of misery that Lin Feng was becoming an expert in.
His shed had no mirror, which was probably a mercy. He worked by feel, pulling the cloth tight across his left side where the grinding ache lived, looping under his arm, pulling again. Too tight and he couldn't breathe properly. Too loose and every step sent a bolt of white through his vision. He found the middle ground on his fourth attempt, knotted the ends, and sat still for a moment with his eyes closed.
His forearm he'd already wrapped. The claw marks on his chest were the problem: four parallel lines, scabbed but angry, running from his right collarbone to his lower ribs. They looked like someone had taken a rake to him. They also burned with a low, itching heat that normal wounds didn't produce, and he suspected the corruption in the wolf's claws had left something behind.
He pulled his shirt on. Two layers, the inner one to absorb whatever the claw marks were still seeping, the outer one to hide the bulk of the wrappings. His burned hand he couldn't do much about. The palm was blistered, the skin peeled back in a way that made gripping anything an exercise in creative profanity.
Water bucket. Yoke.
The yoke settled across his shoulders and the wrappings immediately shifted. He gritted his teeth and lifted.
Fill. Lift. Walk.
---
The hunters gathered at Han's lean-to every morning before dawn.
Clearwater's hunting party was five men: Han, his brother Han Bao, two cousins from the Wang family, and Zhang Wei, the youngest by a decade. They carried spears with iron tips, bows that had been restrung so many times the wood was more glue than grain, and the calm competence of people who'd been killing things in the wilderness since before Lin Feng could walk. Which, given his condition, was not actually that long ago.
Lin Feng arrived while they were oiling bowstrings. His approach drew the kind of looks he was used to, brief and dismissive, already turning away before he'd fully registered.
"Han." Lin Feng stopped at the edge of the group. "I need to talk to you."
Han looked up. Forty-four years old, face like a piece of leather that had been folded too many times, with a scar across his left cheek from a boar tusk fifteen years ago. He was not unkind, but he had the practical economy of a man who measured everything against the question *is this useful to me right now?*
"Carrying water, aren't you? What do you need?"
"I found tracks. In the gorge. The west gorge, past the north ridge."
"The gorge." Han's hands didn't stop their work on the bowstring. "That's wilderness. Past our boundary markers."
"The tracks are past the markers. But they're moving this way."
"What kind of tracks?"
"Three-toed. Deep. Wider than my hand. Claw marks in the earth longer than my thumb."
Han's hands paused. Not much, a hitch in the rhythm. He looked at Lin Feng more carefully.
"You're describing something bigger than a wolf."
"Bigger than any wolf I've seen the hunting party bring back. And the pattern was wrong. Not straight-line movement. Circling. Coming back to the same spots."
"What were you doing out past the boundary markers?"
The question he'd known was coming. Lin Feng had his answer ready; he'd rehearsed it on the walk over, testing it for holes.
"Couldn't sleep. My knee was bad. Sometimes walking helps. I went further than I meant to."
"In the dark? Past the markers? Into the gorge?" Han set down his bow. "Lin Feng. Even for someone who doesn't have your... condition, that's stupid. The wilderness kills people. You know this."
"I know. That's why I'm telling you about the tracks."
Han Bao leaned forward. The elder Han's younger brother, broader, louder, with none of Han's careful restraint. "The cripple goes wandering in the gorge at night and finds scary footprints. We're supposed to drop everything for this?"
"I'm not asking you to drop anything. I'm asking you to check."
"Check what? The gorge is a three-hour round trip. You want us to spend half a day verifying that Lin Feng saw a big rock and thought it was a track?"
"They're not rocks."
"You can barely carry a water bucket. You're going to tell us what animal tracks look like?"
Lin Feng's jaw tightened. In the vision, he'd stood before the Jade Emperor. He'd spoken to gods and made them listen. Here, a man who'd never left this valley was dismissing him because he carried water for a living.
"The tracks are real. Something is moving toward the village from the west, and it's not a normal predator."
"Not a normal predator." Han Bao's face split into a grin. "What, then? A spirit beast? One of the old stories?" He nudged one of the Wang cousins. "Lin Feng's found a spirit beast in the gorge. Someone alert the emperor."
Laughter. The Wang cousins joined in. Even Han allowed himself a thin smile.
"Lin Feng." Han's voice was not cruel, but it was final. "I appreciate that you're concerned. But we've patrolled the north ridge for weeks. We've seen tracks, wolf, bear, the usual. Nothing unusual. Nothing like what you're describing."
"The north ridge isn't the gorge. The gorge isā"
"Past our territory. Where we don't patrol because nothing lives there worth hunting and nothing threatens us from that direction." Han picked up his bow. "If something were moving toward the village, we'd have seen signs on the ridge first. We haven't. Whatever you saw in the gorge was probably a bear."
"Bears don't have three toes."
"Bears leave prints that can look like three toes depending on the ground." Han slung the bow over his shoulder. "Go carry your water, Lin Feng. Let us handle the hunting."
He turned away. The others followed. Conversation over.
Lin Feng stood at the edge of the empty lean-to. His ribs ached, and the claw marks on his chest burned with their slow, wrong heat.
"Scary footprints." Liu Chen's voice. The miller's son had been leaning against his father's mill during the entire exchange, close enough to hear everything. He pushed off the wall, flour dusting his shoulders. "Maybe the scary footprints attacked you, too? That how you got those scrapes?"
Lin Feng walked away. Not because he wanted to. Because hitting Liu Chen would require using his burned hand, and his burned hand had reached the limit of what it could do for the morning.
---
"Lin Feng."
He stopped. Turned.
Zhang Wei stood at the corner of the mill, half in shadow. He was lean where the other hunters were thick, with a face that never seemed to commit to an expression. Watchful without being wary. Attentive without being intense. He had his bow slung low across his back and a hunting knife at his belt that he kept sharper than any tool in the village.
He'd said nothing during the exchange with Han. Lin Feng had barely registered his presence.
"Walk with me."
They walked in silence to the stream, away from the mill and the houses. Zhang Wei said nothing until they were out of earshot of anyone.
"The north ridge. Two days ago." He spoke the way he did everything, economically, each word chosen for function. "I found tracks."
Lin Feng waited.
"Not three-toed. Four. But deeper than they should've been. Something heavy, moving fast, in a straight line from the northwest. Heading southeast." He paused. "Toward the gorge."
"You didn't tell Han?"
"I told Han. He said it was a large boar. I said boars don't run in straight lines for half a mile. He said I was young and would learn to read tracks better." Zhang Wei's face didn't change, but something in the set of his shoulders suggested he'd filed that response in a very specific drawer. "I tracked the prints for another hundred yards. Then they disappeared."
"Disappeared?"
"Stopped. In the middle of open ground with no cover. One stride there, the next stride gone." Zhang Wei looked at him sideways. "Boars don't disappear, Lin Feng."
"No."
"Show me the gorge tracks."
"When?"
"Tomorrow. Dawn. I'm on south patrol rotation today but I'm free in the morning." Zhang Wei glanced back toward the village. "Don't tell anyone. Han won't like me spending time on this, and Liu Chen will make it into a joke."
"It's not a joke."
"I know." His eyes dropped to Lin Feng's arm, the one wrapped under his sleeve, the bulge of linen visible at the cuff. "Those aren't walking scrapes."
Lin Feng said nothing.
"Tomorrow. Dawn. I'll meet you at the north path marker." Zhang Wei turned to go, then stopped. "If you're wasting my time, I'll know it within five minutes of seeing the ground. And I won't come a second time."
"You won't need to."
Zhang Wei left. Lin Feng watched him go, a young man walking with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd spent his life learning to move through dangerous ground without making noise. Not an ally. Not yet. Just a person who'd seen something that didn't fit the world he knew and was curious enough to follow it.
It was more than Lin Feng had expected.
---
The village meeting happened at sundown, in the open space between Elder Zhao's house and the communting well.
Thirty-odd people gathered, not everyone, but enough. The farmers who'd lost goats. The hunters who'd been patrolling. The tradespeople who had opinions about everything regardless of their expertise.
Elder Zhao stood on his porch steps, the closest thing Clearwater had to a dais.
"Farmer Luo," he said. "Tell them."
Luo was a thin man with the weathered look of someone who spent his days in the paddies. He wrung his hands while he spoke, a habit that predated the current crisis.
"Six goats. From the western pasture. Gone three days now."
"Gone how?" someone called.
"Just gone. I penned them at dusk like always. Morning, the gate was still latched, latched and barred from the outside, like I left it. No breaks in the fence. No blood. No fur. No tracks that I could find." He wrung harder. "Six goats don't just vanish."
"They dug under the fence," Liu Chen's father said. The miller was a heavyset man who'd inherited his size from the same stock that produced his son. "Goats dig. Everyone knows this."
"Mine don't. I buried the fence posts two feet deep after last summer. Nothing's getting under those."
"Over, then."
"Over a six-foot fence? All six of them? Without leaving a single track on the other side?"
The crowd murmured. Liu Chen's father shrugged, the gesture of a man for whom problems that didn't involve grain milling were abstract curiosities.
"Han." Elder Zhao turned to the hunting party leader. "Your assessment."
Han stepped forward. Measured. Calm. The village relied on him for this, the practical evaluation of danger, stripped of fear and speculation.
"We've been patrolling the ridges for two weeks. Normal animal activity. Wolf signs on the north ridge, but nothing in unusual numbers. Bear tracks near the eastern stream, old. Nothing that suggests an organized predator moving into our territory."
"And the missing goats?"
"Could be anything. A cat from the mountains. A pack of dogs gone feral; it happens in bad years. I'll extend patrols to the western pastures starting tomorrow."
"That's not enough." Luo's voice had risen. "Six goats, Han. That's a season's breeding stock. If whatever took them comes backā"
"Then we'll find it and kill it. That's what the hunting party does."
"What if it's not something the hunting party can kill?"
Silence. The kind that falls when someone says the thing everyone's thinking but nobody wants to voice.
"Meaning what?" Han's tone hardened.
"Meaningā" Luo glanced around. "My grandmother used to talk about the old days. Before the gods left. There were beasts that weren't natural. Things that came from the deep wilderness, touched by powers we don't understand anymore. Things thatā"
"Your grandmother told stories to scare children." Liu Chen's father again, dismissive, certain. "There's no such thing as spirit beasts. The gods have been gone for ten thousand years. Whatever is taking goats, it bleeds and it dies like anything else."
More murmuring. Some agreement. Some uneasy shifting.
Lin Feng stood at the back of the crowd and said nothing.
He knew what had taken the goats. Knew it with the certainty of someone who'd been clawed by one of those unnatural things two nights ago. The missing goats hadn't been killed; they'd been consumed. Devoured whole, the way corrupted beasts devoured anything that carried traces of life energy. No blood because the blood was taken with everything else. No bones because the bones went too. No tracks because a corrupted beast that had just fed on six animals' worth of life force could move in ways that didn't leave normal prints.
He knew. And he couldn't say a word. Because "I found a cave with a ten-thousand-year-old ghost who told me about corrupted beasts" would end with him tied to a post while the village decided whether he was mad, cursed, or both.
Elder Zhao wrapped the meeting with practical measures. Extended patrols. Double-penning livestock at night. No one outside after dark alone. The usual responses to the usual threats.
None of which would matter against what was actually coming.
---
The cave was colder that night.
Lin Feng noticed it as he descended the shaft. The air temperature had dropped, and the faint glow of the inscriptions seemed dimmer, as if the energy that sustained them was being drawn elsewhere.
"Three," Old Ghost said before Lin Feng's feet touched the floor.
"Three what?"
"Corrupted presences. In the wilderness surrounding this gorge. The wolf you encountered has returned to the outer edge, perhaps half a mile east. A second presence, larger, heavier, likely a corrupted bear or mountain cat, approached from the northwest during the day. It stopped approximately a mile from the gorge entrance."
"And the third?"
The ghost's form flickered. Hard. Nearly invisible for a full second before resolidifying.
"Further out. The man I was would have been cautious around that one."
"What does that mean?"
"It means the third presence is not like the other two. The wolf and the second beast are drawn by instinct, simple corruption responding to simple stimulus. The third is..." The ghost trailed off. His form went translucent at the edges. "Different. More directed. Less random. The man I was encountered corrupted beasts throughout his journey, and most were animals driven mad by power they could not control. But some, a rare few, developed a kind of intelligence from the corruption. Cunning. The ability to plan rather than merely react."
"An intelligent corrupted beast."
"Do you understand why that distinction matters? An animal follows instinct. It can be trapped, misdirected, frightened. A creature with intelligence adapts to traps. Anticipates misdirection. Does not frighten easily."
Lin Feng sat against the inscription wall. His ribs protested the position, and he adjusted until the pain settled to its baseline. His burned hand had started peeling, new skin forming underneath the blisters, pink and tender. The resonance healing worked. Slowly. But it worked.
"They're not just coming for the cave," he said. "The goats. Farmer Luo's goats were taken three days ago. From inside a latched pen."
Old Ghost was quiet.
"They're spreading. Looking for food. Energy. Whatever corrupted beasts feed on." Lin Feng stared at the inscriptions. He'd learned nine characters in four nights. At this rate, he'd finish the first wall in about three years. "If they get close enough to the village, people will die."
"Yes."
"And I can't warn anyone because they'll think I'm insane."
"Also yes."
"And I can't fight them because I'm a cripple with a stick and some lamp oil."
"Substantially yes."
"And if I abandon the cave, they'll still converge here, consume the residual energy, and probably move to the village afterward anyway. So leaving doesn't protect anyone."
The ghost said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
Lin Feng pressed his palm to the inscription wall. The vibration came faster now, more readily, as if his channels were learning to respond. He held it, feeling the buzz move through his arm and into his chest.
"The man I was," Old Ghost said, and his voice had changed. Quieter. More present. "The man I was built this sanctum to endure. Ten thousand years of protection. Formations that masked the energy signature from every corrupted beast on the continent. Inscriptions that preserved knowledge through eras of devastation. A scripture that contained the entirety of the Devourer's Path."
He paused.
"And now it unravels. Because a crippled boy fell into a hole and touched a corpse."
"I didn't ask for this."
"No. You did not. And the man I was did not ask for his path either. It was given to him by circumstance, by desperation, by the particular cruelty of a universe that creates potential and then places it in the most inconvenient containers."
Old Ghost drifted to his corpse. Hovered there, studying the bones that had once been his body, the scroll case clutched in fingers that would never move again.
"This sanctum is all that remains of who the man I was became. Every lesson he learned. Every technique he mastered. Every secret he pried from the universe's clenched fist. If the corrupted beasts reach this chamber, they will devour the residual energy. The inscriptions will go dark. The Scripture's protective formations will fail." His voice dropped to something barely audible. "And the man I was will have truly died."
Lin Feng watched the ghost hover over its own remains. For the first time, he saw something beneath the clinical detachment and archaic questions. Old Ghost wasn't just a teacher. He wasn't just a spirit bound to old bones. He was a person who had spent centuries building something, who had died protecting it, and who had spent ten thousand years watching it slowly decay.
And now the decay was accelerating. Because of Lin Feng.
"I'll protect the cave," he said.
"With what?"
"I don't know yet." He pressed harder against the wall. The vibration deepened. "But I'll figure it out."
"That is not a plan. That is a sentiment."
"It's what I have." Lin Feng looked at the ghost. "You said my channels are unique. That nobody else's have responded to the inscriptions the way mine do. That the Scripture's defenses recognized something in me. So use that. Teach me faster. Not the full path; I know I'm not ready for that. But something. Anything that gives me an edge against corrupted beasts."
"The first practical application of the Devourer's awareness does not come until the seventy-third inscription set. You have learned nine characters."
"Then teach me the relevant ones first. Skip ahead."
"Skipping ahead in the Devourer's preparations is what killed five of the seven who came before you."
"Not skipping ahead is what will kill me this week."
The ghost's form held steady. Solid. More present than Lin Feng had seen him since the vision.
"There is a technique," Old Ghost said. "Not from the Scripture. From before the Scripture. A sensing ability that the man I was developed during his years as a cultivator, before he found the Devourer's Path. It requires no essence. No cultivation. Only awareness and functionalā" He stopped. "It requires functional channels."
"Which I don't have."
"Which you do not have in the conventional sense. But your channels respond to inscription energy. If that response can be trained, directed, refined..." The ghost trailed off. When he came back, his voice was different. Harder. Decided. "We would need to accelerate your resonance work. Extend your contact time with the inscriptions from hours to days. The pain will be significant. The risk of damaging your already damaged channels is real."
"What does the technique do?"
"It allows you to sense living energy. To feel the presence of beasts, their direction, their approximate strength, their state of corruption. The man I was used it to track prey across continents. You would use it to not die in a gorge."
"When do we start?"
"Now." Old Ghost moved to the far wall, a section of inscriptions Lin Feng hadn't examined yet. "Remove your shirt. You will need maximum contact with the inscription surface. And understand: what I am about to teach you was designed for a seventh-stage cultivator with three centuries of experience. Adapting it for a crippled teenager with channels that should not work will be, at best, an improvisation."
Lin Feng pulled his shirt over his head, gasping as the movement pulled at his ribs and the claw marks on his chest. The cave's cold air bit into his bare skin.
He pressed his back against the inscription wall.
Every shattered meridian in his body lit up at once.
The pain was extraordinary. Not the gentle vibration of touching a single character. This was full-body contact with dozens of inscriptions simultaneously, each one activating a different segment of his channel network, each one demanding resonance that his broken pathways could barely provide.
He screamed. Cut it short. Bit down until his molars ground.
"Hold," Old Ghost said. "Through the pain, hold."
Lin Feng held.
Somewhere outside, in the dark he could not see and the wilderness he could not reach, three corrupted beasts moved closer to the only place in the world that might save him.
And in a village a painful hour's walk away, six goats were already gone, and nobody who could do anything about it believed a word he'd said.
Except one.
Tomorrow, Zhang Wei would come to the gorge. Would see the tracks. Would know that Lin Feng was telling the truth about at least part of this impossible situation.
It was thin. A single thread holding together a plan that barely deserved the name.
But it was more than he'd had yesterday.
Lin Feng pressed his broken body against ten-thousand-year-old stone and let it hurt.
