The carpenters knew nothing of it. The danger had been gathering for days.
The black-robed men who swept through the village searching for children were disciples of the demon cultivator Wei Jiu — the same sect that came to Jue Mountain every year to bury iron boxes in the earth.
Two days before the search, several black-robed disciples stood at the mountain's base and reported to the woman above them: "Elder Tu, the entire mountain is wrapped in some form of spiritual power. We have circled it fully. There is no way in."
The woman they addressed was draped in black gauze embroidered with gold, her beauty precise and cold. She narrowed her eyes. "This is not your first time here. Hire villagers. They have no spiritual roots — the spirit shield will not stop them. The soul-dulling curse we placed will blunt their five senses enough that they can manage the lower slopes."
The lead disciple hesitated. "That is what we have done, Elder. But this time is different. In the past, the hired men only needed to bury a box of resentful water at the foot of the mountain. Now they are sent to climb, and they cannot. They walk in the mist for hours and never gain elevation. Something like a ghost wall turns them back every time."
The woman — Tu Jiuyuan, elder under Wei Jiu — listened without expression. Then she swept her sleeve outward, and a yin wind cracked through the air and knocked more than a dozen disciples flat. "Idiots. This is the year the reincarnation tree completes its cycle. Twenty years ago, Mu Qingge's bones were destroyed and a fragment of her scattered soul took root in that tree. Without enough resentful water fed to the roots, the fruit will be hollow — whatever emerges will be useless. We have reached the Mahayana stage where the Nascent Soul transforms into God. Mu Qingge's reincarnation is needed now, not ruined."
The fallen disciples hung suspended in the air by some invisible force, their mouths open and silent with pain.
Tu Jiuyuan closed her fists. Black mist rose and contracted around her hands, pulling something vital out of the men suspended before her. They dropped to the ground like emptied skins.
"I have stripped your root spiritual power with the Bone Sacrifice Curse," she said. "Without it, the spirit shield will not recognize you as cultivators. The keel compass will cut through the smokescreen and take you to the summit. Bury the box. When you return, I will restore what I took."
A comfortable lie. A practitioner's bones and roots, once stripped by the Bone Sacrifice Curse, were never restored. Even Mu Qingge herself — the female demon who had torn through the immortal cultivation world like a wound — had been rendered powerless when the curse caught her in its ninefold grip.
Since Mu Qingge's fall, the one who now stood first among demon cultivators was their own lord, Wei Jiu. His cultivation already exceeded hers at her peak.
It was a bitter irony: the most feared woman in a generation, reborn as fruit — to be harvested and absorbed to swell someone else's power.
And it was not only Chimen who wanted her. Several so-called righteous sects had quietly placed their own spirit shields on the mountain, sealing the tree and forbidding anyone else to touch it. When a soul scatters and reforms on the reincarnation tree, the person who emerges is entirely new — no memory, no allegiance, no inherited wickedness. Easy to raise. Easy to shape.
Mu Qingge had been born with the rarest and most dangerous demon constitution, spirit and nature fused at the core.
The decent sects would never say it plainly. But they all wanted the child. Raised young, shaped carefully, she could be made into the kind of disciple that no ordinary master could produce — one capable of helping a great cultivator survive the once-in-three-hundred-years tribulation that was now drawing close.
Tu Jiuyuan felt a cold satisfaction settle in her chest when she thought about it.
She and Mu Qingge had once trained under the same master. The master had favored Mu Qingge — let her learn the true arts, helped her form her core early, while Tu Jiuyuan was left behind, always a step short. The jealousy had never left her. It returned in the quiet, always.
But now Mu Qingge was a fruit on a tree. And when she fell and opened her eyes for the first time in her new life, she would find nothing waiting for her but misery.
Tu Jiuyuan smiled — small, satisfied, and cold.
She pinched the strands of hair she had pulled from the disciples' heads and fed them into the small bronze furnace she carried. She murmured the incantation. The connection formed: she inhabited their senses as if wearing them, seeing through their eyes, hearing with their ears, standing on the mountain through them.
Sacrificing a few disciples was a clean trade. Cleaner than the villagers had ever been.
This time, the mountain gave no resistance. Perhaps the spirit shield had degraded with age. The puppet-disciples walked straight to the summit, and she saw everything clearly through their borrowed eyes.
Then she saw it: weathered fragments in the grass beneath the tree. Her breath stopped.
Had the fruit already fallen?
She made them look up. The great fruit still hung on the branch, heavy and whole. Relief moved through her — brief, until she felt it.
A gust of wind. And then: hair pulled from her scalp, root and all.
The next moment, Tu Jiuyuan lost her senses completely. Someone else wore her now.
The disciples remaining at the base of the mountain dropped to their knees in unison. "We welcome you, lord — may your fortune equal heaven's."
The man who had arrived wore black robes. His features carried something almost feminine in their precision, but his height, the coldness in his long phoenix eyes, and the violence that ran under his stillness left no room for confusion. No one had ever mistaken Wei Jiu for anything other than what he was.
He turned Tu Jiuyuan's stolen senses toward the mountaintop and examined the scene through the disciples she had already positioned there. He drove them to collect the fragments of the fallen fruit shell, cast a backtracking spell over the pieces, and read the year of the fall within moments.
The Geng year of Qing.
Wei Jiu released the elder's hair. He snapped his fingers. The strands burned to nothing. "Send people down through every surrounding village," he said. "Find all children born in the Geng year."
Tu Jiuyuan's senses returned to her all at once. She knelt and pressed her forehead down. "My lord — if the reincarnation fruit fell before ripening, will the spirit child still be near Jue Mountain?"
Wei Jiu's eyes narrowed slowly. "The fruit fell unripe. That was a significant risk. A spirit child born that way could not survive far from the reincarnation tree — the connection would sustain her. She is close. Search thoroughly."
Chimen's reach was long. A single order and every village within range was combed through. Children of the right birth year were gathered and examined. But none of them carried the spiritual resonance of the reincarnation tree. None were the one.
Wei Jiu turned his gaze back toward the summit. The remaining fruit still hung on the branch, growing quickly now, ripening at speed.
He had been present at the battle twenty years ago. He knew exactly what had happened: Mu Qingge and her sister, Mu Ranwu, had died together. Two souls entering the tree meant two fruits. It followed.
One fruit had fallen early. The mediocre sister, most likely. But Wei Jiu was not a man who left things to probability. He needed to be certain.
"Mu Qingge." He said the name quietly to himself, his mouth barely moving. In his eyes, something ignited — not warmth, but the fixed light of a predator that has already decided.
He practiced soul-swallowing magic, and it had a nature of its own: it amplified hunger, endlessly. Wei Jiu's obsession with Mu Qingge had always exceeded even that. She was the one thing he had pursued and never reached. That had not changed because she was dead.
A faint red bled into his eyes — the color that appeared when the bloodthirst came up. It made his face, which was already too perfect to look at comfortably, into something worse.
Qiao Lian and his wife had made their decision quietly: they would not go back to the village yet. They would wait until the black-robed disciples moved on and the attention faded.
It had been a careful plan, and it had worked. The child they had found on the mountain — the girl they were raising as their daughter — had been registered in the household records under a falsified birth year, pushed back by a full year from the Geng year. They had told the villagers her birthday was delayed in the records due to early illness. It was written down and could be verified. There was nothing to find.
When the black-robed men forced their way into the yard and looked at the thin, pale girl in bed, they lost interest immediately. No spiritual energy, no glow of cultivation potential, nothing. Whatever they were searching for, it was not this sickly ordinary child. They left without a second look.
After that, no one returned.
The girl — called Ranran — had been gentle since she could walk, and she looked young for her age, which the couple quietly relied on. If anyone thought to ask, fourteen or fifteen was easy to believe.
Still, the news from the village was grim. Five children born in the Geng year had been pulled from their families. The black-robed disciples cut their fingers and let the blood fall into a dark incense burner to test them. When Carpenter Xue heard this, his face went white. Ranran was small-framed and fragile. An injury like that could keep her sick for weeks.
Later, it grew worse: children from every nearby village were taken, Geng-year births all of them, under the pretense of testing for immortal bones. But there was no pretense in what followed — families who resisted were beaten by disciples with the strength of men twice their size, and the children were carried away whether the parents screamed or not. Some families never heard from their children again.
Ranran did not know the reason for any of it. She only knew that her parents had looked like wilted plants for days — her mother worst of all, shaken enough to take to bed for two full days.
A sick mother needed a filial daughter.
Ranran asked her father to stoke the stove and set about making sesame flatbreads — she had eaten them once somewhere and the recipe was simply in her hands, clear as memory she couldn't place. When they came out of the iron pan, hot and fragrant, she carried the plate to the small table and set it between her parents.
Qiao Lian looked at the cakes. They were perfect — neatly shaped, evenly cooked. He had no idea where the child had learned to make them. He asked her while eating, praising her between bites.
Ranran considered the question with genuine uncertainty, then took a satisfied bite of her own piece. "I don't know. I made them once after eating them and it just worked." She tilted her head. "Mother, do you think I starved in my past life? I always want to eat."
Qiao Lian spat lightly on the floor to ward off bad luck. "Pah — past life, death and dying, what kind of talk is that? You were simply greedy, that's all. Greedy then and greedy now."
The words left her mouth and she caught herself — she was the one speaking of past lives and death. She looked up.
Ranran was already laughing, bright and unconcerned, taking another large bite.
Qiao Lian laughed too, helplessly. They talked for a while, the three of them around the small table with the warm cakes, and the tight knot of fear that had lived in her chest for days loosened slightly. The black-robed men had not returned to the village in two days. It seemed like the worst might have passed.
She and her husband had already made a longer plan. They would stay through the winter, let her husband build up the business enough to move, and then take the family back to Hening — their hometown, far enough from Jue Mountain that this whole tangle of cultivators and searching and fear would become someone else's problem.
They would put distance between the girl and all of it. That was the plan. Distance, and time.