[Warning: Player vitality at eight percent. Energy levels are critical. Immediate elimination pending.]
The tin loudspeaker bolted to the production post popped with a screech of raw static. To the rest of Wutong, it was simply the noon break of the county wire broadcast, where an actor in a provincial radio troupe delivered a melodramatic space thriller over bad copper lines.
To Fang Qinyu, peeling her eyelids open against the searing June heat, it was the voice of the grim reaper.
She did not get up. She did not even roll onto her side. She slid straight out of the creaking bamboo cot, hit the packed-dirt ground under the shade of the broad-leafed loquat tree, and planted her forehead directly against the soil.
Every unnecessary movement was suicide.
"Jie?" Eight-year-old Fang Xiaobo dropped his chipped enamel cup, his bare feet scuffing in the dust as he hurried to her side. His ribs showed like washboard slats under a hemp vest that had seen three owners before him. "Jie, the fever broke, right? Why are you kissing the dirt?"
"Conserving resources," Qinyu croaked, keeping her face pressed into the dust. The smell of loam and fallen fruit was sour and thick. Her skin burned with phantom alarms. "Do not pace. Do not swing your arms. Lie flat, Xiaobo. If you cross the critical margin, you dissolve into red mist."
Xiaobo blinked, clutching his empty cup. "The team leader is coming down the lane with the chalk bucket."
At the edge of the threshing yard, a crowd of women husking sorghum stopped their chatter. Old Secretary Ma led the pack, a bamboo tally board tucked under his arm, his brows drawn tight like knots in hemp rope. Behind him, glowing with the frantic energy of an ox facing the plow, walked Fang Rulan.
Rulan wore a brand-new patched cotton blouse, scrubbed spotless. She had spent the last two days rising before dawn, weeding five mu of sorghum before anyone else had even boiled water. She had returned from a bad fall by the canal with a strange, calculating glint in her gaze—a girl who had seen tomorrow and meant to buy every inch of it with sweat.
"Fang Qinyu!" Secretary Ma's voice boomed across the flat dirt yard. He jabbed a yellowed finger toward her prone form. "The third production team has been in the mud since sunrise. Even the cripples are braiding straw rope by the granary. You have not logged two work points all week! The commune doesn't feed ghosts."
Qinyu didn't twitch. Moving consumed oxygen. Oxygen was tied to the invisible numbers blinking behind her retinas. If she reached zero, game over.
"Uncle Ma, please don't be angry with her," Rulan broke in, stepping forward with her hands clasped. She dabbed at the corner of her dry eyes with the hem of her sleeve, her voice trembling with tragic virtue. "My younger sister has always been frail. Her constitution is unfit for the midday sun. Our household… our household cannot afford to lose our grain quota over her weakness."
The threshing women murmured in approval. What a sensible, dutiful elder sister. A real mule of a girl, born for hardship.
"If Qinyu fails to work," Rulan continued, turning a tearful, resolute face toward the elders, "I will bear her burden. I will work twelve hours in the terrace fields. But our grain will be cut in half, and poor little Xiaobo will starve if he stays here. My second aunt in the northern hills needs a herd boy. I have already arranged for a cart to take him tomorrow. He will have sweet potatoes to eat, at least."
Xiaobo shrank back, clutching his sister's prone arm. "Jie… I don't want to go to the northern hills. Second Aunt beats people with willow switches."
"See?" Rulan sniffled, reaching out to grip Xiaobo's arm. "The boy is stubborn, but it is for his own survival. Here, Xiaobo, help your sister by carrying that basket of stones to the culvert. Show the work team you have hands!"
She thrust a wicker basket filled with heavy river stones into the eight-year-old's hands. The load dragged Xiaobo down instantly, his knees bowing, his breath whistling through dry teeth.
Qinyu’s head snapped up from the dirt.
Above Xiaobo’s head, her fever-addled vision painted a thin, sputtering bar of bright red. It was dropping. Ten ticks. Nine ticks.
"Drop the payload!" Qinyu shrieked.
With a burst of terrified momentum, she lunged forward on her knees, knocked the basket away, and hauled her little brother onto his back beside her. The stones spilled across Secretary Ma’s cloth shoes with a series of dull thuds.
"Are you trying to kill him?!" Qinyu gasped, pinning Xiaobo flat against the ground with one arm. "His stamina bar is unfit for that encumbrance! You reckless, homicidal novice! Lie down, Xiaobo! Stop breathing through your nose, take shallow breaths through your teeth! Conserve!"
A dead silence blanketed the threshing floor.
The sorghum huskers stared. An old man smoking a dry leaf pipe choked on his own smoke.
"Did she just call Rulan a novice?" someone muttered.
"She’s lost her mind. Pure laziness has rotted her brain. Look at her, treating the dirt like a bridal bed!"
The cadresman's face darkened until it matched the color of an overripe plum. He shook the dust off his shoe and snatched the slate-grey ledger from his hip. "Fine. If you wish to rot, rot alone. The team will not reward a parasite. Fang Qinyu, zero points. Fang Xiaobo, dependent rations revoked."
He marched toward the tall public chalkboard mounted on the sun-baked wall of the grain storehouse. A piece of gypsum chalk was gripped between his gnarled knuckles.
"No!" Xiaobo whimpered, struggling against his sister's iron grip. "Jie, our names! If he crosses our names off, the granary won't open for us on distribution day!"
"Stay still!" Qinyu hissed through gritted teeth, her forehead beaded with cold sweat as she held him down. "If we run to him, we drop to critical. Do you want to hit zero? If we hit zero, we despawn!"
Rulan watched Ma raise the chalk, a quiet, vicious smirk tugging at the edge of her lips. In her previous life, Qinyu had drifted through the settlement like a willow leaf, eventually catching the eye of a clerk in town. Not this time. This time, the dead burden would be cut loose before the summer harvest even peaked. Xiaobo would be out of sight in the mountains, and she alone would harvest the merit.
Ma pressed the chalk against the slate. The white tip squeaked, beginning the diagonal slash across the characters *Fang Qinyu*.
A whistling rush of air tore through the sweltering heat.
*THUNK!*
A heavy iron-forged hoe cleaved through the air and embedded itself three inches deep into the packed earth right beside the chalkboard, vibrating with a metallic hum that vibrated through everyone's teeth. The wood of the handle shuddered against the whitewashed brick.
Old Ma dropped his chalk. The crowd jumped back with a collective gasp.
A tall, broad-shouldered youth walked through the dust of the lane, his homespun sleeves rolled high above corded forearms stained with red clay. He carried a pair of woven wicker baskets on a carrying yoke, wet mounds of dredged river mud bending the pine wood like a drawn bow. He dropped the load without a sound, the mud splashing around his straw sandals.
Zhou Hanchen looked at the chalkboard, his jaw hard as river basalt, then turned his dark, unrelenting gaze onto the old cadre.
"Don't touch her name," Zhou Hanchen said, his voice flat, gravelly, and lethal. "I am taking full responsibility for her rations."