“He was delirious from a cracked wrist. Pick up your scrolls, girl. We have six paths left to sweep before dusk.” Taiyeng kept his back to Ryunhia, listening for her footsteps. He heard the rustle of bamboo, the soft scrape of sandals, then nothing. A silence that stretched too long. He finally turned. Ryunhia was still standing there, arms laden with parchment, her gaze fixed on him with an unblinking, sharp stillness. “Master,” she began, her voice low. “His wrist was not cracked. He called you the… the Scorched Earth.” Taiyeng spat dryly onto a flat stone. “Scorched earth? Girl, you spend too many hours squinting at battle tallies. The scout took a broom handle across the ribs and babbled nonsense before his breath gave out. He likely thought I was an executioner from the peaks.” He tapped the broom against the ground again, a little too forcefully, sending a puff of fine dust into the air. “Now, pick up your bundle. The courtyard flags still hold half an inch of pine needles.” Ryunhia’s brow furrowed, but she lowered her gaze, her lips pressing into a thin line. She didn’t argue further, merely turned and walked back towards the main hall, her shoulders a little more slumped than usual. Taiyeng tracked the scrape of her sandals until she vanished around the retaining wall. Heat still crackled along his knuckles, smelling faintly of sulfur. He shook his hands out, grinding the ash residue into the soil with his heel. Later that evening, beneath an oil lamp smelling of cheap tallow, Taiyeng entered the temple scriptorium to find Oyun hunched over a calfskin ledger. The scribe’s fingers, stained perpetually with ink, moved deftly across the paper, adding annotations in precise, elegant script. “Scribe Oyun,” Taiyeng rumbled, leaning against the doorframe, making the old wood creak. Oyun didn’t startle, merely glanced up, a faint, knowing smile playing on his lips. “Sweeping Master Taiyeng. One might assume the hall flagstones demanded another midnight polish. Or has your charge snapped a training pole through a shrine window again?” Taiyeng grunted. “Neither. I need a favor. A specific one.” He stepped into the room, the scent of old paper and fresh ink filling his nostrils. “I need an entry rewritten in the kitchen records. An old scroll. One putting me on wash duty since before the northern river dried up. A dull name, zero lineage, no recorded cultivation. Just another grease-stained scrubber.” Oyun’s smile widened, a mischievous glint in his dark eyes. He closed the tome, placing a slender bookmark between its pages. “So the great recluse requires a fresh shroud of ink. What catastrophe demands such careful forging?” “No deception,” Taiyeng snapped, his voice sharper than intended. He immediately softened it. “Shelter for the girl. And quiet for my own bones.” Oyun nodded slowly, his expression shifting to one of understanding. “Understood. Obscurity is expensive armor. Lay out those ink slabs while I scrape the old vellum clean.” Taiyeng spent the next few hours by Oyun’s side, poring over dusty, moth-eaten ledgers. While Oyun meticulously cross-referenced names and dates, Taiyeng’s attention drifted to a stack of sealed crates tucked away in a shadowed corner. They bore branded merchant seals crossed through with soot. “What are these?” Taiyeng asked, his hand hovering over one crate. It felt unusually light for its size. Oyun paused, his quill still. “Just old supplies. Nothing of import.” His voice, usually light and teasing, held a subtle tension. Taiyeng, despite his efforts, was not a man easily deterred by evasiveness. He reached out and, with a single, controlled movement, pried open the lid of the top crate. Inside, carefully wrapped in rough cloth, were dozens of small, corked vials filled with glistening, pale green liquids. Spiritual elixirs. Beside them lay bundles of sun-dried spirit-ginseng stripped of their sect crests. “Spiritual medicine,” Taiyeng stated, his gaze sharpening. “This isn’t ‘old supplies.’ This is enough to sustain a small village for weeks. Why are you hoarding it here? The upper abbots lock every vial behind ironwood grates.” Oyun sighed, a long, weary sound, and pushed his spectacles up his nose. He picked up a vial, turning it slowly in his fingers. “Hoarding? No, Taiyeng, I am diverting. Distributing. If we waited on the Grand Preceptor's charity, every root would mold inside the vault before reaching a child's bowl. Have you looked below the mountain ridges lately, Taiyeng? Past the terrace ponds and mist orchards?” Taiyeng felt a prickle of unease. He knew of the suffering, of course. He’d seen it in his past life, the reason for his rage. But he had deliberately walled himself off from it. “The mortal lands suffer from famine,” he said, stating the obvious, feeling hollow. “Famine?” Oyun gave a bitter laugh. “It’s a creeping blight, Taiyeng. A cancer. The sects drain the spiritual leylines, drawing all the earth’s vitality into their strongholds. They build their jade palaces on the backs of a dying world. The soil is turning to dust. The rivers run sluggish and poisoned. Children starve, not by the dozens, but by the tens of thousands. The very air outside these mountains is thinner, choked with the dust of dying fields.” He gestured vaguely towards the window. “This medicine? It’s a drop in an ocean, but it keeps a few more hearts beating, a few more bellies from aching, for another day.” Taiyeng stared at the vials, his mind flashing back to the fields of withered crops, the hollow-eyed faces of families he’d once seen, before his fury had consumed him entirely, before he had become the devastation itself. He had once believed burning it all down was the only answer, a cleansing fire. Now, he just swept leaves and tried not to care. But Oyun’s quiet dedication, his subtle defiance, chipped away at the walls Taiyeng had painstakingly built around his heart. “The disciplinary hall flogs men to bone for skimming medicinal stores,” Taiyeng muttered, testing the vial's weight against his callused palm. Oyun merely shrugged. “What is expulsion compared to a child’s last breath?” He returned to his ledgers, his quill scratching softly. “Now, back to our ghost. Let us record a laborer named Jin, mute in the left ear, noted only for sweeping cobwebs without breaking urns.” Three sunrises later, bronze gongs thundered across the terraced bluffs, opening the Outer Court Tournament. Novices swarmed the ring tiers, adjusting silk sword-sashes and boasting of broken training dummies. Taiyeng leaned on his broom by the eastern drainage gutter, eyes trailing Ryunhia as she stepped onto the paving slabs in her patched grey smock. Her movements were stiff, her face pale. She carried her new, plain wooden staff, the one Taiyeng had carved for her. “Look down there,” a voice drawled from the varnished viewing pavilion. “The cast-off princess came dressed in kitchen sacking. Did she bring an iron ladle to parry steel?” Wood splintered under Taiyeng's thumb. Up on the canopy platform stood Xilan, leaning over the rail with arms folded over his silk sash, a pale wind-blade already whistling between his fingertips. Ryunhia's jaw set firm, her knuckles whitening on the plain ash-wood staff Taiyeng had planed for her that morning. Across the sand, the arena elder struck the brass basin. “First bout: Disciple Ryunhia versus Disciple Xilan!”

Ink Stains and Starving Lands