Chapter Text
At first, Yanqing took up very little space.
That was partly because he was small. Absurdly small, actually, in Jing Yuan’s private opinion, though he had enough sense not to say so aloud and earn both Yanqing terrifying, tiny glare and even more whispers and carefully worded “suggestions” from people. Yanqing had the solemn eyes of a court official and the round cheeks of a child still young enough to fall asleep with both hands curled around whatever object he had decided was his. His sleeves hung past his wrists. When he walked, his steps were careful and deliberate until he forgot himself, and then he toddled more than marched, small feet pattering against the polished floor with a speed that seemed to surprise even him.
But size was not the only reason.
Some children filled a room the moment they entered it. They asked questions. They touched things they had no business touching. They climbed furniture, demanded snacks, laughed and announced their opinions to anyone fortunate enough to have ears.
Yanqing did none of that.
Yanqing sat exactly where he was placed.
At the edge of the chair across from Jing Yuan’s desk, both hands folded tightly in his lap, feet not even close to reaching the floor. He did not swing them. He did not look around except in quick, darting glances when he thought no one was watching. His attention caught on the sword displayed along the eastern wall again and again, bright and helpless like a moth near a lantern, but each time he forced his gaze back down to his knees when he thought someone noticed.
Jing Yuan pretended not to notice.
This, he had learned, was sometimes the kinder thing. His assistant had left tea on the desk. Tea for Jing Yuan, at least. Beside it sat a smaller cup of warm milk sweetened with honey, because he had taken one look at the child and made a series of decisions Jing Yuan also knew better than to mention.
Yanqing stared at the cup.
Then he stared at Jing Yuan.
Then he stared at the cup again.
“You can have it,” Jing Yuan said.
Yanqing blinked.
His hands remained locked in his lap and shifted nervously in place for a moment.
Jing Yuan waited.
Yanqing looked at the cup for another long moment, visibly conducting some private and very serious calculation. Then, slowly, he reached out with both hands and drew it toward himself.
The cup was small.
Yanqing’s hands were even smaller.
He held it as if it might vanish if he was careless. Jing Yuan looked down at the report in front of him and did not read a single word of it. Across the desk, Yanqing took one slow,cautious sip. His eyes widened. Only a little. But Jing Yuan saw it, because he was an Arbiter-General of the Luofu and therefore very skilled at noticing subtle changes in enemy formations, trade negotiations, and apparently small children discovering how something sweet tastes.
“Acceptable?” Jing Yuan asked with a smile.
Yanqing froze.
For one second, Jing Yuan thought he had scared him. Then Yanqing’s mouth pressed into a tiny smile. He looked down into the cup, then back up at Jing Yuan, and nodded quickly.
“Mm!”
Jing Yuan’s lips twitched. He returned to his report, or at least made a convincing enough show of it.The Seat of Divine Foresight was not really built for children. It had too many sharp edges. Too many priceless objects. Too many people entering with urgent messages and leaving with heavier shoulders than they had brought in. And yet, for a short while, there was only the scratch of Jing Yuan’s brush, the distant hum of the Luofu, and the quiet, careful sounds of Yanqing drinking warm honey milk with a smile.
When Jing Yuan glanced up again, Yanqing had shifted.
Not much.
Only enough that one small hand had left the cup and curled around the edge of Jing Yuan’s long sleeve where it trailed near the side of the desk. Yanqing kept his eyes on the cup. His fingers remained there, light and uncertain, barely gripping the fabric. Not a demand. Not even a request.
Just a tiny point of contact.
A way to make sure something stayed.
Jing Yuan looked at that small hand for a long moment.
Then he turned back to his report and made sure to keep his arm as still as possible.
For several days after that, Yanqing followed him.
Not openly, of course. Yanqing, at that age, seemed to regard his presence as a private matter between himself and whatever corner of the room he had decided was safest.
Still, Jing Yuan noticed.
It was difficult not to.
Yanqing had not yet mastered stealth, though he moved with solemn concentration as if he was trying to do just that. His small shoes made soft, uneven sounds against polished floors. His robe dragged when he hurried to keep pace and then stopped abruptly whenever Jing Yuan turned his head. Once, a ribbon slipped loose from his hair and was left behind for a very displeased member of the alchemy commission to find.
Jing Yuan saw it all from the corner of his eye and said nothing.
This, as well, seemed kinder.
The pattern had become difficult to ignore after a while. If Jing Yuan crossed the hall to speak with someone, Yanqing appeared near one of the pillars and became deeply interested in the floor. If Jing Yuan walked to the outer corridor, Yanqing drifted after him with the careful distance of a child who wanted to be near but not noticed wanting. If Jing Yuan paused, Yanqing paused. If Jing Yuan turned, Yanqing looked away with such innocence that it felt illegal accusing him of anything.
“General-” his assistant started, side-eyeing the child
“No,” Jing Yuan said.
“I have not said anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was only going to ask whether you required anything before your meeting.”
“A mercifully ordinary question. How unlike you.”
His expression did not change. “The meeting is in the western hall.”
“I am aware.”
“Your shadow appears to believe otherwise.”
Jing Yuan looked down the corridor. Yanqing, who had been half-hidden behind a decorative screen, immediately ducked behind it.
The screen did not cover his feet.
Jing Yuan thought, briefly, of the many wars he had survived, the negotiations he had endured, the assassins who had attempted subtlety with varying degrees of success and how they compared to the current challenge of pretending not to see a very small child hiding behind furniture with both shoes plainly visible beneath the carved wood.
“I see no shadow,” Jing Yuan said.
“Of course, General.”
Jing Yuan continued down the hall.
Behind him, after a moment, came the patter of small feet.
He did not slow his pace. He merely adjusted it by the smallest degree, enough that Yanqing no longer had to hurry so much. The difference was negligible. Irrelevant. Beneath notice, surely. The western hall was quiet when he reached it. Too quiet, perhaps, for a child uncertain whether he was allowed to enter. Jing Yuan paused by the doorway and looked at Yanqing, who had to stop abruptly before he collided with the general’s leg.
His hands were bunched in his sleeves and he looked up at Jing Yuan with a seriousness too large for his face.
Jing Yuan waited.
Yanqing looked past him into the hall. Then back at him.
“Stay?” he asked.
It was the first thing he had said all day. One word. Small enough that Jing Yuan could have mistaken it for nothing, if he were a less observant man.
Stay.
Jing Yuan felt something in his chest move before he had given it permission.
“The meeting will be very boring. Don’t you want to play in the garden?”
Yanqing considered this.
“Stay.” he repeated, a little more firmly.
Ah, Jing Yuan thought. So it had not been a question after all.
He looked down at the child, at the crooked ribbon and the determined mouth and the small hands hiding in sleeves too long for him, and understood that he was being given an order by someone who could not yet reach the door handle.
A reckless precedent.
Still.
“I suppose,” Jing Yuan said, stepping aside, “the western hall can survive one observer.”
Yanqing entered at once with a bright smile that made him look for once like a kid his age and when Jing Yuan resumed walking, Yanqing followed close enough that his sleeve brushed Jing Yuan.
Jing Yuan did not move away.
The mission was not supposed to be difficult enough to kill him.
That was the official assessment, at least.
Difficult, yes. Risky, certainly. Remote enough to make reinforcements inconvenient and communication unreliable. There were old pathways through the region where Abundance’s corruption still clung to broken stone and half-buried structures, roots sunk deep into places no living thing should have wanted to grow. Reports had named hostile movement near an abandoned settlement, though not in numbers large enough to justify mobilizing a full company before the path was confirmed.
A scouting party would have been sensible.
A general going ahead of them was less sensible.
Not unheard of. Not indefensible. Jing Yuan had been in command long enough to make his choices sound reasonable when presented in the correct order. He knew the terrain better than the younger captains. He knew what traces of the Abundance looked like when they tried to imitate ordinary decay. He could move faster alone, draw less attention, and decide whether the Luofu needed to risk more soldiers before more soldiers were placed at risk.
All of that was true.
Only it was not the whole truth.
The whole truth sat behind his ribs like the blade he had grown used to carrying.
Generals did not last forever.
This was not a tragedy. It was an expectation. The Xianzhou Alliance built its command around endurance, but the role of general had always been a dangerous one. Some died in battle. Some fell to mara. A century was a respectable span. Less than that was common enough. More than that made people begin counting. Jing Yuan had become very good at hearing the count in rooms even when no one spoke it aloud.
Too long, some eyes said. Too close to those who had already been lost.
He could hardly blame them.
He had buried friends. Pursued friends. Condemned friends. Watched names become records and records become warnings. He had seen faces he loved turned into things that wore memory badly, or wore none of it at all. The past, when it returned, tended to do so to haunt him with a blade in hand.
Sometimes he thought the dead had been kinder. They stayed where grief placed them. They did not look at him with familiar eyes emptied of everything that had once made them familiar.
And still, the Luofu continued.
That was the point. That had always been the point.
Ships that did not move became tombs. The logic was clean enough when viewed from a distance, and Jing Yuan had always appreciated clean logic. It asked very little of the heart. It did not care whether one was tired.
If he died here, it would not be a tragedy.
That was not despair, he told himself. Merely arithmetic.
A general found alone in corrupted territory, having advanced ahead of his troops to confirm a route through dangerous ground to free a planet from the abominations of the abundance. A regrettable loss, but a honorable one. Speeches would be made. Incense would be burned. His name would be written with the others. Someone younger, steadier, less full of ghosts would take up the burden and call it an honor because all burdens were honors until they had been carried long enough.
Worst case, then, Jing Yuan thought as he crossed the ruined path alone, he would die for something useful. Best case, the soldiers behind him would have a cleaner route by morning.
There were far worse arrangements.
The wind moved through the broken settlement with a sound like breath passing through teeth.
Jing Yuan paused beneath the remains of an archway and listened. The place had been abandoned long enough that its name had become irrelevant to everyone except the dead. Low buildings leaned inward on themselves, their windows dark, their walls split by pale roots that pulsed faintly where the shadows were deepest. Something had bloomed along the far road in clusters of soft red flowers. The petals were too bright, too tender, too alive. Nothing living had any business looking that... fresh here.
Jing Yuan stepped around them.
His weapon remained ready in his hand.
The flowers bent toward him as he passed and he did not look at them for too long.
The Abundance often made beauty out of rot. That was one of its cruelties. It did not always arrive as a monster with too many limbs and a mouth full of wrong teeth. Sometimes it arrived as fruit too ripe for the branch that bore it, as vines curling gently through a dead man’s ribs, as blossoms opening red and soft over stone that should have stayed barren. It offered continuation without mercy. Life where life had no kindness left in it. Jing Yuan had seen enough of that kind of life.
He moved through the lane quietly, reading the ground as he went. A drag mark beneath the ash. Broken stone disturbed near the corner of a wall. A smear too old to still be wet and too fresh to be ignored. There had been movement here recently. Not large. Not organized. Too uneven for a patrol, too light for most abominations.
He followed it into the shell of what had once been a courtyard. The ground there was disturbed. Small prints crossed larger drag marks. A piece of cloth had caught on a splintered beam and fluttered weakly in the wind.
Jing Yuan stilled.
The cloth didn't look like it was hanging there for too long and it was not from a soldier’s uniform.
He moved more quietly after that.
The air changed as he went further ahead. Not enough that most would have noticed. A slight sweetness under the dust. A warmth that did not belong to the late hour. The red flowers grew thicker along one wall, clustered around a crack in the stone where pale roots wound down into darkness. Their petals shivered though there was no wind.
Jing Yuan lifted his blade.
The sound came again from beyond the courtyard. Not claws. Not a growl. Not the wet drag of something that had forgotten how many legs it once possessed.
A breath.
Small. Uneven. Frightened.
Jing Yuan did not lower his blade.
In a place like this, the sound of someone breathing was not reassuring. Fear could be copied. Weakness could be worn like a lure. The Abundance was not honest in the shapes it left behind. It made flowers from rot and fruit from corpses and movement from things that should have been allowed to die. A living breath in the middle of a dead settlement was not a comfort.
Jing Yuan moved toward it anyway.
The breath caught once, then stopped.
Listening, he thought. Whatever was there had heard him.
He turned the corner with his blade ready.
A child was crouched beneath the broken frame of a doorway.
For one moment, Jing Yuan did not understand what he was seeing. The battlefield, or what had once been close enough to one, refused the image. Blood-dark stone. Pale roots. Ruined walls. Red flowers blooming where nothing should. And there, tucked into the narrow shadow beneath the doorway, a child so small that in Jing Yuan’s mind it was only impossible. He could not have been more than three or four by short-lived species measures. It was difficult to tell beneath the dirt, the too-large robe, the hair fallen loose around his face. One sleeve hung past his hand entirely. The other had been torn near the wrist. His cheeks were round beneath the grime. His eyes were enormous. And very much alive. That, somehow, was the most suspicious thing of all.
Jing Yuan did not move.
The child looked at him.
For a heartbeat, fear sharpened into suspicion. His small body pressed farther back against the broken doorframe. One hand vanished into the folds of his sleeve, as though he had something there. A stone, perhaps. Nothing that would help him if Jing Yuan meant harm, but the attempt itself was noted.
Jing Yuan noted more than that. The cracked lips. The too-shallow breathing. The way the child kept his weight off one leg. The old bruise near his temple, darkened at the edges. No visible red bloom beneath the skin. No pale roots at the throat or wrists. No unnatural warmth in the air immediately around him. No flowers. No ginkgo leaves, though his hair and eyes had a golden color that might have invited crueler assumptions.
But no obvious sign of corruption. Obvious, of course, was a dangerous word.
The child’s fingers tightened inside his sleeve.
Jing Yuan’s grip remained steady on his blade.
If this was bait, it was cruelly chosen. If it was not-
Then the child’s expression changed.
Not into trust.
Not hope, exactly either.
Something else. Recognition of another person. Relief so sudden it seemed to frighten him as much as Jing Yuan had. The child’s mouth trembled. His eyes filled at once, but no sound came out. He looked like he had been waiting too long and had only just realized waiting might have an end. Jing Yuan felt the world become abruptly, brutally specific. The mission. The reports. The hostile movement. The clean, abstract arithmetic of risk. All of it narrowed to an abandoned child in a doorway, trying not to cry because someone had finally come. He had commanded armies. He had broken sieges. He had negotiated with people who smiled while calculating casualty projections behind their eyes. None of that was useful now, except perhaps the discipline not to move too quickly.
Even that felt insufficient.
He slowly crouched down and lowered his free hand to rest against his knee, empty palm visible. The child was still watching the blade.
Not Jing Yuan’s face. Not his empty hand. The blade.
Of course he was. Children learned danger by shape before they learn other things. Sharp things. Raised hands. Adults who came too close. Jing Yuan could keep his voice gentle, could crouch, could show his palm, could make himself as small as a man of his height and reputation could manage, but the weapon remained a fact.
A necessary fact.
“There,” he said softly. “I will not come closer.”
The child stared at his hand.
Then at his face.
Then at the blade, lowered but still present.
If this was a trap, then the trap had been well chosen. Put a child-shaped thing in the ruins. Make it small. Make it frightened. Make it wounded, but not too wounded to move. Let it look at him with enormous eyes and cracked lips and one shaking hand hidden in its sleeve. Let it wait until he lowered his guard.
Abominations did not always charge.
The Abundance did not always make monsters that looked like monsters.
Jing Yuan knew that.
He knew it with the unpleasant intimacy of experience. He knew it in the same way he knew the smell of corrupted flowers and the sound of roots moving under stone. He knew that mercy could be made into a door and something patient enough might wait for him to open it. Setting his blade down here, alone, far from reinforcements, with hostile movement nearby and red flowers blooming from dead stone, was not merely foolish.
It was the sort of foolishness that got soldiers killed.
Jing Yuan looked at the child.
The child looked at the blade.
If it was a trap, he was stepping right into it.
If it was not-
The thought stopped there. If it was not a trap, then there was a child in front of him who had survived long enough to hide beneath a broken doorway and reach for a stone or shard or nothing at all because nothing was still better than empty hands.
If it was not a trap, then every breath Jing Yuan spent treating him like one was another injury.
Slowly, Jing Yuan set the blade down on the ground beside him.
Not far enough to be useless, but far enough for the child to see.
The child’s eyes widened.
Jing Yuan kept his hand away from the hilt.
“There,” he said again, quieter.
The child swallowed.
His throat worked with the motion. Dry, Jing Yuan noted. Exhausted. His lips were cracked. There was a bruise near one temple, old enough to have yellowed at the edges. No visible heavy bleeding. No obvious sign of mara-struck corruption. Too thin beneath the robe. Too small beneath the grime and torn fabric and terrible stillness.
Too alone.
Jing Yuan’s mind continued its assessment because that was what it had been trained to do. Distance to the blade. Distance to the child. Possible movement from the east. Roots near the threshold, inactive for now. Flowers behind him, too many. If the child lunged, if something behind the child lunged, if the breath had been bait and the true threat waited above the doorframe-
And beneath all of it, the simpler fact remained.
The child had stopped staring at the sword and he was looking at Jing Yuan now.
“What is your name?” Jing Yuan asked.
The child stared at him. Perhaps he did not understand. Perhaps he did and did not trust the question. Perhaps no one had asked him anything kindly in some time.
Jing Yuan tried again. “Can you speak?”
The child’s mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
His face crumpled with panic at his own silence.
Jing Yuan lifted one hand slightly. “It is all right.”
The child’s breath hitched. Jing Yuan did not move. A shudder passed through the child’s body. His hand came out of his sleeve, closed around the broken half of something wooden. A toy, perhaps, if one were generous. A stick, if one were not.
He let go of it. The broken thing dropped into the dust with a small sound.
Jing Yuan watched the child look from it, to the blade on the ground, to Jing Yuan’s open hand.
He took one step out from beneath the doorway.
Then another.
Both were slow. Too slow. Even then, his bare foot caught on the torn hem of his robe, and his shoulder knocked lightly against the broken frame as he tried to steady himself. He did not take his eyes off Jing Yuan. Not once.
On the third step, his knee buckled.
Jing Yuan moved before he thought better of it. Only a little. Only enough to put his hand within reach, palm open, fingers loose.
The child grabbed him.
Both small hands closed around Jing Yuan’s fingers with desperate force. The grip was shockingly strong for something so small. He made a sound then, broken and breathless, and tried to stand.
His legs failed immediately.
Jing Yuan caught him before he hit the ground.
The child flinched again when Jing Yuan’s arm came around him, then clutched harder, panic and relief tangling so tightly they had become the same thing. He was lighter than he should have been. Too warm in some places, too cold in others. His whole body shook against Jing Yuan’s chest.
“There,” Jing Yuan murmured, though he did not know yet what he meant by it. “I have you.”
The child pressed his face into the front of Jing Yuan’s armor.
And sobbed.
Not loudly. It did not seem like he had the strength for it. The sound was thin and exhausted, muffled against fabric, his small hands fisted in anything they could reach. Jing Yuan held him through it, one arm around the child, the other still angled toward the blade on the ground.
The ruin remained dangerous.
The mission remained unfinished.
There were still tracks to read, enemies to locate, a route to confirm before the Luofu’s troops advanced. Jing Yuan knew all of this. The part of his mind built for command had not gone silent. It was already counting distance, supplies, risk, the quickest route back to the nearest safe point, the likely time before nightfall, the practical difficulty of carrying a child through hostile ground.
So he watched the doorway over the child’s head. He watched the roots in the cracked stone. He watched the red flowers shivering where no wind touched them. And he let the child cry.
There was nothing else to do for him yet. No question that would make sense through exhaustion. No reassurance that would not sound like another adult word, too large and too late. Jing Yuan could not make the ruin safe by saying so. He could not make himself harmless by wanting it. All he could do was remain still, remain present, and keep the child close enough that every small shudder met the same answer.
Then, so quietly Jing Yuan almost missed it, the child mumbled something into the fabric.
Jing Yuan looked down. “Hm?”
The small face remained hidden. Only loose hair and one dirt-smudged cheek were visible. The child’s hands had not loosened. His fingers were twisted so tightly in Jing Yuan’s clothes that pulling away would have hurt them both.
Another muffled sound came from against his chest.
Jing Yuan lowered his head slightly. “What was that?”
The child swallowed. His throat worked painfully with the motion.
“My name,” he whispered.
Jing Yuan went still. The child shifted only enough for one wet, enormous eye to look up at him from beneath the fall of tangled hair. His voice was hoarse, offended almost, as though Jing Yuan was at fault for not listening correctly.
“Yanqing,” he said. “You asked.”
Ah.
Jing Yuan looked at him.
Yanqing.
Not cargo. Not a survivor. Not an impossibility tucked beneath a broken doorway. Not merely a child, though all those things remained true in their own insufficient ways.
Yanqing.
“Yes,” Jing Yuan said, very softly. “I did.” After a moment, his face crumpled again, but the tears that came now were smaller. Less desperate. His head dropped back against Jing Yuan’s chest. Jing Yuan kept his hand steady against his back.
“Were you alone here?” he asked after a while.
Yanqing’s fingers tightened, but no other answer came.
“Is there anyone else?”
Yanqing made a small sound. Not a no, but not a yes either. Only confusion, or fear, or a tired child’s failure to sort one terrible thing from another.
“All right,” Jing Yuan said. “No more questions.”
Yanqing’s breath hitched.
“All right,” Jing Yuan repeated, because the first time had not reached him. “I have you now.”
The words were simple. Perhaps too simple for the situation. He did not know what he would do with the child past the next few minutes. He did not know whether there were more enemies in the settlement, whether the signal would hold, whether the troops behind him would receive his route adjustment before nightfall. He did not know whether this small life in his arms had parents somewhere in the ruins, bodies beneath the flowers, names waiting to be found and added to a report.
He only knew that Yanqing had heard him.
The child’s grip tightened once, weakly, then loosened again. Not fully. Even exhaustion did not persuade him to let go. But his body sagged against Jing Yuan’s chest, fever-warm in some places and too cold in others, all that terrible tension giving way at once. His eyes closed. His breath came unevenly for several moments, then steadier, though still rough from crying.
Jing Yuan waited until he was certain the child had fallen asleep.
Only then did he move.
Slowly, carefully, he shifted Yanqing higher against his chest. The child made a soft, unhappy sound but did not wake. Jing Yuan gathered him with one arm, supporting his head against his shoulder, then reached for his blade with the other hand.
Yanqing startled at the scrape of metal against stone. He jolted, still asleep, only enough for his hand to clutch blindly at Jing Yuan’s clothes.
“It is all right,” Jing Yuan murmured. “Still here.”
The small fingers stayed locked in the fabric. That, Jing Yuan supposed, would have to do.
He rose with the child held close against him and the blade ready in his free hand. It was not an ideal arrangement. Carrying a sleeping toddler through corrupted territory while armed one-handed was, by almost every available measure, a poor development.
The mission remained unfinished.
The nearest safe point was still too far.
The ruined lane ahead was no cleaner than it had been before. In fact, it had become considerably worse.
Jing Yuan looked out over the broken settlement, where the wind moved through broken windows and red flowers shivered from the cracks in the stone. Somewhere beyond the courtyard, something shifted faintly, then went still. He adjusted Yanqing against his side. His cheek was pressed against Jing Yuan’s chest. His mouth had fallen slightly open in sleep, and a damp patch was beginning to form on the front of Jing Yuan’s clothes.
Of course.
The timing was disastrous, the trust premature, and the drool entirely undeserved.
Jing Yuan looked down at him.
One small hand still gripped his sleeve, as if even unconsciousness had not persuaded him to let go.
Something in Jing Yuan’s chest moved. Inconveniently.
He had come alone because it was practical, because it was efficient, because if the worst happened then at least it would happen cleanly, in a place where no one would have to watch another familiar face become a warning. Because worst case scenario he'd rest after having gloriously continued the Hunt.
Now there was a child asleep against his heart.
Clean endings, Jing Yuan thought, were apparently no longer available.
He sighed.
Then he began looking for somewhere safer to pass the night.