Wangna came to him at night.
Everyone else kept their distance from Huang Shing by instinct now. They respected him. They followed him. But there was a space around him that people did not enter without being called. Wangna had never paid much attention to that space.
She sat across from him and looked at him directly.
"Where do you come from."
Huang Shing looked at her.
"Everyone is asking this," she said. "Nobody will say it to your face. But everyone is asking." She paused. "You are not from any village near here. You are not from any city anyone has heard of. You know things nobody knows. You build things nobody has ever seen." She held his gaze. "What are you."
Huang Shing was quiet for a moment.
"A mortal," he said. "The same as you. The same as everyone in this village."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only answer that matters." He looked at her steadily. "I am not from this place. That is true. I come from somewhere far from here. And I have seen what mortals are capable of when nobody has told them yet what they cannot do." He paused. "I could not look at what was happening here and keep walking."
Wangna was quiet.
"Everything I have built," he said, "was built from mortal materials. No spiritual power. No cultivation. No sect backing. No ancient technique." He let that sit. "Everything you have seen is something any mortal can do."
She looked at him for a long time.
"The dream you showed everyone," she said finally. "Is it real. Is it actually possible."
"Yes."
"You are certain."
"I have never shown anyone a dream I could not build."
She was quiet again. Something was moving behind her eyes. Not quite belief yet. Something closer to the moment before belief when a person is deciding whether the evidence is strong enough to justify the risk of hoping.
"The cannon," he said. "When it fires, every cultivator on this continent will feel it. Not the sound. Not the destruction." He looked at her. "The knowledge that a mortal built it."
Wangna nodded slowly.
Then she asked what he needed her to do.
He told her to scatter the village.
Slowly. Quietly. In small groups moving in different directions over several days. Craftsmen sent to nearby villages on minor work. Traders heading toward distant markets. Wanderers who had always planned to move on. Families relocating to be closer to relatives. Nothing unusual. Nothing that looked like dispersal.
He wanted the knowledge distributed across the region before the mountain could contain it. Every person who left carried something in their head that had not existed in this world before they learned it. Gunpowder. Metallurgy. The understanding that cultivators were biology not gods.
Seeds.
He wanted them everywhere before the frost came.
He asked Wangna to take a team into the forest and wait.
She did not ask why. She understood what the empty village would become.
Then he called his last cavalry.
Sixty men.
The best fighters from every engagement since the first night with the uncle. The ones who had held the trench line when Houji's storm hit. The ones who had kept loading when their hands were shaking. The ones who had run toward the sound rather than away from it.
He had given them something new.
Semi automatic weapons assembled from better components and village metalwork over the final two weeks. Not perfect. But capable of a rate of fire that made everything they had used before seem like it belonged to a different era entirely.
Which it did.