At that, the rider paused, then continued in the same carrying voice: "If your children suffer from colds or fever, it makes no difference, we will see them treated!"
The words hit the camp like a spark to tinder. Refugees with children surged forward at once, pressing in with questions, and one by one the children were pulled aside to be examined, physicians feeling along their bones, testing their constitution, asking for their birth dates and the hour of their birth.
Anjing's bone constitution was unusual for his age, taller and larger-framed than most boys his age, but he was just past eleven, which put him squarely within their requirements. He listened to the rider's announcement, watching the lines already forming as parents steered their children forward, and felt his fists close without quite meaning to.
Just then, a father and daughter approached the encampment. The man dropped to his knees in the snow, his daughter cradled against his chest, and pleaded with the physician: "Sir, please, my daughter has frostbite. She can't die. Please, I'm begging you, have mercy"
The girl's fingers and arms were swollen and mottled purple where the cold had taken hold. Her eyes were glazed, her awareness barely there. To Anjing's eye, she wouldn't last, it wouldn't have surprised him if she were gone within the hour.
The physician showed no particular reaction. He stepped forward, seized the girl's hand, shoved back her sleeve, and prodded along the bones with clinical efficiency, drawing a sharp little cry from her. Then he turned to the father and asked for her birth date and natal hour.
"Mm." He turned back and murmured something to the rider and the scholar standing beside him. Both men nodded with the faint satisfaction of people who had found exactly what they were looking for.
"Give her the treatment." Flat, unhurried.
The physician reached into a case behind him and produced a small pill, dissolving it in water and helping the girl drink it down. Then he uncapped a vial of reddish-purple oil and applied it directly to the frostbitten flesh.
The girl shrieked, sharp and instinctive, as though touched with fire.
But almost immediately, the blankness left her eyes. She stared at her own hand, blinking slowly. Then she turned to her father with an expression caught somewhere between wonder and disbelief.
"Papa, my hand. Papa, I can feel my hand again."
The father was not a man of many words. He pulled his daughter into his arms and wept, then pressed his forehead to the frozen ground before the riders in three deep, resounding bows.
"All right, enough, step back." The rider's mood had lightened; he waved them off and turned to the next in line.
The two of them were well known in the camp. Most people had already written the girl off as lost. Seeing these riders spend real medicine on her, and watching it work, broke something open in the crowd. The mood swung completely. These were a great family's men, they decided. Their master was a man of genuine virtue.
Anjing, standing in the press of bodies, raised an eyebrow.
He had been watching carefully. What he saw didn't add up.
The riders moved with a precision that could only come from extreme, sustained training, not the rehearsed discipline of household guards, but something forged under conditions most people didn't survive. The leader's combat readiness never lapsed; his hand never drifted far from his blade, his single eye scanning the crowd with the alert, coiled attention of a man who had never once allowed himself to be caught off guard.
And the scholar at his side was something else entirely. Anjing's mother had genuine martial ability, she had reached the stage practitioners called inner breath as thread, where the body's vital energy flowed in true, controllable currents, lifting her well above the level of common street fighters. Anjing could read his mother's depth at a glance, the scholar was unreadable. Which meant the man either carried some esoteric technique that masked his ability, or he had already reached inner breath as tide, the stage where that energy grew powerful enough to leave the body altogether, to act at a remove from flesh and bone.
That level of training. That level of power. If these really were a great household's retainers, then it was one of the old clans, the kind whose names moved mountains. So why announce themselves with no name at all?
Something's off. But they have the medicine.
Having watched a girl he'd already marked for dead walk away using her own hands, Anjing was certain: these people carried what was needed to heal his mother.
It also made them less likely to be ordinary slavers.
Slavers dealing in children wanted children they could sell on — healthy ones, sellable ones, worth something on the open market. They had no reason to accept sick children, let alone spend medicine on them. These people behaved as though the children themselves were the point. As if what mattered was not the price the child would fetch, but the child.
"imperial agents cultivating their own? A hidden sect?" He turned the question over quietly. Checking bone constitution, asking for birth hours, that's too deliberate for a merchant house.
Under ordinary circumstances, Anjing would not have hesitated, selling himself as an indentured servant to buy medicine for his mother was a straightforward trade, even if the household turned out to be cruel or violent. A normal wealthy family could never hold him if he decided to leave.
Even genuine slavers he would have backed himself against. Bide his time. Find the crack. Walk away.
But people whose origins were this opaque, whose backing was this obscure, that was a different calculation entirely. Who knew what they were? A southern cult. Some devil's sect. Something stranger, out of the deep mountains, with purposes no sane person would want to be tangled up in.
"No. Enough." He set the instinct aside and gave a small shake of his head. Whatever these people were, what they were doing here was keeping people alive. And he had no other choices left.
Anjing closed his eyes. He thought of his mother, her breathing shallower each morning, the light in her eyes dimming by degrees, the end already visible on the horizon like a storm that had been approaching for days.
If he sold himself, the worst that could happen was death. The odds favoured survival. If he did nothing, his mother's death was not a possibility but a certainty.
Nothing to deliberate over.
He opened his eyes and walked toward the encampment.
By now, a number of families had already made their decision.
Giving up a child was a way out for everyone, and this group was making it easy: the grain was real, the medicine worked, and the riders were not haggling. The response from families with children was overwhelming, a desperation so complete it had curdled into something almost like relief.
Within a short time, more than twenty children had been gathered together. Their parents collected their grain and stood nearby, watching their children across the distance with expressions impossible to name, grief and gratitude so tangled together they had become a single, wordless thing.
Anjing arrived alone. No one behind him. Just his own footprints pressing into the snow.
"Hmm?"
The white-robed scholar beside the one-eyed leader noticed him first, something snagged his attention and he turned. His gaze was unhurried at first, almost indifferent. Then it sharpened, fixing on Anjing with a sudden, focused intensity, the way a blade finds an edge when drawn across a whetstone.
Following the scholar's eyes, the one-eyed leader turned as well.
His single eye brightened.
At first glance, Anjing looked unremarkable, lean, not yet imposing in stature, just another refugee child, somewhat large-framed for his age but nothing that would demand a second look in the northern frontier. But both the leader and the scholar were martial practitioners. They could see past the gaunt surface to what lay beneath: solid bone, inner breath quietly circulating, the gaunt surface a mask over something else entirely. Sharp angles. Barely contained danger.
"You want to offer yourself?"
The leader turned his horse toward Anjing, curiosity evident. "If it's you, I can make the call myself, your family gets two dou of premium grain."
"Sir."
Anjing raised his head and met the rider's gaze directly. The man had the bearing of someone who had spent a lifetime dealing out violence and receiving it in return, and it showed in the way he held himself, in the set of his shoulders, the stillness of his hands, the readiness coiled beneath the surface like a drawn bowstring. Anjing looked at him without flinching and spoke without deference or defiance, his voice level and unhurried.
"I am willing. But not for myself, I'm here to ask for medicine for my mother."
"My father was a juren. Our family carries a martial lineage, we are not ordinary people. I am in good health, with no illness or injury. Life on the ice plain is hard, but I have no pressing need to sell my life."
"However, my mother has sustained a lung injury. She needs medicine urgently."
"I am asking, sir, whether you would give her that medicine."
"I believe I am worth the price."
The rider's smile faded. His single eye narrowed and moved over Anjing slowly, taking the measure of him. Then, without warning, he spurred his horse forward, straight at Anjing, pulling up only when the animal's bulk was nearly on top of him, the great beast stopping at his side in a spray of snow.
A northwestern war horse was effectively a weapon of flesh and bone. Even a light landing sent a tremor through the ground. Even knowing with certainty it wasn't going to hit you, when something that size came driving at your face at speed, the body moved before the mind could stop it — a flinch, a half-step back, some instinctive act of self-preservation.
Anjing didn't move. He held the exact posture of his salute, hands folded, head level, eyes forward. His expression did not shift. He didn't even blink.
"Good."
A genuine grin broke across his weathered face. "You're something different, that's plain enough. Whether you're worth what you're asking for..."
He and the white-robed scholar exchanged a glance. The scholar made a dry remark, reminds me of a certain someone, roughly your age and then his outline simply ceased to be there.
Anjing's eyes narrowed fractionally. He had not been able to follow the movement at all. Not even a suggestion of motion, there one moment, gone the next, like a candle snuffed between two fingers.
The one-eyed leader dismounted.
He was a large man, built like an iron tower, dense with the kind of mass that came not from bulk but from decades of compression, of training that had packed something extraordinary into every inch of him. His body radiated such concentrated inner breath that snowflakes drifting onto him melted before they could settle. Each footfall landed heavy and deliberate, reverberating up through the frozen ground. Eyes closed, listening only to those footsteps, a person might have thought a wild bull was pacing across the plain.
The blood-smell on him was deep and old — heavier, even, than the bandit chief who had ridden the northern frontier for years pillaging everything in his path. He studied Anjing for a long moment, something unspoken moving behind his single eye, and then smiled with what appeared to be genuine appreciation.
"Thin, but the foundation is real. No wonder you came in with your chin up."
Without further preamble, he reached out and gripped Anjing's arm, pressing and working along the bone and muscle with his fingers, feeling the quality of what lay beneath the skin.
"Exceptional." He said it almost to himself, turning Anjing's arm with the absorbed focus of a craftsman examining raw material he had waited a long time to find, as if he held not a boy's arm but iron ore smelted to its purest form, or ice that had been compressing in silence for a thousand years. "Dense marrow, solid bone, proportions just right. Decades since I've seen bone constitution like this. Maybe longer."
Through the discomfort of the grip, Anjing felt something else — an invisible pressure entering through the point of contact, circulating through him in deliberate paths, finding the major nodes along his meridians and pressing into them one by one. Waves of dull ache and pins-and-needles moved through his limbs in slow, probing pulses.
He kept his face blank and endured it, turning the sensation over in his mind with careful attention.
This was not an ordinary technique. Inner breath projecting outward through physical touch — that was the exclusive capability of a practitioner at *inner breath as river* or above. Energy disciplined enough, powerful enough, to leave the body and act on another.
The sheer force of it left no doubt: *inner breath as tide*, at minimum.
Just then the white-robed scholar reappeared, stepping back into existence from wherever he had gone, as casually as if he had merely turned a corner. He gave the one-eyed leader a small, quiet nod. The large man released Anjing's arm, held his gaze for one long, measuring moment, then swung back onto his horse in a single fluid motion.
"You're worth it." He looked down from the saddle, and there was something in his voice now that hadn't been there before; not warmth exactly, but the particular regard of a man who rarely found what he was looking for. "This is yours."
Across the encampment, the scholar and the physicians had been quietly assembling something. Two men now carried a large chest between them and set it down in front of Anjing, the weight of it thudding against the frozen ground.
"Medicines and grain," the leader said. "Enough to treat every injury your mother has and replenish what's been lost. Enough for a proper meal."
"Take it to her."
"Then come back."
He offered no elaboration. Neither of them needed it, both understood perfectly well what it would mean if either side broke their word.
Anjing looked at the chest. It was roughly the size of his own torso and weighed, at a guess, well over a hundred jin. He didn't know why the one-eyed rider had been this generous, this open-handed with someone who had walked up out of the snow with nothing to offer but himself, but fortune had found him today in a way he couldn't quite explain.
The medicines and grain in that chest, in this Frost Calamity-ravaged northern frontier, were worth ten lives. Perhaps more.
He didn't hesitate. He bent down, closed both hands around the handles, and lifted it in one clean movement, settling the weight across his shoulder.
"Thank you, sir."
His breathing came harder now, but his voice was steady. With that, he turned and walked back across the snow toward the shelter where his mother waited, each step deliberate, the chest heavy on his shoulder, the cold closing around him like a fist.
----
1, Juren: Second-tier imperial examination qualification, retained untranslated as a period-appropriate status marker. The social weight, educated family, not nobility but not common either
2. One e hundred jin: Roughly fifty kilograms. Retained as jin to preserve the period register; the feat reads as impressive but within the bounds of a physically exceptional adolescent with unusual bone constitution.