They left the pine ridge at dusk, following an old goat trail that cut west from the trader's road. Li Shen led the way this time — boots dragging over broken stones and gnarled roots. Yue Lan walked half a step behind, threads drawn close, whispering soft against her wrist.
Neither spoke of the crows. Words wouldn't chase off eyes that never blinked.
---
By nightfall they found the house — an abandoned farmhouse halfway up a terraced slope, rice paddies dry and cracked from a winter no one had tended. The roof sagged in one corner, its clay tiles bleeding moss. Wind rattled loose shutters like old bones.
Li Shen stepped through the warped doorway first. The single room inside was empty but for an overturned stool, a scatter of rotted rice husks, and a prayer scroll nailed to the far beam. The characters were smeared by rain, but he could still read one word: Prosperity.
He barked a short laugh. Yue Lan caught the sound, her eyes glinting in the gloom.
"Funny?"
Li Shen tapped the scroll with his blade's tip. "Every ruin still hopes for a crown."
She smiled, small and tired. Her spirit threads drifted to brush the doorway behind him — weaving faint loops that shivered like breath against rotten wood.
---
They didn't light a fire. The night was too close for flame. Instead, they sat back to back, knees drawn up, listening to the wind creep through broken shutters.
Somewhere far down the slope, a dog barked once — then cut off like a blade through wet cloth.
Yue Lan's voice brushed the dark. "They'll come."
Li Shen's grin was teeth in the black. "Let them."
---
The first knife scratched at the back shutter near midnight — just a slip of steel on old wood, but enough to set Yue Lan's threads trembling. Li Shen didn't rise. He only shifted his weight, resting his blade across his thighs.
A second shape slipped around the front — boots too careful for a drunk, too clumsy for a monk.
Li Shen whispered, "Three."
Yue Lan's breath ghosted back, "Four."
---
The shutter cracked open. A thin figure squeezed halfway through — a flash of blade, a breath of poison on wool. Li Shen moved first — a quiet pivot, the blade's flat edge striking the intruder's wrist hard enough to pop bone. A muffled grunt, a splash of steel on the rotted floor.
The second came through the doorway — dagger drawn, eyes wide, drunk on rumor. Yue Lan's threads licked out like frost snakes, coiling around his neck before he found his breath. He fell to his knees, throat bubbling with half a prayer.
Li Shen rose as the third shape lunged through the open shutter — bigger, armored in mismatched plates, a bandit king once maybe, now a bounty hound sniffing silver. His blade met Li Shen's — iron on iron, sparks snapping into the dark. Their boots skidded over rice husks, dust choking the room.
---
When it was done, the floor was slick with spilled whispers and coin pouches that bought nothing.
Yue Lan stood in the doorway, hair tangled, eyes clear. Her threads drifted to Li Shen's blade, wiping blood from the nicked edge.
"You knew they'd come," she said.
Li Shen's breath steamed in the night chill. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, smearing dirt and rumor across his cheek.
"Crows can watch all they want," he said. "But thieves still bleed."
He nudged one of the fallen bodies with his boot — a silver talisman slipped free, stamped with a crow's single feather. Not a sect mark. Not a monk's prayer. A warning. Or a leash.
Yue Lan crushed it under her heel. Her spirit threads drifted out the door, brushing the wind as if to scatter any last word the dead might carry.
Outside, dawn's edge cut the fields in gray and pale gold. A ruin still hoping for a crown. A crown still refusing every chain.
And a house that bit back.
---
⚡ End of Chapter Eight — The House That Bites Back
---