The orchard's hush cracked at dawn — not from drills or frost, but from hunger's whisper carried on the wind.
Roots and rumor mean nothing to empty bellies.
---
By first light, Master Tian's house smelled of thin rice broth and stale barley cakes. Too thin to feed mouths swung steel all day. Too stale to keep children standing in frost.
Li Shen stood at the hearth, steam rising off a battered iron pot that once boiled medicine for plague and iron sickness alike. Now it boiled rumor's weakest link — hunger.
---
Yue Lan sat at the threshold, spirit threads drifting through the steam. She could weave frost into steel, but she could not weave rice where there was none.
She watched the villagers gather outside: men with hollow eyes from sleepless drills, mothers pressing half-cakes into children's palms, boys staring at the Wolfchain banner as if it might sprout bread instead of blades.
---
Master Tian leaned against the hearth, staff tapping the dirt floor.
"Steel feeds the spirit," he rasped, voice as dry as the rice. "But not the bone."
Li Shen's jaw tightened. He stirred the pot once. Water, two handfuls of cracked grain, a pinch of salt scraped from old stores. Enough for ten mouths, maybe. Thirty stood outside.
---
Yue Lan's threads brushed Li Shen's wrist.
"The orchard can't feed them," she said softly. "And the salt trail's cut off."
Li Shen said nothing. His eyes drifted to the battered pot, to the cracked wooden bowls stacked like broken promises on a shelf.
---
Master Tian barked a cough that rattled the steam.
"Sometimes the wolf must trade teeth for meat," he said.
Li Shen turned. His voice was low but sharp enough to cut the hush.
"Trade with who? The crown wants our heads. The traders want our rumor dead in the snow."
Tian's grin cracked his cracked lips.
"Then you don't trade coin," the old man rasped. "You trade fear."
---
At dusk, Li Shen left Tian's Watch with six villagers behind him — saw-scarred fathers and orchard hands too lean to swing blades, but strong enough to carry sacks and not ask questions.
Yue Lan went too — her threads flickering at their backs like cold lanterns.
They did not walk the ridge path. They took the old charcoal trail — half-buried under pine needles, winding toward the river bend where traveling traders risked coin for salt, rice, and rumor alike.
---
They found a camp at midnight — three wagons circled near the river, horses hobbled, iron pots steaming with rice so thick Li Shen could smell the fat in it before he saw the lanterns.
The traders sat low, backs to the fire. Armed, but careless — rich enough to feel safe where the crowns' iron patrols thinned.
Li Shen stepped from the brush, frost crunching under his boots.
One trader turned — saw the six shapes behind him, the lone figure at the front, the spirit threads ghosting like moonlight in the cold.
He rose, palm out.
"Stay," the trader barked. "We're under Nine Heavens seal—"
Li Shen's blade hissed free, edge glinting under the sickle moon.
"I'm under no seal," he said.
---
They left the traders alive — mostly. They left them rice too — half a sack to get them through the pass if they hurried. But the wagons' belly gave up its hoard: rice, barley, dried fish, a sack of bitter roots, two coils of salt rope older than the crown's latest tax decree.
Li Shen's men shouldered the sacks. Yue Lan's threads drifted over the half-conscious traders slumped by the fire, binding shallow cuts with frost to stop them from freezing before they crawled home.
---
Back at Tian's Watch by dawn, smoke rose from Master Tian's hearth again — but this time it smelled like fat rice porridge, fish broth, a rumor stronger than hunger.
The children ate first. The orchard hands next. Fathers last.
Li Shen did not eat. He stood by the Wolfchain banner as the sun cracked the frost.
Rumor demands blood.
And sometimes rumor feeds it back — warm as soup in the belly of frost-bitten hope.
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⚡ End of Chapter Twenty-One — Blood for Bread
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