Huang shing started with questions.
"How frequently did the uncle visit the cultivator?" he asked.
An older woman near the back answered first. "Every three months. He would collect all the tributes from the villages and carry them up the mountain."
"When is the next visit due?"
"Forty days from now."
Forty days.
Huang shing turned the number over in his mind. It was not generous but it was workable. He began building the plan immediately, layer by layer, the way he built everything.
His first thought was simple and honest.
*If these people had guns, this would already be over.*
He looked at the faces around him—farmers, traders, parents, elderly men and women who had spent their entire lives believing that cultivators were untouchable forces of nature beyond the reach of ordinary people. That belief was the cultivator's most powerful weapon. More powerful than any spiritual artifact. More powerful than any technique.
He needed to break it.
But first he needed to arm them.
He divided the village into teams. Each team received a specific list of materials to collect—sulfur deposits, charcoal sources, mineral formations from the surrounding geography. He explained what each material was for without explaining the complete picture yet. He needed them moving before he needed them understanding.
In a small house near the eastern edge of the village, a child was crying.
His mother sat beside him on the floor with her hand pressed over his mouth, her eyes moving to the window and back, to the door and back, the way eyes move when a person is listening for something they do not want to hear.
"Shhh," she whispered. "Shh. Stop. Stop now."
The boy could not stop.
She pulled him closer and lowered her voice until it was almost nothing.
"Yang. Listen to me. Listen." She waited until his shaking slowed enough that she knew he could hear her. "What would your father say if he saw you like this?"
The boy's breath hitched.
"You remember what you told him? Last spring, before the harvest? You sat in his lap and you told him you would go to the capital one day. That you would become a soldier for the nation. You said it yourself." She smoothed the hair back from his wet face. "You were so proud when you said it. Your father smiled for three days after." Her voice caught slightly and she steadied it. "That is the boy your father knew. That is the bravest child your father ever had. So why are you acting like a small kid now?"
Yang pulled her hand from his mouth.
"Why is everyone supporting that monster?"
His mother's hand came back instantly.
Her grip was harder this time.
She looked at the window. She looked at the door. She held the position for several seconds, completely still, listening to the sounds of the village outside.
Nothing.
She released him slowly and turned to face him with an expression he had never seen on her before. Not grief. Not sadness. Something colder and more frightening than either.
"Yang," she said very quietly. "If you say one more word. One more word like that, anywhere, in this house or outside it, I will tie you to that post for seven days. No food. No water. Seven days."
His mouth opened.
"Do you understand me?"
He looked at her face and understood.
Not that she was angry. Not that she was cruel.
She was afraid.
She was afraid that someone outside had heard him. That someone passing the window had caught even a syllable of what he had just said. That the wrong person had been walking by at the wrong moment and was now carrying those words to someone who would act on them.
Yang understood all of this without being told.
And understanding it made him cry harder, silently, the kind of crying that a child does when they realize for the first time that the world is not arranged in any way that resembles fairness.
His mother pulled him into her chest and held him there, her hand resting on the back of his head, her own eyes dry and fixed on the door.
She did not cry.
She had learned a long time ago that crying was a sound.
And sounds carried.
While the teams dispersed Huang shing began mapping.
Huang shing questioned the villagers carefully about everything they knew of the surrounding area. The geography took shape gradually—three villages in total, sitting in a loose triangle around the mountain. The one he was in was the smallest. Two larger settlements existed on the other side of the mountain, and a third sat deeper near the forest edge.
The picture that emerged was clear.
The cultivation sect was running a government. The cultivator on the mountain was a regional administrator, sent to manage these three villages, identify talented mortals with cultivation aptitude, and collect resources on behalf of whoever sat above him in the sect hierarchy. The uncle had been his instrument in this village. There would be similar instruments in the other two.
This also meant the cultivator had no particular emotional attachment to the uncle. The uncle was a tool. A broken tool would be replaced, not mourned.
Which meant revenge was not necessarily the cultivator's primary motivation for coming down the mountain.
Resources were.
If the tributes continued arriving on schedule, if the resource collection remained uninterrupted, the cultivator might be willing to overlook a great deal in exchange for not having to deal with the administrative inconvenience of a disrupted village.
It was not a permanent solution. But it was a negotiating position.
Huang shing filed it away and returned to the immediate work.
He gathered the villagers who were most capable with their hands and began teaching them. He showed them a grenade—held it up, broke down its components one by one, explained the chemistry in plain language stripped of every technical term that would confuse rather than illuminate.
The reaction surprised even him.
Once they understood that the materials were common—that nothing in the weapon came from spiritual energy or cultivation techniques or magical inheritance—the expressions in the crowd shifted from reverence to something more dangerous.
Possibility.
"You can make this," he told them. "Any of you. It requires no talent, no aptitude, no spiritual roots. It requires only hands and patience."
He watched that land.
Then he began laying traps.
He spent three days mapping the approaches to the village and designing trigger mechanisms along every viable entry path. Pressure traps. Flame traps. Concealed charges buried beneath packed earth that would detonate under the weight of a person crossing them. He walked the perimeter himself, placing each one with precise spacing, testing the trigger sensitivity, marking the safe paths in his memory.
The villagers helped without being asked twice. The work gave them something to do with the fear and that made them easier to direct.
Then a team returned from the nearby village carrying something that made Huang shing stop what he was doing entirely.
Iron ore. High grade. In significant quantity.
He turned it over in his hands for a long moment.
Then he set everything else aside.
For the next week he worked on nothing else. He built a crude forge from available stone and clay, produced bellows from animal hide, and began the slow process of smelting, shaping, and assembling components by hand. The barrel was the hardest part. He worked it in sections, testing each joint for integrity before moving to the next, discarding three failed attempts before producing something he was satisfied with.
On the eighth day he held up the finished prototype.
It was rough. Ugly by any standard he had grown up with. The barrel was uneven, the grip was wrapped leather over shaped wood, and the firing mechanism was a simplified flintlock design stripped to its essential components. The gunpowder it used was weaker than he wanted.
But it worked.
He took it to the center of the village, loaded it carefully in full view of everyone who had gathered to watch, aimed at a clay pot sitting on a post forty feet away, and fired.
The sound alone scattered three people backward in shock.
The pot disappeared.
The silence that followed lasted several seconds.
Then everyone started talking at once.
Huang shing watched their faces and saw exactly what he needed to see. Not just surprise. Not just fear of the weapon. Something more important—the dawning, disorienting realization that a piece of metal and powder had just done something that most of them had only ever seen cultivation achieve. Destruction at a distance. Instant and invisible and unstoppable.
"The bullet moves faster than any eye in this village can follow," he said into the noise. "You hear the sound after it has already arrived. No cultivator at the level of the man on that mountain can react to something he cannot see coming."
The crowd absorbed this in silence.
Mass production began the next morning.
The teams reorganized themselves without being told, moving with a focused collective energy that had been entirely absent forty days ago. The forge ran day and night. Materials moved in from collection routes and finished components moved out to assembly points. Within two weeks they had eleven functional weapons of varying quality and enough ammunition for each to fire multiple times.
It was not an army.
But it was no longer a village of helpless mortals either.
And through all of it, Huang shing transmitted everything back to the ship. Every observation, every cultural detail, every piece of information about the cultivation sect's administrative structure and resource requirements. The original Huang shing received it all and built a picture that grew more detailed and more useful with every passing day.
Then a villager came to find him at the forge.
"The tribute period," the man said. "It arrives in three days."
Huang shing set down his tools.
The forty days were almost gone.
On the morning of the tribute day Huang shing called for Yang's mother.
The other villagers watched her go with quiet eyes. Nobody spoke. She walked across the village square alone, her hands folded in front of her, her steps careful and controlled the way a person walks when they are trying not to show that their legs are unsteady.
Huang shing was standing outside the storage house where the collected tributes had been gathered. He looked at her when she arrived and said nothing for a moment.
Then he smiled slightly.
"What a devoted mother," he said. "The way you love that boy. It is something rare."
She said nothing.
"Yang," he continued, as if recalling the name fondly. "Bright child. Brave. He told his father he would go to the capital one day. Become a soldier for the nation." He tilted his head slightly. "Did you know he still believes that? Even now."
Her jaw tightened.
"I sometimes think about what happens to children when they lose their mothers," Huang shing said. His voice remained completely conversational. Unhurried. "A child that age, no father, no mother. He would have to beg, I think. Outside the village hall. Or find some rich household willing to take in a servant boy." He paused. "All those plans about the capital. All that bravery. Gone." He looked at her directly. "Don't you think?"
The woman's composure broke.
Not loudly. Not with drama.
Her face simply collapsed inward the way a structure collapses when the single weight bearing beam finally gives. Her eyes filled and her hands came up and she pressed them hard against her mouth to keep the sound from coming out.
She understood.
She understood every word he had not said. The shape of the threat was perfectly clear without him ever having named it directly. He had not said *obey me or your son suffers.* He had not needed to.
He had simply described a world in which she was absent.
And let her imagination do the rest.
Huang shing watched her for a moment.
"I need the tribute delivered to the mountain without incident," he said quietly. "I need every person in this village to behave exactly as they have always behaved. Nothing unusual. Nothing that draws attention." He let the silence sit for one breath. "Can I count on you?"
She nodded without looking up.
Her hands were still pressed against her mouth.
"Good," he said. "Your son is going to the capital. I have decided." He turned back toward the storage house. "Make sure he earns it."
He walked inside.
She stood in the square alone for a long moment before her legs remembered how to carry her home.
She came home and found Yang sitting in the corner mending a torn piece of cloth the way she had taught him, his small hands working the needle slowly and seriously.
She crossed the room and kissed him on the top of his head.
Yang looked up.
He stared at her with wide bright eyes, the needle still held between his fingers, completely confused.
"What happened?" he said. "Why did you suddenly—"
"You are going to the capital."
Yang blinked.
"What?"
"I have found someone willing to pay for your studies there." She straightened up and smoothed the front of her clothes with both hands, not looking at him. "You will become a great soldier. Just like you said."
Yang sat very still.
His face moved through several expressions in quick succession—surprise, confusion, a cautious and fragile happiness that did not yet trust itself enough to fully arrive.
"But—" he started. "How. When did you—why so suddenly—"
"Yang."
He stopped.
She was looking at him now. Her eyes were dry and her voice was steady and she was smiling the particular smile that mothers produce when they have decided their child does not need to know everything.
"Just be happy," she said.
He stood there holding his mending, smiling uncertainly, trying to understand what had shifted in the world while he was sitting in the corner.
He could not figure it out.
But the capital. A soldier. Everything he had told his father.
The smile stopped being uncertain and became something real.
His mother watched it happen.
Then she turned away before he could see her face change.
"Wait here," she said, already moving toward the door. "I will be back soon."
She lifted the first bundle of tribute from beside the entrance, settled its weight across her shoulders, and walked out into the morning without looking back.
Yang stood in the middle of the room holding his needle and thread, smiling at the empty doorway.