The ward stones are simply another thing that Mei Cao can take for granted. They are small round stones with a few characters of mysterious writing etched into them, placed down one every fifty feet or so along the perimeter of their woods. They were purchased partially by her father's expense, and they are still paying off the loan. The price was discounted by the grace of duchess Cai, who mandates that villagers be kept safe and treated fairly. Occasionally, a cultivator from the Ministry arrives in the village to investigate the whole perimeter and issue replacements.

They keep hostile beasts and spirits away. You never go beyond the ward stones alone, unless it's along the road back to the village, which has its own set of ward stones.

These things were told to her often enough, and implied in the stories her father tells, that it has reached the level of a subconscious, immutable fact.

Reinforcing this is that, from an early age, Mei Cao could pick out the stones from a distance of a dozen feet or so, glowing softly and feeling warm and safe like small, steadily burning embers. She could also hear the disquieting whispers of spirits, sometimes, when father's hunts take them past the ward line. The whispers and strange, unnerving feelings grow twice or thrice as strong if you step beyond the line.

Today, as she is collecting wood from a copse near the line of stones, she cannot help but see that one of them is cold and lifeless, its steady ember of protection gone dark. If she walks up to examine it directly, it proves to have cracked into two pieces.

That's not good. She will not run to warn her father, because she's carrying as much wood as she can manage and doesn't want to just drop it all and certainly doesn't want to fall in the woods and break something. But she will go as swiftly as seems feasible back to where he's already most of the way through building the second of the pits they were going to burn today. The first is already burning. 

Nothing seems to be really wrong just yet, even with the damaged stone. These woods are the same ones she knows well.

"Hey Dad! I think one of the wardstones was broken? Or something like that. It had a crack in it, it didn't look right." 

Her dad grumbles.

"Well, we'd better report it to the headman. He'll know what to do. But the fire's already burning, we can't afford to waste the fuel. So it'll have to be when we're back in the village." 

She'll trust his judgement. The ward-line can't possibly be a fragile thing, if it's kept them all safe this long. And it would be a terrible waste, to lose all their work thus far. She returns to collecting the final ingredients for the second burn. 

Things go fine and normally, for the first day. It's busy, and you can't wander far.

And then in the middle of the night, Mei Cao hears something trundling through the brush towards the charcoal burns, muttering indistinct curses and complaints in a wet and sick sounding voice.

She tears herself away from staring at the burn for any hint of escaping flame, and shouts, trying not to be so loud as to wake her father in his tiny lean-to. 

"Hey! Who is it? Be careful, we've got a burn going here!" 

She doesn't recognise the voice, but who is she kidding, she wouldn't. 

Out from the low brush comes a thing of oozing mud, almost as tall as her and thrice as wide. It does not reply so much in words as a stubborn, grumbling sound of complaint and accusation.

A spirit, or a monster, or something like that.

It doesn't have legs, merely a large pile of muck that drags itself along, leaving a stained trail as it approaches. It has something that might be called a face, at least, formed of the broken semi-hard crusts that the edges of a drying mud puddle tend to form. This face does not look happy, and is glaring at the charcoal kiln.

It pauses to regard her, raises an oozing 'arm' and points at the kiln, making more noises of complaint - they seep and shimmer across her mind, felt more than heard, and coming with a heavy, cold, stagnant feeling.

It doesn't like the burning. Fire is bad. She should put the fire out.

She's taken for a moment with the idea that the fire is burning out of control, but a glance at the mound shows it isn't, in fact. It must be ... something from the spirit. 

She's going to shout to wake her father, and then get out her sling and start hurling rocks at the spirit. It doesn't look bigger than a wolf; maybe it will go down like one. 

How annoying.

The mud thing ignores her sling stones as they sink into it with wet plops, and advances on the kiln, and begins tearing it apart with dozens of oozing tendrils of foul-smelling muck.

No! It can't do that! She's going to go grab a shovel and try and keep it away from the burn. Or fix the damage, or something. 

Her father is coming out of his hut, blearily looking for the problem, not quite sure what to do. But he's grabbing his own shovel, out of sheer ingrained reflex as much as anything else. 

The mud spirit flinches back from the heat and sparks when it breaches the outer shell of the kiln, allowing the fire to surge up vigorously and ignite all the partially-charcoaled wood with the sudden rush of air. It seems to be crusting over in the places that were closest to the sudden burst of wild fire.

Can she ... shove it further into the fire? Malicious spirits are weak to fire, right? 

Her shovel and her arms are instantly coated in the most vile sort of muck - heavy, sticky, clinging, cold.

Upon being attacked in this way, the mud spirit surges up and engulfs her entire head in muck! It tastes like dirt and winter. She can't breathe!

And then - something - She suddenly feels terribly cold and hopeless, so weak and sluggish that she could simply stop moving, then sink into the bottom of a bog and never be found.

She falls back in a panic and then - nothing. She fucked up.

She falls to the ground. 

She is vaguely aware that somewhere her father is shouting. 

She should still be fighting, but - the fire's not there, in her. 

She stops moving. 

It's as if it left something inside her, obstructive, foreign and disgustingly large, filling and clogging something inside her that is not quite her body or her mind. The sensation is incredibly alien, and rather painful.

The mud spirit sluggishly turns its attention back to the kiln, going to another spot that isn't burning so vigorously and starting to tear at it again.

Her father is going to have to drag her to safety, most likely.

She's not going to stop him. 

Is she dying? She hopes not. 

If her father has her, maybe she can just black out and when she comes round maybe she'll be in less pain. 

She drifts in and out of sleep, sitting in the village chief's house and being fed warm broth and helped to the outhouse by someone she doesn't recognize. Her father us usually there too, looking tense and miserable.

They ask her questions. What happened, exactly? When did she notice something was wrong? Why did she confront the spirit instead of running? Is she sure the ward stone only failed that day- Could it have been broken earlier, and they didn't notice? How does she feel?

(It does seem to slowly get better. The foreign fullness and the clinging ooze against her thoughts goes away, replaced with a more simple... Dirty clog sort of feeling. Even that seems to be slowly fading with time. After a week, she can move around normally. They aren't going back to their land yet, though, and nobody will tell her why, until-)

-An official arrives. Lin Shan. She has a stare that pins you in place with bright blue eyes, her robes smooth and shiny, her hair perfectly straight and pinned in place by a simple silver rod.

She bears a symbol of office, an owl's wings. Everyone gives her great deference, as an honored official of the Ministry of Integrity.

She has a lot of questions, too. For her father, for the chief, and eventually, for her. What did the spirit do? What did it say? How did it move? How did it feel when it attacked you?

She will relay her experiences basically truthfully. Lying sounds hard. The Wardstone might have broken sooner, she doesn't check them every day and she doesn't actually know what a broken or semi-broken wardstone looks like. She struggles to describe the sensations of the curse, lacking entirely the vocabulary. 

She spends a lot of time thinking about that clinging ooze sensation and how much she hates it, even so. 

Lin Shan writes things after each answer - in a tiny, tiny book covered in impossibly small writing that shines slightly gold, with a golden pen. She gives no indication of whether the answers are good or bad.

After a while, she spends a good few minutes writing things and paging through the palm-sized book.

"...Hold this," is her eventual command, as she produces a little painted wooden token. It feels... Bright. Foreign, like the mud thing, but entirely less hostile. More like the sun, if anything.

And not ten seconds after that, she snatches it back again.

"Mei Cao of Whispering Pines Village, you have the potential to become a cultivator."

She what. 

"I ... don't know what you mean by that." 

Couldn't anyone, theoretically, become a cultivator? That's how you got wandering heroes from folk-tales. 

"I mean that there is a choice you will need to make. Normally, for a mortal to become a cultivator requires strict instruction and expensive resources. However, some rare few are uncommon talents, able to cultivate without such things. One of the duties of the Ministry of Integrity is to augur the future and find catastrophes, preventing them before they occur. By the foresight and grace of the Emperor we are given this duty. You, Mei Cao, are the subject of my latest augury."

This one seems like a blunt girl. Having recently experienced defeat, she must be craving power. The path of speech to guide her into the correct decision is something that Lin Shan composes nearly automatically.

"If I had not arrived, it is likely you would have begun cultivating without proper instruction. Something that is exceedingly dangerous not just to yourself, but to everyone around you. The horror stories of times this has occurred in the past, before our great Ministry was charged with this duty, are endless- Perhaps you would anger a powerful spirit, inciting it to destroy your village. Perhaps you would mutilate your soul, losing the capacity to feel sympathy or regret. Perhaps you would unintentionally create a dreadful curse that lingers in the area for generations. All of these are things that have happened before. To prevent this undesirable outcome, I am forced to present you with a choice."

"You may have your talent sealed and continue your life here as a mortal, however it may turn out. If you take this course of action, you will never be significantly more powerful than you are now. Your life will continue in this village, and you need not worry about conflict or danger. Rest assured, the Bog Lump which assailed you will receive stern chastisement and be driven away for its unwarranted aggression, and new ward stones provided, with spares. Or... You may join one of the Great Sects of the Empire - the Argent Peak, most likely, as you dwell near the south of the Emerald Seas province. There you will receive proper training, resources with which to awaken your soul and become a cultivator, and the support and companionship of others who walk the path of immortality. You will become mighty. But as you are without resources, there is a price for such beneficence. A simple one: After being instructed in the sect and growing your skill and might and soul for five years, you will serve in the Emperor's armies for eight years. After that, you will be a veteran with great spiritual powers, certainly sufficient that no such petty spirit as that will ever be a threat again."

"I will of course do my duty to the Emperor. Whatever service you require of me, I accept."

Having reflexively given the correct answer, she can take a moment to decide how she feels about it. 

She thinks she's in favour? Cultivators are powerful. The Emperor's armies are invincible. She doesn't want to ever get attacked by whatever spirit that was again. She probably likes the idea of being someone more powerful and important than the village headman (the most powerful person she has rendered as an actual human and not a folk-tale). 

But she has no idea what any of this will entail. Her plans for the future dissolve into chaos. She imagines herself in a snow-white robe meditating on the top of a mountain somewhere. That seems fake. 

"What will happen to my father? He's getting old, won't be able to keep working forever without my help." She would also like the ask the same question about the woodlands they manage and burn, and her little garden plot where she grows onions and cabbages for their table, and the flock of crows she has an irrational affection for despite her grain-farming neighbour's hatred. But filial piety wins out, if not in her worries, at least in those worries she can express to a member of the imperial ministry.