The south-side labor rotation was working well.

  Three weeks in, the Wei, Liu, and Chen families were cycling through each other's plots on a shared schedule I'd drawn up using a stick and a flat piece of bark that I kept tucked under my sleeping mat. The Wei family's eldest son worked the Chen plot while Chen's widow worked the Liu fields. Then every other day it reversed, and on off days Hao moved between all three and handled whatever heavy labor had piled up during the week.

  The yields wouldn't show for another two months, but the signs were already there. Seedlings were going in on time and the irrigation was holding. The Chen widow's eastern field, which had been half-fallow for two seasons, was fully planted for the first time since her husband died.

  I stood on the hillside above the village at dawn and looked down at the layout.

  From up here, the whole settlement laid itself out like a diagram. The river fork was to the south. The hill I was standing on was to the west. Open farmland was to the east. And the northern road, cutting straight through flat ground toward the Prefect's seat at Meishan, was completely unobstructed for as far as I could see.

  If I were a raiding party, I'd come from the north. There's nothing between the road and the first row of houses except a vegetable garden.

  I crouched and studied the terrain. The hill behind me wasn't steep, but it had good elevation. Fifteen, maybe twenty meters above the village floor. Anyone standing up here could see movement on the northern road a full li before it reached the settlement. The river to the south was too wide and fast to ford easily, which meant it functioned as a natural barrier.

  We had one exposed flank and every single house in the village was oriented toward the fields rather than the approach road because why would farmers build defensively? Nobody had ever taught them to think that way.

  I pulled the bark sheet from my belt and scratched new marks into it with a sharpened stick. I'd been mapping the village layout for a week, adding details after each circuit. Now I added the terrain features such as hill elevation, river width, and the flat northern approach.

  A palisade across the north side would be the obvious first move. Log posts driven into the ground with a packed earth base. It would be just enough to slow someone down and force them to bunch up at a chokepoint. The village has timber access from the hillside forest that I could use as well.

  The problem wasn't construction though, the real problem was justification.

  Farmers didn't build walls. Walls meant you expected trouble, and expecting trouble meant inviting it. If I walked into the village center tomorrow and proposed a palisade, half of them would think I was paranoid and the other half would worry that the Prefect would interpret the fortification as defiance.

  They're not wrong about the Prefect. A walled village is a village with ideas. A village with ideas is a threat to a man who needs compliant bodies for his conscription rolls.

  I scratched out the palisade line and redrew it. I couldn't build it across the northern approach, it could only be long enough to be connecting the two nearest houses on either side of the road, with a simple gate that could be closed at night. That way it could be framed as a livestock fence.

  We'd been losing chickens to foxes — that was true, actually — and a connected fence line between the outer houses would keep animals in and predators out. The fact that it would also funnel any human approach through a single monitored point was just a practical bonus.

  Start small. Give them a reason that makes sense in their world, not mine.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  I added a second mark on the hillside. A watchtower was too ambitious but a grain-drying rack that was positioned at the hill's midpoint would give someone standing on it a clear view of the northern road. Build it sturdy enough to hold a man's weight and tall enough to see over the treeline, and nobody would question a drying rack on a hillside. Every village had them.

  A drying rack that happens to be a lookout post. A livestock fence that happens to be a defensive chokepoint. Infrastructure that serves two purposes.

  This was going to be a recurring theme in this life, I could feel it.

  "I want to build a fence," I told Hao that evening.

  We were sitting outside the house after dinner, watching the sky turn amber. Mother was sleeping. She'd had two good days in a row, which I was trying not to read too much into.

  "A fence? Why?" Hao asked.

  "The foxes got into the Zhao family's coop again last week and took three hens. Before that, the Wei family lost a goat that wandered onto the north road. If we connected the outer houses on the north side with a continuous fence line, we'd keep the livestock contained and the predators out."

  Hao stretched his legs out and considered it. "That's a lot of timber."

  "Not if we use the hillside stand. Those pines are thin enough to fell with hand tools and straight enough to plant as posts without much shaping. I've already mapped the trees that we need to take, the east side pines are overcrowded, if we cut those down, then it will improves the growth for the remaining trees."

  He glanced at me sideways. "You mapped the trees?"

  "I had a free afternoon."

  Hao shot me a look but didn't press any further. "How many men would you need?"

  "Six, working in two-day rotations so nobody falls behind on their fields. Zhao Ping's son has axe experience. The Wei brothers are strong enough for hauling. If you talk to them, they'll sign on."

  He was quiet for a while contemplating my words.

  "The fence isn't just about foxes," he said.

  I didn't insult him by denying it. "The foxes and wandering livestock are a real problem. The fence solves both."

  "And?"

  "And it connects the northern houses into a line that anything coming down that road has to go through or around instead of walking straight into the village center." I kept my voice even. "I'm not building a fortress. I'm building a fence that happens to make the village harder to walk into uninvited."

  Hao pulled a blade of grass and twisted it between his fingers. "The Prefect's men—"

  "Will see a livestock fence. Because that's what it is. If they look at it and see a defensive barrier, that says more about their intentions than ours."

  I watched him turn it over in his mind. The political logic was clicking into place behind his eyes. Hao wasn't stupid. People mistook his warmth for simplicity and that was a dangerous miscalculation. He understood leverage just fine — he just preferred not to use it.

  "I'll talk to the men tomorrow," he said. "But I want to help build it too."

  "I'm counting on it. You'll be hauling most of the timber," I said.

  Hao couldn't help but laugh. "And what will you be doing?"

  "Supervising." I stood and brushed the dirt off my trousers. "Someone has to make sure the posts are straight."

  "Supervising." Hao shook his head at my words. "Father would've hit you for that."

  "Father would've agreed with the fence."

  "He would've. He also would've built it himself instead of tricking six men into doing it for him."

  Father protected the village with his body. I'll protect it with everything else.

  I went inside to check on Mother and update the bark map. The fence was the visible project, the thing people would see and understand. But the real work was the pattern underneath it.

  The Prefect's next conscription order could come in a month or a season. The Lord of Qinghe's southern campaign would either succeed or fail, and either outcome would send ripples through every village in the prefecture. War was coming to Hekou and there was nothing we could do about it.

  I added the fence line to the map and drew the drying rack on the hillside. I marked the timber stand with a circle and the number of trees I'd need to fell.

  Then I flipped the bark over and started a second map. It was the village as it needed to be in six months with terraced hillside for expanded growth and a proper granary with sealed bins. The fence extended to a full perimeter. The drying rack was replaced by a real watchtower.

  And last but not least, a training ground on the flat area east of the river.

  Training ground. I stared at those two words scratched into bark.

  Hao could crack the air with his qi when he was angry. I could feel the boundary between internal and external energy after two weeks of blind meditation. Somewhere in this village of a hundred and ninety people, there were others with the same level of aptitude for cultivation, perhaps more.

  The training ground stayed on the map. I wasn't ready for it yet, not by a long shot, but I was building toward it.

  I tucked both maps under the sleeping mat and closed my eyes.