The Chen family's old grain shed was exactly where Mother said it would be, a leaning structure of warped timber and straw thatch behind their main plot, half-swallowed by overgrown millet that nobody had bothered to clear. The door hung on one leather hinge. I pushed it open and the smell hit me before the light did.

  Perfect.

  Three years was a long time for physical evidence. Rain, rot, insects — any of those things could've erased what I needed. But the shed's roof, despite its sorry appearance, had mostly held. The thatch sagged in the center but hadn't collapsed, which meant the interior stayed dry enough to preserve what mattered.

  I stepped inside and let my eyes adjust.

  The grain bins were still here. Four of them, clay-lined wood, each large enough to hold a season's worth of millet or sorghum for a single household. Three stood empty with their lids removed. The fourth still had its lid on, sealed with a strip of cloth that had gone grey with age.

  I checked the empty ones first. Along the base of the second bin, scratched into the clay lining, I found what I was looking for... gnaw marks. Dozens of them\ were concentrated at the seam where the clay met the wooden frame. Rats had chewed through the sealant to reach the grain inside, and the marks were deep enough that this hadn't been one animal on one night. This was a colony working the same entry point over weeks.

  I crouched lower and saw droppings along the baseboard. A scattering of them were near the gnaw marks, a trail leading toward the far wall where a gap between two planks was wide enough to fit my thumb through. I checked the third bin and found the same pattern.

  So the rats came in through the far wall, hit bins two and three, ate their fill over what was probably several weeks, and left the evidence everywhere. Anyone who actually looked would've seen this in five minutes.

  Which meant Zhao Ping hadn't looked. He'd heard about the missing grain, made an accusation that fit his existing suspicion of Chen, and the village had accepted it because Zhao Ping was the closest thing they had to an authority figure.

  I pulled the cloth seal off the fourth bin and looked inside and saw that it was empty. Whatever grain had been stored here, the rats hadn't reached it.

  Interesting.

  Chen had sealed this one better than the others, which suggested he'd noticed the rat problem and tried to adapt. A man stealing his own grain stores wouldn't bother improving one bin while leaving the others exposed.

  That's not just evidence of rats. That's evidence of a man trying to fix a rat problem. Which is evidence of a man who knew his grain was disappearing and was trying to stop it. Which is the opposite of a man stealing it.

  I pulled a piece of the chewed sealant free from the second bin and pocketed it along with a handful of the dried droppings. I checked the wall gap and found tufts of coarse brown fur caught on a splinter and took those as well.

  I had irrefutable physical evidence.

  Now came the hard part.

  I found Hao at the river fork washing his face after a morning of hauling compost for the Wei family.

  "I need your help with something," I said.

  He looked up, water dripping from his jaw. "What kind of something?"

  "The kind that requires talking to people."

  That got a half-smile. Hao knew his strengths and he knew mine. We'd fallen into an unspoken division of labor over the past couple of weeks — he handled people, I handled problems.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  I sat beside him and laid it out. The Chen accusation, the rat evidence, the grudge that had kept an entire family isolated for three years. I didn't mention Mother as my source because I didn't need to complicate the narrative. I told him I'd noticed the Chen family wasn't participating in any of the informal labor sharing that was keeping the other struggling households afloat, got curious, asked around, and checked the old shed on a hunch.

  "You checked a three-year-old grain shed on a hunch," Hao said.

  "I'm thorough."

  Hao gave a heavy sigh. "So Chen never stole anything. The rats ate the grain and Zhao Ping blamed him for it."

  "Zhao Ping made a public accusation and couldn't walk it back without looking like he was wrong. Three years later, the Chen family is cut off from village cooperation at exactly the moment they need it most. Chen's father is dead from the campaign, his mother is trying to work their plot alone with two children under ten. If they can't make their yield, they default on the tax quota, and the Prefect's collectors take it out on everyone else."

  Hao's expression shifted, the shadow of fury passed over his face. I could tell that he was frustrated for the Chen family and wanted to right the wrongs done to them.

  "I'll talk to Zhao Ping," he said.

  "Not yet." I held up a hand. "If you go to Zhao Ping and say 'you were wrong about Chen,' he loses face and digs in even more, which will only cause the grudge to grow worse. We need to give him a way to be right."

  "Like what?"

  "Like discovering the rat problem himself." I pulled the chewed sealant from my pocket and handed it to Hao.

  "You go to Zhao Ping and tell him you were helping the Chen widow clear some brush and noticed the old shed was in bad shape. You mention you saw rat damage. You don't accuse anyone of anything. You just describe what you saw and let him put it together."

  Hao turned the sealant over in his fingers. "And when he puts it together?"

  "He's a proud man, but this has been sitting on his conscience. If he has evidence he can point to, something physical he can show the village, he can reframe the whole thing. 'I've looked into the old Chen matter and it turns out rats were the cause.' He gets to be the one who uncovered the truth. He keeps his authority. Chen's family gets brought back in."

  "And the village gets another household contributing to the labor pool right when we need it."

  I gave him a nod of confirmation.

  Hao looked at me for a long moment.

  "When did you start thinking like this?" he asked.

  About six months ago when I woke up in your brother's body.

  "Someone has to," I said simply.

  "Father used to say the same thing." Hao stood and pocketed the sealant. "I'll talk to Zhao Ping this afternoon."

  "Good. And remember, just plant the idea in his head and let him water it himself."

  He started walking, then stopped to look back at me. "Liang?"

  "Hm?"

  "You've arranged the labor sharing, fixed the irrigation, and now you're helping the Chen family." A grin creased his lips. "You're working hard for the sake of the village, aren't you?"

  Sharper than he looks. Always has been.

  "I'm trying to make sure we survive the next six months."

  "That's not all you're doing."

  He left before I could answer, which was fine because I didn't have one that wouldn't sound insane. I'm trying to build the foundation of a cooperative structure that can eventually protect this village from conscription, taxation, and the inevitable escalation of a continent-wide war being waged by a warlord with no concept of sustainable governance.

  Somehow I didn't think that would land well.

  Zhao Ping came to the Chen plot the next morning.

  I watched from the south-side irrigation ditch where I was reinforcing the channel walls with packed clay. Hao had done his part perfectly. He made a casual mention and let the information do the work. And now Zhao Ping was standing in the old grain shed with a lantern, examining the gnaw marks and the droppings for himself.

  He was in there for fifteen minutes. When he came out, he stood in the overgrown millet for a while, hands on his hips, staring at nothing. Then he walked to the Chen family's front door and knocked.

  I couldn't hear the conversation, but I didn't need to. The Chen widow came to the doorway, listened, and then her shoulders dropped with relief.

  Zhao Ping helped her patch a section of her roof that afternoon. By evening, his surviving son was working her eastern plot alongside the Wei family's labor rotation.

  One more family contributing to the collective yield.

  I finished reinforcing the irrigation wall and checked the water flow. The south-side paddies would get even coverage through the next growth cycle, which meant an extra half-harvest of rice across three families, and that would provide a cushion against the tax quota.

  I wiped the clay from my hands and walked to the next section of ditch that needed work.

  Hao could bring people together. That was his gift and I'd be a fool to fight it. But someone had to make sure the ground was solid before he built on it. Someone had to check the ditches, clear the debts, and count the grain so that when my brother extended his hand to the next family or the next lost soul who wandered into his orbit, there was actually something to offer them beyond good intentions.

  I sighed and saw that the next section of ditch was silted worse than the last.

  I squatted down and got to work.