The screaming started at the third hour of night.

  I was standing at the tree line — had been for hours. Standing at the edge of a village I had no investment in, watching the dark for a threat I had declined to prevent, was not a pattern I wanted to acknowledge. I was simply here. The air was pleasant. The stars were acceptable.

  The sound: a crash of wood, something splintering — a fence, or a coop door. Then the chickens. Their alarm calls were not elegant: raw, shredded-vocal-cord shrieks that communicated nothing except wrong wrong wrong, which, to their credit, was accurate.

  Then the human screaming started.

  The creature was not a spirit beast. Not quite. A forest predator — something between a large cat and a dog, built for speed over long grass, with claws that could open tree bark and a jaw designed for exactly one function. Normally, it would have stayed deep in the forest, content with rabbits and the occasional slow deer. But the qi depletion had emptied its territory and the tooth on Wei's shelf was broadcasting a signal that, to this animal, read as food, come here, come now.

  It had crossed the village boundary at a run, cleared the first fence without breaking stride and gone straight for the chickens. Two dead in under a second — efficiently, almost professionally, the way predators kill when they're hungry enough to prioritize speed over entertainment. The blood was black in the moonlight.

  Then it found Neighbor Chen.

  Chen had come out with a torch, because torches were what people used in places where qi cultivation was a rumor and practical solutions involved fire. He was a large man — shoulders wide enough to block a doorway, hands like shovels — and he stood in the gap in the chicken pen's fence with the expression of someone who believed that physical presence was a form of argument.

  The creature didn't share this belief.

  Its claw caught his leg on the pass — a swipe, almost casual, the way you'd brush a hand across a table. The torch went one way. Chen went another. The sound he made was less a scream than a declaration of surprise, the kind of noise a man produces when his body informs him, ahead of schedule, that he is no longer standing.

  Blood on the dirt. Not arterial — the claw had opened the muscle over his shin, a long, messy wound that would bleed dramatically and heal slowly and cost him a limp he'd carry into old age. He crawled. Fast, for a man his size. Toward the house, where someone was already shouting his name.

  Not my problem. I could not bring myself to care. I had known this would happen. I had known it the moment Wei pulled the tooth from his basket, glowing and warm and full of exactly the kind of energy that drew exactly the kind of consequences that was now bleeding on the ground.

  The creature bolted. It had what it came for — two chickens and a clear understanding that this location was not worth the trouble. It vanished into the dark in three bounds, carrying the memory of the tooth's signal and the knowledge of where to find more.

  The village woke. Torches multiplied. Voices overlapped — panicked, angry, confused, the cacophony that communities produce when something happens that isn't covered by the usual protocols of harvest, weather and neighborly dispute. Someone bandaged Chen's leg. Someone else counted the chickens and announced the loss with the flatness of a person who counted survival in eggs.

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  The night ended and morning came without ceremony. The fog didn't care about the night's events. The dog barked at the sun. The blood on the dirt dried into a stain that would take two rains to erase.

  I heard the conversation before I saw it — the acoustics of a village in blame mode, voices carrying farther and sharper than their owners intended. The gathering happened near the well: twenty people, give or take, standing in the loose semicircle that forms when a community needs someone to point at.

  Wei stood in the center.

  Not voluntarily. He'd been placed there by the geometry of accusation — the way all the bodies angled toward him, the way all the eyes converged. He stood with his arms at his sides, his chin level, his face wearing the expression of someone who has not yet decided whether to fight or fold but is leaning toward fight because fold isn't in his vocabulary.

  "The boy brings the forest into the village," the fisherman — Gao — said. His voice was pitched for an audience, the way village grievances always were. "Every day he goes deeper. Every day he comes back with something. And now—" He gestured at Chen, who was sitting on a stool by the well, his bandaged leg extended, his face grey. "This."

  Wei's older brother stood behind him. The tall, thin one. He put a hand on Wei's shoulder — not holding him back, not pushing forward. Just present. Wei's sister stood at the edge of the crowd, watching with the calculating stillness of someone who was tracking exits.

  "I didn't—" Wei started.

  "The tooth." Gao again. "You brought a spirit beast tooth into the village. Chen saw it yesterday, on your shelf. Glowing. Like a little lantern. And then, what a coincidence, something comes in the night and tears up his leg."

  The connection was not wrong. It was, in fact, precisely correct: the tooth's qi signature had drawn the predator. Cause, effect, straight line. Gao didn't know the mechanism, but he didn't need to. Village logic was efficient that way — it skipped the theory and went straight to the conclusion.

  Wei said nothing. I watched his jaw work — the muscle clenching, releasing, clenching — and saw the moment the connection landed for him, too. He was smart enough and newly trained enough, to trace the line himself. The tooth. The qi. The signal. The animal.

  His face changed. The defiance drained out of it, replaced by something worse: understanding. The specific, poisonous understanding that arrives when you realize your best intention has produced someone else's worst night.

  His mother pushed through the crowd.

  She was small. Thin. Her hair pulled back with a strip of cloth that had been white once. She moved through the villagers with the compressed energy of a woman who had been managing crisis her entire life and was very tired of it and was going to manage this one too, because no one else was going to.

  She didn't speak to Gao. Didn't acknowledge the crowd. She walked to Wei, looked him in the eye and slapped the tooth from his hand.

  It tumbled from his grip and landed in the mud. The sound it made was small — a dull thuk, like a heartbeat muffled by earth. It lay there, yellow against brown, still pulsing faintly, still warm.

  Wei's chin trembled. Briefly, quickly — a vibration more than a motion, visible only to someone who was watching closely enough. He did not cry. He stood in the center of twenty accusers and his mother's rigid, exhausted silence and the tooth in the mud and the blood on Chen's bandage and he did not cry.

  I stood at the tree line. The morning light was bright and fair and completely indifferent.

  I could have warned him. I had known what the tooth would do. I had known it the moment he pulled it from his basket, glowing and warm and full of exactly the kind of energy that drew exactly the kind of consequences that now stood, bandaged and bleeding, by the village well.

  I had said put it down. I had not said why.

  I thought he would figure it out himself.

  He had.

  The tooth lay in the mud. The crowd dispersed. Chen limped home. Wei stood alone by the well, staring at the ground.

  I turned away. The path back to the forest was short. The distance between what I could have said and what I had said was considerably longer.