The herbs died overnight.

  Wei arrived the next morning with his basket on his back and the expression of a person who has been betrayed by the physical world and is considering filing a formal complaint. He swung the basket off his shoulder and held it open for me to see.

  The Mingwort was brown at the edges. The Silverthorn had gone limp, its normally rigid stems drooping like candles left in the sun. The Whitestem — useless Whitestem, which even Wei had learned was decorative at best — had turned black, as if it had gone straight to decomposition.

  "These were fresh yesterday," he said. "I picked them at the good spot, the one by the creek bend. They were perfect. Green, firm, the right ones — I checked the edges twice." He pulled out a Mingwort specimen and held it up. The cap's margin was clearly serrated — correct identification, proper harvesting, textbook technique. And completely dead.

  "What happened to them?"

  I took the Mingwort from his hand. Turned it over. The cellular structure was intact — this wasn't disease, wasn't frost damage, wasn't anything that fit into the natural vocabulary of plant death. This was qi depletion. The ambient energy that circulated through the forest's soil, through the root networks, through the mycorrhizal highways that connected every living thing to every other living thing — that energy was being siphoned. The herbs were dying the way a lamp dies when you cut the oil: not broken, just empty.

  I set the mushroom down.

  "Pick closer to the village," I said again.

  "I did pick closer to the village! This IS closer. Three days ago, the good spot was by the third ridge. Now everything past the creek is dead." He gestured toward the forest with the hand that wasn't holding a dead mushroom. "The next good spot will be the village garden and Mrs. Bai's cabbages are already suspicious of me."

  In the village, the unease had settled like a low-grade fever — not dramatic enough to cause alarm, but persistent enough to change the texture of daily life. The fisherman pulled empty nets. Not unusual for any single day, but unusual for three consecutive days. The fish had followed the spirit beasts downstream, toward water that still carried qi in concentrations sufficient for survival.

  Children stayed indoors. Their mothers couldn't explain why — the forest hadn't changed visibly, the paths were the same, the weather was fine. But something in the quality of the air, some primal instinct encoded in the human animal and overwritten by civilization but never fully erased, told them: keep the young ones close. I saw Mrs. Bai catch her youngest by the sleeve when he tried to slip past her toward the path and pull him back without looking up.

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  Mrs. Zhao stood outside her house each evening and stared at the tree line. She had been doing this for a week. When Wei asked her what she was looking at, she told him about the Year of the Rat — forty years ago, when a similar silence had fallen on the valley and they'd lost three goats and a woodcutter to something that came out of the deep forest one night and was never identified.

  "She thinks it's happening again," Wei reported. "The old people remember. My mother remembers too — she said her grandfather told stories about lights in the forest and then the well went dry for a month."

  I mapped the pattern. The qi depletion was expanding outward from a point roughly sixty li northwest, moving at a rate that suggested continuous, aggressive cultivation cycling. The source was mobile — shifting position every two to three days, following the spirit beast populations as they fled.

  I knew someone like that. Once. A young man in a different valley, with the same hunger and the same spiral — hunt, consume, expand, repeat. He'd burned through everything in a week's radius before anyone thought to object. By then there was nothing left to object with.

  Wei's dead Mingwort sat between us, its edges curling inward.

  At the current rate, the depletion radius would reach the village in twelve days. Ten if the cultivator accelerated his pace, which he would. They always accelerated. I knew this the way I knew the smell of rain before it arrived — it happen so many times that the pattern had worn a groove in my memory.

  "What's causing it?" Wei asked. His voice was quieter than usual — not frightened, but focused. The boy who had screamed at a spirit beast three weeks ago was still here; he just channeled the fear differently now.

  I could have told him. Could have explained: there is a young man in the forest, with more talent than sense and more power than wisdom and he is hunting spirit beasts the way a fire hunts timber — consuming everything in his path, spreading outward, leaving ash. I could have told him that this was normal, that it happened in every generation, that the strong climbed over the broken bodies of the small and that the world had decided a long time ago that this was acceptable.

  I could have told him a lot of things.

  "Wind," I said.

  He looked at me with an expression that communicated, clearly and without ambiguity, that he did not believe a single syllable of that answer.

  "Okay," he said. "Wind."

  He gathered his dead herbs, put them back in his basket and stood up. He didn't ask again. He was learning that my lies were a form of information — that the things I chose to conceal outlined the shape of the things I was concealing, the way a curtain outlines the shape of the window it covers.

  After he left, I sat for a long time and listened to the nothing that the forest had become and calculated how long I had before the nothing arrived here.