Thin mist, no wind.
The morning sun had just emerged, its rays especially distinct in the mist, golden strands slanting down like a pearl curtain stirred by the wind. The golden morning light stretched the stilt house's shadow long and thin across the earthen slope to its west.
Dark green fleeceflower root vines flourished on the slope, and someone had even built a trellis for them. They seemed well tended. Yet perhaps because it was too quiet, their leaves looked like patterned snakes climbing the slope through the hazy mountain mist, quite frightening to behold.
The vines climbed the trellis to the second floor. Several lengths of batik cloth hung from a bamboo pole beneath the upstairs eaves, their indigo butterfly patterns coated in thick dust. Motionless in the mist, they resembled ghosts that had slipped into the stockade.
Thick ash filled the bonfire pit before the stockade. In the past, the ashes here had always been warm. Children would toss all sorts of strange roots and insects into them to roast, then dig them out to eat in less than half a day. Now, however, the ashes were cold and gray-blue.
This was an utterly ordinary stockade scattered along the outskirts of the Miao Borderlands. Anyone entering the endless mountains of the Miao Borderlands from Three Xiang would reach it less than a hundred li in.
Chestnut Creek still burbled past the stockade courtyard, but the terraced fields on either bank lay abandoned and choked with weeds. The stockade was silent and deserted, as though it had stood abandoned for years.
Cheng Xinzhan pinched up a handful of gray-blue ash from the firepit and looked at the deathly still stockade. No cooking smoke, no crowing roosters, no white dogs chasing and playing with children. His chest felt tight. He