News of the Heavenly Origin Sect spread through Thunder Village exactly as fast as Chu Yan had feared and precisely as slowly as Wei Feng had predicted.
"Two people," Old Man Feng said, leaning on his freshly repaired well with the satisfaction of a man who had personally witnessed the founder's plumbing skills and remained thoroughly unconvinced of his sect-building ones. "A sect of two people, meeting in a shed."
"We're recruiting," Chu Yan said, with as much dignity as the statement could bear.
"Recruiting whom, exactly? The chickens?"
"The chickens are under consideration."
Old Man Feng cackled and returned to his water bucket, and Chu Yan filed the exchange away as further proof — as if he required any — that reputation in Thunder Village would need to be earned the slow way, one stubborn villager at a time.
He found Su Rou three days later, entirely by accident, behind the herbalist's cottage at the eastern edge of the village.
She was perhaps sixteen, thin in the particular way of someone who had grown up without quite enough to eat, kneeling in the dirt beside a row of medicinal herbs with a small paper talisman balanced between two fingers. As Chu Yan watched, unnoticed from the treeline, she pressed the talisman gently against a wilting stalk of spirit grass — and the stalk straightened, color returning to its leaves in a slow, visible bloom, as though someone had rewound time across its final hour of life.
[Ding.]
[Notable individual detected: Su Rou. Aptitude: talisman crafting, elementary. Spiritual root grade: Middle, unusually stable for current cultivation level.]
[Recommendation: recruitment candidate.]
Chu Yan didn't need the system to tell him that. He'd seen enough talisman work in his life — mostly crude, mostly wasted on farmers too poor to afford better — to recognize when someone had done something genuinely difficult and made it look effortless.
"That's remarkable," he said, stepping out from the treeline.
Su Rou startled so badly she nearly dropped the remaining talismans in her lap, scrambling half upright before recognizing him as harmless — or, at least, unarmed. "I didn't — I wasn't stealing anything, I only work here, the herbalist lets me practice on the dying stock in exchange for—"
"I didn't think you were stealing." Chu Yan held up both hands, softening his voice. "I watched you heal that stalk. That's genuinely skilled work. Where did you learn talisman crafting?"
Wariness flickered across her face, the particular caution of someone accustomed to kindness turning out to have conditions attached. "I taught myself. Mostly from a torn manual I found years ago. I'm not — I know it's not proper training. I know it's amateur."
"It didn't look amateur to me."
"You're not a talisman crafter."
"No," Chu Yan admitted. "But I'm reasonably good at recognizing talent, even when I can't replicate it myself." He crouched down across from her, keeping a respectful distance, and let the swagger fall away entirely, because something told him this particular conversation would not survive it. "I'm Chu Yan. I've recently founded a sect — very recently, very small, currently headquartered in a shed with a hole in the roof shaped, inexplicably, like a chicken. I'm looking for disciples. I think you might be exactly the kind of person I'm looking for."
Su Rou blinked at him, several emotions crossing her face in rapid succession — surprise, suspicion, and, underneath both, something that looked uncomfortably close to hope, quickly suppressed. "A sect wants me? I have no family name worth mentioning. No connections. I work for the herbalist because my parents died of fever four years ago and I had nowhere else to go."
"None of that changes what I just watched you do to that spirit grass."
"Most sects require sponsorship. Or spirit stones for the entrance fee. I have neither."
"My sect requires neither," Chu Yan said, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he meant it entirely. "My sect requires talent, and effort, and a willingness to build something from very little — which, unless I'm mistaken, describes you rather precisely already."
Su Rou looked down at the talisman still pinched between her fingers, turning it over slowly, and for a long moment said nothing at all.
"I don't have anywhere else offering me anything," she said finally, quiet and matter-of-fact in the way of someone who had learned not to expect much and had made a careful peace with it. "I suppose that makes this an easy decision, even if it shouldn't feel like one."
"It's a good decision regardless of how easy it feels," Chu Yan said. "I intend to prove that to you, given time."
[Ding.]
[Side Quest complete: Recruit a disciple through genuine merit rather than persuasion.][Reward: 12 Contribution Points, +15 Sect Merit.]
[Disciples: 2/10. Sect Merit: 20/50.]
He walked her back to the shed himself that same afternoon, introduced her to Wei Feng — who greeted her with the easy, unbothered warmth that seemed to be his default setting toward nearly everyone — and watched something in Su Rou's shoulders loosen, fractionally, as she took in the shed's chaos of dust and broken tools and the single glowing ledger only sect members, apparently, could see.
"It really is a hole shaped like a chicken," she observed, looking up.
"Everyone says that," Wei Feng said, with the weary patience of a man who had clearly stopped fighting the observation. "We're aware."
"I wasn't criticizing. I was admiring the specificity."
Chu Yan grinned, watching the two of them settle into an easy, cautious rapport that felt, already, like the beginning of something worth protecting. Two disciples. Eight more, at minimum, before Main Quest 2 would even consider itself complete — and somewhere beyond that horizon, a bloodline still sealed, a token still unexplained, and a sect that had not yet begun to draw the kind of attention that would eventually make Feng Lie's wounded pride look like the smallest possible problem it could have caused.
But for now, in the fading gold light slanting through a shed with a ridiculous hole in its roof, it felt like enough simply to have begun.