The villagers did not come all at once.
They arrived in pairs and threes, at different hours of the day, each with a reason that was not the real one. Someone needed a charm re-inked. Someone else wanted to ask whether a cracked tablet should be moved or left where it lay. A woman brought dried persimmons and lingered too long after setting them down, her eyes fixed on the hall door as if expecting it to speak.
Li Wei'an listened.
He listened the way he always did: without leaning forward, without nodding too quickly, without offering the comfort of early agreement. He poured tea when throats were dry. He waited while words tangled themselves into shapes that could be spoken.
By the second day, a pattern had formed.
They called it the Mountain Benefactor.
No one could quite remember when that name had first been used. Some said their grandparents had spoken it with reverence. Others claimed it was older than that, a title carved from gratitude rather than fear. The spirit had protected the mountain paths, kept landslides at bay, guided lost hunters home when fog swallowed the trails. Crops had grown evenly. Children had wandered too far and returned with scraped knees instead of broken necks.
"It was never a god," Old Chen said, sitting on the stone bench and warming his hands around a cup of tea. "Just… something that lived here. Like a good neighbor."
Li Wei'an did not respond, which Old Chen took as permission to continue.
"We gave incense. Sometimes food. Once, during the drought, we poured wine at the old stone and asked it to carry our words uphill. And it did. The rain came."
"After how long?" Li Wei'an asked.
Old Chen frowned. "Two weeks. Maybe three."
"And before the rain," Li Wei'an said, "did anything else happen?"
Old Chen's fingers tightened on the cup. "A goat went missing."
Li Wei'an let the silence sit between them. The kettle hissed softly behind the hall wall.
"It was old," Old Chen added, too quickly. "Barely walking straight. Would have died soon anyway."
Others told the story differently.
A middle-aged woman insisted the Benefactor had never asked for anything directly. "It's not like that," she said, voice sharp with certainty she had rehearsed. "It doesn't speak. We just… understand."
"Understand what?" Li Wei'an asked.
She hesitated. "What balance requires."
A younger man laughed when Li Wei'an repeated the phrase back to him. The sound was brittle. "Balance. That's what everyone says when they don't want to say blood."
He clapped his hands together, then stopped, as if startled by the noise. "Look, we don't like it either. But things started going wrong. Paths collapsing. Wolves coming too close. My cousin swore he saw the old stone crack after we skipped the offering one month."
"Which offering?" Li Wei'an asked.
The man looked away. "You know which."
There was no agreement on when incense had stopped being enough.
Some claimed it was after the winter flood, when the stream changed course and exposed old roots that had not seen daylight in decades. Others said it began when a trader from the lowlands tried to chip a piece from the stone tablet near the upper path, claiming it was valuable jade. The trader had fallen ill three days later, feverish and raving, and no one had mourned him deeply.
"Punishment," a woman said, nodding to herself. "A warning."
"For whom?" Li Wei'an asked.
"For us," she said, then paused. "Or maybe for him. For the one who didn't show respect."
Li Wei'an wrote none of this down.
Instead, he asked where the old tablets stood.
There were three, weathered slabs of stone set along the mountain paths, each carved with characters softened by time. The villagers spoke of them as boundary markers, though no one could say exactly what they marked. Territory, perhaps. Or memory.
The first stood near the lower trail, half-sunken into the earth. Li Wei'an brushed away moss and traced the grooves with his fingers. The inscription spoke of protection freely given, of a presence that "stood watch without demand."
The second tablet lay higher up, cracked down the middle. Someone had filled the crack with resin at some point, though it had yellowed and shrunk away. The characters here were different. Still protective, but conditional. "In exchange," one line read. "In recognition."
The third tablet was the strangest.
It stood near a bend where the path narrowed and the trees pressed close. Its stone was newer than the others, though not new enough to be recent. Li Wei'an recognized the hand that had carved it: careful, trained, likely from a minor sect that no longer existed.
The inscription spoke of offerings "to sustain harmony." The characters for harmony had been altered. A single stroke deepened. Another widened. What had once meant mutual accord now leaned closer to appeasement.
Li Wei'an stepped back and looked at the tablet as a whole.
Someone had not erased the past.
They had edited it.
When he returned to the village, he spoke with the elders.
They sat in a circle beneath the largest fig tree, its roots breaking the ground into uneven plates. Tea was poured. The conversation circled cautiously.
"We don't enjoy this," one elder said, staring at his hands. "We argue about it every season."
"Argue how?" Li Wei'an asked.
"About who," another replied. "About how much."
No one said about whether.
A woman cleared her throat. "It's not murder. We choose. Those who are already… at the end. The sick. The old."
"And if none volunteer?" Li Wei'an asked.
Silence.
Finally, the first elder spoke again. "Then we wait."
"For what?"
"For a sign," he said, and did not meet Li Wei'an's eyes.
That night, Li Wei'an returned alone to the upper path.
The air was heavy with the smell of damp earth and pine sap. He stopped at the third tablet and knelt, brushing away leaves that had gathered at its base. Beneath them, the ground was darkened by old stains.
He followed the trail of those stains with his gaze, not far, just far enough.
There was no altar.
Just a place where the earth had been pressed down again and again, where grass refused to grow as thick as it should. Where offerings had been made not to be seen, but to be taken.
Li Wei'an sat back on his heels.
The Mountain Benefactor had not changed overnight.
It had been fed, carefully, incrementally, taught what it could ask for by what it was given. Gratitude had hardened into expectation. Expectation into need.
He did not feel anger.
Only a quiet heaviness, like a door that had been left open too long and warped on its hinges.
Above him, the mountain was silent.
Not absent.
Listening.