CHAPTER 13 — THE ACCOUNT OF LEE
Dr. J'an
The Tàiyáng Empire produced extraordinary generals, skilled administrators, and at least one ruler whose name will appear in histories for as long as histories are written.
It also produced Lee.
Lee is not a general. He is not a scholar or a noble or anyone whose name appears in the official records of the empire's expansion. He is a green-skin Oni who was enslaved before he was old enough to have done anything worth enslaving him for, who spent the years that followed becoming very good at surviving inside a system designed to use him up and discard what remained.
The account below was recovered from military records — not because Lee was important enough to be documented officially, but because the Seventh Division kept unusually thorough records of its membership, and Lee's entry in those records contains this attached personal statement, which he appears to have written and then filed with his unit documentation for reasons that the filing itself does not explain.
I have preserved it without correction.
It does not need any.
— Dr. J'an
My name is Lee.
I'm a slave in the Tàiyáng Empire, which is a sentence I've said enough times in my head that it doesn't produce anything anymore. Not anger. Not grief. Just — information. The way the floor is cold is information when you wake up on it every morning. You stop feeling it as a complaint and start understanding it as the condition you operate inside.
I'm a green-skin Oni.
Yeah. One of those.
Not the kind that inspires the stories — not the big, heavy, built-for-breaking kind that the red-skins produce, or the blue-horns with their sheer physical load-bearing capacity. We got sorted differently. Green-skins are long. Too long, if you ask the people who have to look at us — limbs that go further than seems structurally necessary, a height that doesn't come with the mass to back it up, a silhouette that reads as wrong to people who aren't used to it.
No real bulk. No real strength in the way this empire measures strength, which is the only measurement that matters here.
What we got instead is vision.
And I mean that precisely, not the way people say it when they mean they can see reasonably well. I mean vision as a physical fact that sits outside what most other Oni can do. Miles. Clear and sharp and without the degradation of distance that makes far things feel unreal to most people. You ever look at something so far away that it stops feeling like it's actually there — like it's more of a suggestion than a solid object?
We don't get that.
Everything is real to us. Everything is present. Everything is there, at full resolution, regardless of how far it is.
That sounds like a gift until you understand what it costs.
It costs sleep, first. The eyes don't shut off the way other people's eyes shut off — in the dark, in the near-dark, there's always something to resolve, something to track. It costs the particular comfort of distance, the way other people can decide that something far away is someone else's problem. For us, far away is just — there. Still our problem. Still completely visible.
And practically, in the hierarchy this empire runs on, it costs status. A people built for sight and reach and the kind of precision that comes from seeing everything clearly — that's not a warrior profile. That's a support profile. That's the profile of something useful to someone else's ambition. Which is exactly where most of us end up.
Army slaves.
Not soldiers. Not warriors. The category that exists below both of those things, the one that does the work that needs doing when the work is too dangerous or too unpleasant or too visible in its ugliness for the people above it to want their names attached.
And yet.
It could be worse.
I know that sounds like something a person says when they've given up, but I mean it as genuine accounting. There are many ways to be a slave in this empire. The mines exist. The construction sites exist. The domestic arrangements that certain people in the noble district maintain exist, and I won't describe them because the description serves nothing.
The army is not the worst of those options.
In the army, there is a rule — not a written rule, not something anyone will say to your face, but a real rule in the functional sense — that performance can change your position. Not your status, not your category, not the brand at your wrist. But your position within the category. The work you're assigned. The treatment you receive from the people above you. The specific flavor of chains you wear.
General Bai is the example everyone points to. Blue-horn. Born enslaved. Now a general — one of five, one of the people Marrick apparently trusts with the command of actual armies. People talk about him like he's proof that the system works. That if you're good enough, if you push hard enough, the system will recognize it.
I've seen General Bai from a distance. I've watched the way he moves through the military district, the way people respond to his presence.
He's still a slave.
He has rank, authority, resources, and the respect of everyone who interacts with him professionally. He also has a brand at his wrist and documentation that classifies him as property of the empire, and none of the rank or authority or resources changes what happens if the empire decides, one day, that the arrangement is no longer convenient.
Longer chains. Cleaner chains. Chains that people salute when they see them.
Still chains.
I know this. I hold this knowledge carefully and I do not let it become the thing that stops me, because the alternative — the people in the lower barracks who talk about burning it all down, who spend their energy on a fantasy of destruction that is never going to happen because nothing we have access to can touch what this empire actually is — the alternative is spending whatever time I have left being angry at a wall.
I don't have the time for that.
I climb. Even if the ladder is made of the same material as the chains, I climb, because the top of the ladder is further from the ground than where I started, and further from the ground is the only direction that interests me.
There's a war coming.
Specifically — and this is the part that makes even the people who stopped caring about most things start paying attention again — there's something involving an Elder Beast.
That phrase moves through the barracks differently from other rumors. Other rumors produce noise. This one produces quiet. The specific quiet of people who have correctly assessed that the scale of what's being discussed is outside the category of things they have framework for, and who are waiting to see if the framework arrives before the thing does.
Elder Beast.
I don't know the details. Nobody in the lower ranks knows the details — information in this empire moves downward only as far as it needs to, and the specifics of what Marrick is planning are well above what needs to reach us. What reaches us is the shape of it. The size of the mobilization being discussed. The way the senior officers have been moving differently for the past several months — more purposeful, less casual, the specific posture of people who have been told something significant and are now living with the weight of it.
Something big.
Something that will produce, as all large things produce, opportunity.
I don't have much. But I have vision that most people can't match, and hands that have spent years becoming precise, and a very clear understanding of what I need to do with both of those things before whatever is coming arrives.
Best marksman in my platoon.
No. Best marksman in the division. Best marksman anyone in this division has seen. That's the level I need to be operating at, because that's the level that gets noticed, and getting noticed by the right person is the only path I can see from where I'm standing.
So. Every morning. Before the barracks fully wake. Every evening, after the assignments are done. The bow, and the target, and the distance, and the precision.
That's the work.
The morning it changes starts the same as every other morning.
Cold floor. The specific smell of a room containing too many people who don't have access to adequate bathing — not filth, exactly, but density, the accumulated presence of bodies that have been working and sleeping in the same space for too long. The sounds of people transitioning from sleep to wakefulness, the low conversations of those who wake early, the particular silence of those who are awake but have decided not to engage with the day yet.
I sit up. Rub my face. Take stock of what hurts, which is routine — green-skins aren't built for the sleeping surfaces available here, and my lower back has opinions about this every morning.
I take two steps toward the door.
"Look at this disgusting thing."
I don't turn around. I don't need to. Red-skin, from the weight of the voice. There's a specific confidence that red-skin soldiers in this army tend to carry — not all of them, not even most of them, but enough that the pattern is real — that comes from existing in a hierarchy that was built around their category. The hierarchy says they're at the top of the Oni structure. Some of them decide that means they're at the top of everything.
"Green-eyed skeleton."
I hear the step. Fast, heavy, already committed.
I think about moving.
For a fraction of a second I do the calculation — dodge, and this becomes a fight, and a fight between a slave and a free soldier ends one way regardless of who wins the physical exchange. Take it, and it ends here, or it ends when someone with authority decides it should end.
I take it.
His fist connects with the side of my face with enough force that the floor becomes suddenly relevant. Everything goes white, then dark at the edges, then resolves back into the barracks from a different angle than I'd been seeing it from.
The floor is cold.
"Footman Hen."
Commander Tay's voice arrives before I've fully processed being on the ground. I stay where I am — not because I can't move, but because moving is a decision that requires reading the situation first, and the situation is still assembling itself.
"Why," Tay says, with the specific calm of someone who has decided that calm is more effective than volume, "are you hitting your fellow soldier."
"He's a slave, sir." Hen's voice has shifted — still confident, but now performing confidence rather than simply having it. "Just reminding him of his place."
"Do you understand," Tay says, "that we have a war coming."
"Yes, sir."
"And that we cannot afford to lose even one soldier. Even one slave-soldier. Even one green-skin slave-soldier who you apparently cannot look at without your hands getting involved."
A pause.
"I should beat you in front of the whole barracks," Tay says. "Make an example of what happens to soldiers who damage resources that don't belong to them."
Hen's breathing changes. I can hear it from the floor. Good.
"But what good does that do. Does it fix anything. Does it make the problem smaller."
"…no, sir."
"Wrong answer," Tay says quietly. "The correct answer is that it would make you an example, and examples have value, and whether the value justifies the approach is a separate question that I am choosing not to explore today." A pause. "Training grounds. Five minutes."
A longer pause.
"And you. Get up."
I get up.
My face has opinions about this. I ignore them and stand, and Tay is already walking, and the expectation is that I follow, so I follow.
We walk through the lower district — the part of the military settlement assigned to the slave-soldiers, which is functional and undecorated in the specific way of spaces that were designed to contain people rather than to mean anything to them. Tay walks at a pace that assumes I'll keep up. I keep up.
"You're a marksman," he says.
"Yes, sir."
"How good."
"Good enough, sir."
He glances at me. The glance says: that's not an answer.
"Good enough gets you killed," he says. "In what's coming, good enough is the soldiers we lose in the first hour. I don't need good enough. I need something I can use."
I reconsider.
"I'm the best shot in this barracks," I say. "Probably in this district."
He doesn't confirm or deny this. But the quality of his silence changes slightly, which is its own kind of confirmation.
"You can shoot a man without killing him," he says.
This is not a question. He's already decided this is true.
"Yes, sir."
"You can control exactly what you damage and what you don't."
"Yes, sir."
We've reached the training range. It's early enough that it should be empty.
It isn't.
Hen is there. Tied to the post at the far end of the range. Not restrained in a fighting position — restrained in the specific way that means he's not going anywhere and the choice of what happens next belongs entirely to someone else.
I stop.
"Begin," Tay says.
I don't move.
"Marksman."
My hand goes to the bow before the rest of me has caught up with the decision. Arrow. Draw. The form is automatic — this is what years of practice produces, the body doing the correct thing while the mind is still working out what it thinks about doing it.
Release.
The first arrow hits the outer left thigh. Not the artery. Exactly where I placed it, which means the scream that follows is pain and fear rather than anything irreversible.
And then something in me goes quiet.
Not numb. Not absent. Quiet — the specific quality of silence that fills in when everything unnecessary stops. No more thinking about what this means. No more calculating what refusing would produce. Just the bow, and the distance, and the target, and the precision.
Aim. Release.
Shoulder.
Aim. Release.
Knee.
Aim. Release.
Rib, shallow — enough to crack, not enough to puncture.
He screams with the particular quality of someone who has realized that no specific moment is going to end this, that each new pain is discrete and placed and will be followed by another, and that whoever is doing this is in complete control of the sequence. That realization produces a different kind of screaming than ordinary pain. More animal. More honest about what the situation is.
I keep going.
The whole time I am thinking one thing: don't miss. Not for him — I don't miss because missing would mean something I placed somewhere other than where I intended to place it, and precision is the only thing I have that this empire doesn't already own.
The final arrow is weighted — more mass, more impact, less penetration. I put it center-chest. He goes still, still breathing, the kind of still that means the body has decided that moving is no longer a priority it can afford.
"Enough," Tay says.
I lower the bow.
My hands feel strange. Not wrong, exactly. Just — disconnected from the part of me that decides things, operating on their own authority for a moment before they return to being mine.
They take me to a room. No explanation. Door closes. Silence that has a specific quality — the silence of something about to happen, rather than the silence of nothing.
The door opens.
A blue-horn soldier comes in. Large in the way that makes large feel like a description of something fundamental rather than just a measurement. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to.
The first hit drops me before I've finished processing that it was coming.
The second takes my breath in the literal sense — the air simply leaves and doesn't return immediately, and the body's response to this is panic, which I suppress, because panic uses resources I need for something else.
The third hit cracks something. I don't know what yet. I'll find out later when the inventory is complete.
He doesn't stop.
Each hit is placed. This is what I notice, through everything else — the precision of it. He's not releasing frustration or performing dominance. He's doing a specific thing, and doing it with the focus of someone who has done specific things many times and takes the quality of the work seriously. He's breaking me down in an order that makes structural sense.
I want to scream.
I don't.
Not because I'm performing toughness. Because screaming would give them something, and I have already given enough today. There's a line somewhere in what I'm willing to provide to this situation and I've found it by feel, and it runs at the edge of the sound I will not make.
Even when I can't breathe properly.
Even when I taste blood in a way that means it's coming from somewhere internal.
Even when everything in my body is simply saying stop in the oldest, simplest language the body knows.
I stay quiet.
He stops eventually. Leaves. The room returns to silence.
I am on the floor again. The floor is still cold. The inventory I mentioned — it's running now, the automatic assessment of what is damaged and to what degree and what function is impaired. Several things. Nothing permanent. I'll need time.
The door opens.
I push my eyes open.
General Ren.
He looks down at me with the specific expression of someone who has received a result and is evaluating it against an expected outcome.
"You didn't break," he says.
I don't answer. I don't have enough breath organized for words yet, and also the statement is its own answer.
"You understood," he says. "What was being asked of you, and what refusing would have cost, and what enduring would eventually produce. You understood all of it and you made the correct calculation."
He crouches slightly. Brings his face closer to my level, which is a thing people with authority don't usually do when they're speaking to someone on the floor.
"Welcome to the Seventh Division," he says.
He straightens and turns.
"The highest chance at freedom available to someone in your position."
Freedom.
I almost laugh. I genuinely, physically almost laugh, which would have hurt considerably given the state of at least two of my ribs.
I don't.
Because the laugh would mean: I know what freedom actually is in this empire and I know what you're offering isn't it.
And that's true. But it's not useful.
What's useful is this: the Seventh Division is the unit that gets assigned to the most significant operations. The unit that goes where the outcomes are largest. The unit that, when something unprecedented is happening, is the one in the room where it happens.
Something unprecedented is coming.
I want to be in that room.
The chain is still a chain. I know that. I am going to earn it anyway.
9 MONTHS AND ONE YEAR UNTIL WAR