The cold wind of winter was like a knife tempered with ice, and it let out a whining cry as it blew past the dilapidated wooden house at the east end of Blackstone Town. Lin Ye was using a weak oil lamp to polish the arrowhead in his hand with a shiny piece of bluestone. The cracks in the wooden house were not tightly sealed, and the cold wind penetrated along the wood grain, causing the lamps to flicker on and off, causing his thin shadow to sway back and forth on the earthen wall.
Today is his seventeenth birthday, and it is also the annual "Vigil Festival" in Blackstone Town. According to the custom of the town, young people over seventeen years old must go to the ancient pine forest in the west of the town to keep vigil on this night, praying to the mountain god for protection and smooth hunting in the coming year. But Lin Ye knew that he was destined to be absent - he was a child without "spiritual patterns".
