Chương 15: Sharing

The first morning away from Seventh Stone found them walking an unfamiliar cart track that wound through low hills like a loose thread. Mingxuan kept his eyes on the path ahead, though his awareness stretched upward to the sky that still held its arterial red. The Blood Qi had not released its grip on the world. It made the grass shimmer the colours of fresh cuts, distant mist glowed as though backlit by low flames, and even the mountains on the horizon looked like broken bones capped with viscera instead of snow.

He tried not to think about it too much. Tried to ignore the way his own Qi stirred restlessly in response to that crimson vastness. They had retrieved his abandoned pack a little beyond dawn. It had been waiting for him on the ridge where he had dropped it, leather damp with dew but otherwise undisturbed. Xinyi had shaken out his spare cloak and folded it for him.

"Seventh Stone may be a backwater," she had said, eyeing the empty cart ruts below them, "yet a lone traveller's valuables are invitation enough for mischief."

"Backwater it is," he had agreed.

"But still a tick on the Emperor's ledger." The empire that phrase conjured remained more story than substance to him. He knew it existed. He knew they were walking through its lands. But the weight of imperial authority felt distant, abstract, something that happened to other people in other places. What mattered was that if they kept walking, they would eventually reach a village whose dialect Xinyi understood. At worst, they might find a farmer willing to trade directions for a mendicant's story.

Xinyi had laughed at that.

"You place uncommon faith in the world."

"Only in rivers," he had answered.

"All of them run toward people sooner or later." Now they walked in gentle silence, their footfalls crunching on dry plant husks that had been withered by the Blood Qi's touch. Xinyi catalogued the plants they passed, speaking mostly to herself.

"Wild aconite... that patch of yarrow looks bruised, poor things. They grow faster than their stems can manage under this sky." Mingxuan listened more to the tone of her voice than the words themselves. He was grateful she spoke at all. Each time her hand flicked out to indicate a specimen, he imagined her tethering herself to practical certainties like a sailor watching for lights on a distant shore. By midday they reached a river that had swollen past its banks.

The Blood Qi had turned the water a deep burgundy, as if the earth itself were bleeding out through this wound in the landscape. Fish darted near the surface, their scales flashing a metallic rose in the crimson light. They seemed unafraid of the herons that stood in the shallows, which was wrong. Herons should be hunting. But these birds only picked halfheartedly at the water before beating their wings in disgust. Mingxuan knelt to refill their gourds, and it was then that he noticed the tadpoles.

They squirmed with an unnatural vigour, their tails flicking twice as fast as they should, as if the crimson Qi had loaned them a surplus vitality they had never asked for and did not know how to spend. He sent a pulse of his own Qi through the water to cleanse it. When he sipped from his gourd, he tasted iron on his tongue instead of the usual mineral tang of river silt. He wondered what changes were brewing in his own marrow.

Whether the Blood Qi's influence would leave marks on him the way it left marks on everything else it touched. That evening, they made camp beneath a tangle of trees whose leaves had sharpened to a violent scarlet. The colour was wrong for the season. These were spring leaves, young and supple, turned vicious by the sky's influence. Xinyi set a small fire and unwrapped the rice balls she had packed before they left. They were beginning to dry out at the edges, but they would serve.

Mingxuan accepted one and ate in companionable quiet. The cicadas burst into song as darkness gathered, their clicking pitched higher than he remembered, almost frantic.

"Do you feel it?" he asked, breaking the silence.

"The restlessness?" Xinyi chewed thoughtfully before answering.

"Like nettles beneath the skin. Even the flame is irritable. Look." She gestured at the fire, and Mingxuan watched as the flames snapped sideways though no breeze stirred the air. Xinyi tossed in a pinch of valerian from her medicine pouch, and the sparks hissed a petulant carmine before settling back into more docile yellows and oranges. They spread their bedrolls side by side on the dry grass. Mingxuan dreamed of rust-coloured rivers and woke twice with his heart galloping in his chest.

Each time, Xinyi's calm breathing steadied him, pulling him back from whatever precipice his sleeping mind had carried him toward. By dawn, the Blood Qi felt heavier than before, pressing the hills into squat shadows that seemed to hunker down against the earth as if bracing for a blow. They struck camp while the dew still clung to the grass, each droplet reflecting the crimson sky. When a pack of foxes skirted the path ahead of them, Mingxuan noticed their eyes shining an unsettling garnet.

They snarled at nothing he could see, fighting over some invisible slight.

"They would usually be sleeping at this hour," Xinyi murmured, half to herself.

"We picked a fraught time to leave." Mingxuan watched the foxes until they disappeared into the undergrowth, then filed the detail away with all the others he had been collecting. Aggressive fauna. Accelerated flora. Fish and tadpoles and herons all behaving as if the world had tilted slightly off its axis, and they were still trying to find their footing on the new slope. He had observed this before, when Blood Qi dominated the Celestial Cycle.

But it was different now that he had no village to retreat to, no walls to hide behind when the pressure became too much. Now there was only the road and the sky and Xinyi walking beside him with her shoulders squared against the weight of the world's unease. On the third day, they crossed a meadow where thistles had grown shoulder-high overnight. The stalks were thick as his wrist, bristling with spines dense as a hedgehog's quills.

Mingxuan drew his knife and hacked a path through them, and the sap that oozed from the cuts was the colour of blood. It stained his wrist and would not wash off, even when he scrubbed at it with water from his gourd. Within the thicket he found a cluster of lilies, stunted and pale, choking beneath the hostile canopy. The Blood Qi nurtured thorns and smothered lilies. The unfairness of it pricked at something in Mingxuan's chest.

"Miniature seasons," he observed, more to himself than to Xinyi. The greater cycle of nature still had its place. The planet still tilted on its axis, bringing spring and summer, autumn and winter in their proper order. But the Elemental Realm, in its restless breathing, squeezed whole years into days. It forced the seasons to jostle like travellers on the same narrow bridge, all trying to cross at once. Mingxuan traced his memories back through the years of observation.

He remembered Wood Qi waking seedlings beneath frost, promising a naive spring, only for Fire Qi to sweep in days later and sear the newborn shoots. He remembered rain swollen with Water Qi drowning ants and arguments alike, then yielding to Metal's merciless clarity that left everything brittle as unfired clay. And that rare bone-white horizon that had brought a hush deeper than snowfall, a winter without cold where endings had abounded, and he had refined himself into something new.

He wondered how farmers planned their sowing tables when tomorrow might arrive wearing a completely different face. When roses could wither before they unfurled, when crops could ripen or rot depending on which way the celestial wind was blowing. Perhaps no one truly planned. Perhaps they simply endured, trusting that the wheel would turn again and again, that what was destroyed today might be reborn tomorrow. A private smile touched his lips. This world, for all its brutality, was a garden of miniature seasons.

And he was determined to learn the rhythm of its fickle heart. On the evening of the fourth day, clouds gathered on the horizon, bruising the sky with indigo. Mingxuan felt something loosen in the air, as if someone had finally unclenched a fist they had been holding tight for too long. One by one, the veins of red bled into blue until the entire dome flashed briefly violet. Then rain fell, gentle and cool, tinted a faint azure that reminded Mingxuan of the Water Qi cycle he had observed so many times before.

The rain pattered on the leaves with a sound like murmuring voices. It rinsed the crimson from stone and petal alike, washing the world clean. Animals hunched and tucked their tails low as they scurried toward shelter. Xinyi lifted her face to the sky, letting the droplets stripe the dust from her cheeks. Mingxuan did the same and felt the restless drone in his bones finally, blessedly, cease. He exhaled and felt lighter than he had in days. They took shelter under a willow whose bark smelled of spice when wet.

Mingxuan watched the rain coax lily buds free from the strangling thistle coils, watched petals unfurl pristine and white as if they had never been choked at all.

"Blood disagrees with me," he said aloud.

"I wonder if that's to do with my Qi. Liu Wen never said what Death is weak to." Xinyi hummed softly as she squeezed water from her braid.

"It disagrees with me as well." Her voice was tight in a way that made Mingxuan look at her more closely.

"It drags me back to that day. The ambush. I swear to you, I can taste the iron on the back of my tongue. It's enough to make me sick." Mingxuan settled beside her, drawing his knees up and pulling his damp cloak tighter around his shoulders.

"We haven't talked about that day much," he ventured.

"We haven't."

"I don't remember it all that clearly, to be honest with you."

"Count that as a blessing." She shook her head, and her expression was distant, as if she were looking at something far beyond the rain-soaked hills in front of them.

"But you shouldn't have to remember it at all." Mingxuan picked up a pebble from the ground beside him, turning it in his palm and testing its weight. The stone was smooth and cool, worn by water and time.

"The other midwives," he said carefully.

"I remember there was more than just you." Xinyi was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had softened, though the tightness remained beneath it.

"We were not a close brood," she began.

"Yet midwives weave acquaintance quickly, or the mothers-to-be grow anxious. Shen kept her hair in a crown braid that never slipped, even in the thick of labour. Her laugh had a hitch to it, like she was always a little surprised by her own amusement. She carved little wooden whistles in her spare time, and she'd give them to the children she delivered when they were old enough to blow them without choking."

Mingxuan placed the pebble carefully at the willow's root, a small marker for a woman he had never known but whose life had been spent for his.

"There was Dai Rou," Xinyi continued. Her fingers twisted in the fabric of her cloak, worrying at a loose thread.

"She liked to place her cheek against your mother's belly and hum to let you know someone held you steady. The audacity to behave so familiarly with a cultivator! I thought she was mad at the time. She owned exactly one pair of shoes, and she lined the inside with mulberry leaves, so her feet would smell sweet at the end of a long day." The detail was so specific, so achingly human, that Mingxuan felt something tighten in his throat. He swallowed it down and waited for Xinyi to continue.

"Yulan." The name seemed to take effort to speak aloud.

"The senior among us. She could thread a needle in the dark, and she teased me for squinting at my work. I never learned how old she was, but she had the air of someone who had been delivering children before my mother was born." Xinyi's voice dropped to a whisper.

"She took an attack meant for me. A demon I hadn't spotted coming from the side." Mingxuan bowed his head. He remembered that. Rain speckled Xinyi's sleeve, darker circles blooming and vanishing against the fabric. Mingxuan sat very still, holding the moment as gently as he could. He tried to picture them, Shen, Rou, and Yulan. Women who had died so he could live. He brushed damp earth into the shallow groove his pebble had left behind.

"I'll remember them," he said.

"It feels inadequate, but it's the least I can do." Once, their Death Qi had been part of him, consumed in that first terrible flood of power on the day of his birth. A bout of melancholy struck him as he realized he would never be able to catalogue their memories the way he had Elder Kao's or Liu Wen's. Those threads were lost to him now, dissolved into the foundation of who he had become.

"Even speaking their names hurts," Xinyi admitted. Her fingers had gone still on the loose thread.

"And I didn't know them well. I don't like to think of these things, Mingxuan."

"I know." From the slope below them, frogs began their twilight call. The pitch was subdued, no longer the frantic chirr of Blood-ridden days. Mingxuan watched a dragonfly stitch between the reeds, its wings reflecting azure instead of warlike crimson. The world was righting itself, slowly. Finding its balance again.

"Blood Qi unsettles more than flesh," he said, thinking aloud.

"It agitates water and root and bone alike. Yet even that tide withdraws. Its lesson, perhaps, is impermanence."

"Impermanence I can tolerate," Xinyi replied. She pressed her palms together as if trying to warm them, though the evening was not cold.

"It's the suddenness that bruises. Seasons should not cut like blades." Mingxuan nodded slowly.

"Yet the blade reminds us to be vigilant." Xinyi's smile flickered, caught somewhere between humour and pain.

"Your lips move, but I hear Elder Kao speaking."

"He would have used three more metaphors and a joke about his knees." Mingxuan felt his own mouth curve in response.

"I'm no wit to match, I'm afraid." The small moment of levity loosened something in the air between them. The rain slackened, and a hush settled where the drizzle had whispered. Mingxuan reached for a fallen willow leaf, turning it so the drops rolled along its spine like tiny rivers seeking the sea. He imagined Shen, Dai Rou, and Yulan's souls watching from some cosmic balcony where the world's great wheel turned. He hoped they approved of how he had grown. He hoped they did not regret the price they had paid.

He tucked the leaf carefully into the hem of his sleeve.

"We should rest," he said. Xinyi agreed with a nod. They unfolded their blankets beneath the willow's shelter. Overhead, the sky darkened from cerulean to navy to midnight. Mingxuan tasted the air and found no copper tang, only rain-washed loam and the faint sweetness of the willow's spice. He whispered the names quietly—Shen, Dai Rou, Yulan—letting each one settle where his Death Qi lay coiled and careful. They built only a small fire, content to watch stars re-emerge one grain of light at a time.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. At the edge of sleep, Mingxuan spoke into the darkness.

"Thank you for coming with me, Xinyi." She did not open her eyes.

"I'd rather keep pace with you than sit counting hours in a hut. Besides, Death has poor bedside manners. Someone must remind you to eat." Mingxuan smiled and let sleep take him. Blood had given way to rain. Unease had given way to quiet companionship. The road ahead promised both thorns and lilies, but tonight the hush lay gentle between them, and the azure drops drummed soft applause upon the willow's leaves.

oOoOo Morning arrived in shades of pale blue that would have been familiar if not for the turquoise clouds and the cobalt coin of the rising sun. Mingxuan woke to a pull behind his sternum. The sensation was gentle, like a thread being drawn taut rather than yanked, but it carried the same inevitable quality he had learned to recognize over the years. Somewhere nearby, a life was drifting toward its end. He lay still for a moment, listening to Xinyi's steady breathing beside him.

The instinct to slip away alone was strong, born of years of solitary vigils and private observations. But something had already shifted between them on this journey, a barrier had begun to lower, and he found he wanted to continue the work of dismantling it. He pushed himself up and reached over to touch Xinyi's shoulder, his knuckles gentle against the fabric of her cloak.

"Xinyi," he whispered.

"I want to show you something." She made an incoherent sound and burrowed deeper into her blanket, but a second, firmer nudge coaxed her eyes open. The dew on her lashes caught the morning light, and for a moment she looked younger than her years, soft with sleep. She blinked twice, trying to focus.

"Too early," she croaked. He offered what he hoped was an encouraging smile and tucked a stray curl of hair behind her ear.

"Please." That earned a sigh, but she pushed herself upright and let the blanket slip to her waist. When he extended his hand, she took it and let him pull her to her feet. She swayed slightly, still half-asleep, and he steadied her with a hand at her elbow. Once she was standing, Mingxuan set a brisk pace, the invisible hook in his chest hauling him forward. He parted the willow's curtain of leaves, feeling them brush cool and damp against his shoulders, and strode into the mossy undergrowth beyond.

Xinyi stumbled after him, the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders and flapping at her ankles.

"Wait, our packs," she said, glancing back toward the hollow where their camp lay.

"If someone wanders by…"

"No one will," he said, squeezing her fingers.

"And time is thin this morning. Trust me. Nothing there is worth more than what I must show you." She gathered the blanket closer and lengthened her stride to keep pace with him. Mingxuan felt excitement and apprehension warring in his chest, each emotion sharp-edged and demanding attention. The tug of Death beat a steady rhythm against his ribs, promising revelation. But beneath that was fear, the old fear that she would recoil from the truth, that she would see something monstrous in what he found beautiful.

They moved through undergrowth that had been rinsed clean by the night's rain. Ferns bowed under the weight of water droplets. A snail's shell flashed opal on a moss-crowned root. Thorn arches braided overhead, each barb wearing a single bead of moisture that caught the slanted cobalt sunlight and fractured it into tiny prisms of aquamarine. The beauty of it made something in Mingxuan's chest ache. The tug finally brought him to a halt at an elder thicket where branches sagged beneath the weight of pale berries.

Between the exposed roots, a black cat lay folded upon itself, ribs and spine forming a sharp angle. Patches of fur had sloughed away, leaving jaundiced skin that trembled with each shallow breath. One remaining ear twitched once, a defeated motion. When Mingxuan eased closer, the animal lifted its head and bared its teeth. A rasping sound escaped its chest, and the cat tried to haul itself upright. Its forelegs scrabbled at the ground, claws scoring the soft mud, but its body would not obey.

After a heartbeat, the effort collapsed. The creature sagged back down, panting as if breathing itself had become an impossible labour. Silence gathered around them. Dew rolled from the elder leaves in slow, striking the soil with tiny ticks that sounded almost like a countdown. Xinyi shifted her weight. Every movement felt too loud, too intrusive for this still clearing. Mingxuan knelt first, pressing his fingers into the damp soil to steady himself.

He could see the Blood Qi curling from the animal in thin scarlet wisps, though he knew Xinyi's mortal eyes would register nothing. Xinyi folded herself carefully into a crouch beside him, her eyes fixed on the shabby creature. Mingxuan caught the faint hitch in her breathing when the current brushed against her skin. She could sense it, even if she could not see it. The chill in the air, the feeling of an ending approaching. He extended a steady palm toward the cat, not quite touching, and let calm seep outward.

He waited for Death to arrive and pose its quiet question, the question it always asked: Are you ready?

"When Death arrives," he murmured, "it starts as a thread behind my heart." Xinyi's eyes flicked from the cat to him, but she did not interrupt. He was grateful for that.

"It feels… inevitable. Not cruel, not kind. Simply a door opening in a corridor I already travel." He pressed his free hand to his sternum, fingers mapping the strange sensation that lived there.

"All sound thins. Colours do too. What remains is the shape of ending. I've always found it beautiful, but I want to know why." Xinyi waited, her silence patient and attentive.

"I never know what waits on the other side of the thread," he continued.

"Sometimes a beast, sometimes a plant, sometimes an animal." A rueful curve touched his mouth, and he felt suddenly vulnerable in a way he had not expected.

"Throughout this life and the last, exposing my fascination with death has been perhaps my greatest fear. I've kept this to myself for as long as I can remember, and it looks like I must continue to do so with most of the world. But I'm tired of hiding from you." Xinyi laid a palm on the back of his hand, and the warmth of her skin against his was grounding.

"Then don't. You shall never need to hide anything from me, Mingxuan." He nodded, exhaling slowly. Gratitude washed through him.

"Not long now," he whispered, turning his attention back to the cat. He lowered himself until his knees pressed into the chill of the loam and kept his hand hovering just above the creature's spine.

"The latch has begun to lift." Xinyi edged closer, and he felt her presence at his shoulder.

"What does it feel like?" she whispered.

"Imagine a string pulled too tight," he answered. The words came more easily now, with her listening.

"It hums with its own panic. The pitch grows thinner, thinner, until it snaps." He tapped his sternum where the tug had become a steady, resonant chord.

"My work begins only after the break. To draw sooner would be theft, an insult to the story trying to finish its final sentence."

"Could someone steal it early?"

"Yes." His voice roughened with old distaste, with the memory of Liu Wen's warnings and the skeletal reaper he had glimpsed in his vision.

"Death cultivators do it all the time, apparently. Yanking vitality like bandits emptying pockets. But it's wrong, and they are wrong. Those transgressions will be punished, sooner or later." The cat's flank hitched. A wet gasp rattled out, turning the small body rigid before it sagged again. Mingxuan felt the thread fray, the string reaching its breaking point.

"Listen," he said softly.

"This is it." The world dulled around him. Colours leached away. Birdsong ebbed to a distant warble, as if he were hearing it through water. In that hush, he sensed the filaments beginning to unspool. Pale, wispy threads drifted free from fur and flesh. He waited with his palms open and inhaled deeply. The cat shuddered once more. The taut string snapped. The final filament slipped loose, and the animal exhaled a sigh so light it barely stirred its own whiskers.

Its eyes dimmed like embers doused by rain, and its eyelids drifted closed. Only then did Mingxuan extend his will, gently coaxing each drifting wisp toward him. He guided them with patient breaths, channelling the filaments through his meridians and letting them settle in the quiet chambers of his dantian where they would nest until he chose to examine them more closely.

"It looks at peace now," Xinyi murmured. There was a tremor in her voice that she could not quite suppress.

"When it was in so much pain before." Mingxuan opened his eyes and risked a glance at her. No revulsion clouded her features, only a solemn wonder that made his chest feel tight. Emboldened, he continued.

"Qi is the essence with which every life makes its mark upon the world. When the strength to continue fails, I preserve the final impression, preventing its loss. I hold onto these fragments until my own reckoning is complete in the grand record, at which time, I presume, I will relinquish the collected pages."

"Do you hear their voices afterward?" She leaned forward slightly, her curiosity overcoming her hesitation.

"Is there something of them in this Qi you harvest?"

"Some." He thought about how to explain it.

"Mostly sensations, when it comes to animals. Sun-warmed fur. The memory of chasing prey. Small things that mattered to them." His mouth bent into something that was almost a smile.

"I do not intend to harvest power. That's merely a byproduct. I find myself much more interested in their stories." A hush wrapped the hollow where they knelt. Mingxuan kept his palm upon the cat's still flank for a final heartbeat, honouring the life that had passed. Then he let his eyes fall shut, turning his gaze inward. In the darkness behind his lids, the freshly gathered Death Qi spread through his inner landscape. Its clouded skein was pricked with faint motes, memories imprinted on the soul.

He breathed slowly until the swirl calmed, testing the new weight in his dantian. It felt vast despite coming from such a small creature. Very gently, he worried the skein loose, coaxing one bright thread to unfurl. It resisted at first, but he persisted with patient encouragement. Soon it relented. Warmth met warmth. The knot loosened, and a door swung open inside him.

"I feel sun on stone," he murmured. Sharing this with Xinyi felt like offering a gift he had never given anyone before.

"Cracked courtyard tile that holds heat long after shadows lengthen. It's comfortable. Satisfying. There's a smell of river mud and pickled fish skins. I paw at a dragonfly. Miss. Mount a second attack. Cry out triumphant when its wings crumple." He opened one eye and found Xinyi kneeling beside him, utterly rapt. Her fingers were curled over her knees, and wonder had softened her features in a way that made her look younger. The sight of her like this made warmth bloom in his chest.

He let the next thread drift forward.

"Now rooftops," he said, voice hushed with something close to joy.

"Hot clay tiles, their ridges warm beneath my paws. I balance, tail twitching, above a lane where market songs collide. Lanterns sway below me. Someone flings a chicken bone that clatters five roofs away. Sport, the hunt, the pride of being king of the eaves." Another thread brightened, and he followed where it led without hesitation.

"A doorstep now," he narrated.

"An old woman's sandalwood hands. She sets out a bowl of thin congee, laughs when my whiskers dab the rice. Rain ticks on bamboo blinds, but inside is dry, and I curl on a stack of soft things by the fire. The smell is starch and smoke and belonging." His voice softened.

"Contentment warms my chest, and I let it rumble." The skein trembled, and deeper currents beckoned. This next one was harder to pass through, muddied by something darker.

"Ah," he breathed.

"Now the pain of birth. A hollow between roots. A yellow sky. Two kits arrive slick and blind, one dark as onyx, one white as jade. I lick each one to a shine, gather them close, nurture them. The nest smells of milk and crushed leaves. There's rain outside, but my body makes its own summer." A sudden shriek tore through his concentration. Mingxuan's eyes snapped open, his heart lurching in his chest. Xinyi had fallen back on her heels, one hand clamped over her mouth, her eyes wide with shock.

Only then did he register that the mewling in his ears was not a remembered echo. It was real. Beneath the thorned bush, two kittens—one white as washed linen, one black as ink—teetered toward them on unsteady paws. Their mews quavered, small and desperate and achingly alive. Mingxuan's mouth opened, but no words came.

"Kittens," Xinyi breathed.

"Yes." He swallowed hard.

"Kittens."

"Yin and yang." There was a hint of teasing warmth in her voice now, cutting through the shock.

"Auspicious, no, Mr. Cultivator?" Mingxuan drew a breath and let his awareness sink below the surface of the kittens' bright cries. The threads of Qi that emanated from their thin chests were clean and new, but already flickering at the edges. The pattern told a story he could read as easily as words on a page: milk had run dry, warmth was leaving, and the forest would not spare time to teach them the many dangers that waited in a single night.

He rested two fingers above the white kitten's crown, feeling for the pulse of its Qi. The flow stumbled, wavered. A few more nights of cold would snap it entirely.

"They have days, perhaps," he said, shifting to face Xinyi fully.

"Less, if the weather turns or a predator passes by." She was already pulling her cloak loose, shaping the wool into a shallow sling with movements that were brisk and unthinking. Pure instinct.

"Then we keep them," she said, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. The white kitten slid in first, nothing but tremor and bone. The black followed, a darker shadow against the cloth. Their combined weight barely bowed the fabric, yet Xinyi cupped them both as if holding treasure more precious than gold. Mingxuan felt a smile tug at the corner of his mouth despite everything. Of course she would answer need with care. It was who she was, down to her bones.

He turned back to the mother cat, now cold and still, and slid his arms beneath the limp body.

"One more duty," he murmured. Xinyi knelt carefully, guiding the sling downward so the kittens could press their tiny noses against their mother's still-warm fur. They butted against the familiar flank, their mews thinning to puzzled chirps as they searched for milk that would never come again. Xinyi swallowed hard and stroked their ears with gentle fingers. Mingxuan laid the mother upon a bed of moss he had cleared, folding her paws beneath her breast as though she were only dozing through a summer afternoon.

The gesture felt important, a small dignity offered to a life that had ended too soon. When the kittens' searching noses finally fell still, he touched their crowns again and spoke so quietly that his breath almost swallowed the sound.

"She has gone beyond the next hill. The grass is soft there, the wind gentle. Run when your paws grow strong. She will see every pounce." In the back of his mind rose an image, of a courtyard long lost and the echo of his own name called one final time. A mother gone. A boy left blinking beneath strange stars, alone in a way he had not yet learned to understand. He bent that memory into balm and let it flow outward toward the kittens, hoping it might ease their grief.

He found a short willow branch and used it to scratch a shallow trench beside the elder roots. Xinyi helped, pressing earth with her free hand while being careful not to jostle the sling. They worked in silence, covering the cat with moss first, then with soil. When the mound stood smooth and even, Mingxuan placed a single elderberry at its crest. The small fruit bled lilac juice that darkened the soil where it touched.

"Rest," he whispered, sealing the grave with one final light touch. A murmur of Death Qi brushed his palm, lighter now. Content. Xinyi rose carefully, rocking the kittens against her heart.

"They need names."

"Bestowed after we feed them," Mingxuan said. They began the slow walk back through the wet undergrowth. Mingxuan cut a path where thorns snagged at Xinyi's cloak, using his knife to clear the way. The sky was brightening to a clearer azure as Water Qi fully asserted its dominion over the world. Early swallows skimmed between branches, reclaiming a tune that Blood Qi had long denied them. Moss exhaled rain-washed perfume.

Distant wood doves cooed, as though the forest itself recognized the small reprieve won by two wanderers and a pair of frail lives. Halfway back to camp, Xinyi broke the comfortable silence.

"You knew at once they could not survive."

"I read it in the falter of their pulse," he answered. The truth came easily with her.

"Life is a river. Some banks are steeper than others." He glanced at her sideways.

"Yet you would have gathered them even if they had been condemned at first breath." She considered that, her gaze lingering on the white tuft peeking from the sling.

"Someone must choose kindness before tallying odds." Their camp waited precisely as they had left it, blankets still rumpled, packs strewn where they had been dropped the night before. Xinyi placed the kittens upon her folded cloak, letting them nestle into the lingering warmth. She fished dried fish flakes from her pouch, crushed them to powder between her fingers, and stirred the crumbs into a small amount of sweet water. A strip of linen, twisted into a makeshift wick and soaked through, became a teat.

The white kitten latched greedily. The black followed after a puzzled sniff, its tiny mouth working with determination. It was hardly nutritious compared to a mother's milk, but it would serve for now. It would keep them alive. Mingxuan built a new fire in the remains of last night's pit while Xinyi tended to the kittens. He set a teapot on to boil, watching steam begin to curl from its spout. The work helped settle the strange mix of emotions churning in his chest.

While they worked, dusk painted stripes of azure through the willow fronds. The kittens fed in earnest, each swallow an act of stubborn continuation. Mingxuan bent close, counting their heartbeats. When the kittens finally surrendered to sleep, their bellies round for the first time in who knew how long, Xinyi tucked them into a spare sock. She turned the cuff into a safe hollow and lifted the makeshift cradle, weighing it in her palms.

"They will need meat soon," she said softly.

"And warmth every night."

"We will manage," Mingxuan replied.

"The next village can't be far. Seventh Stone is a backwater, but it's not on another continent. A stable's straw and a saucer of milk are easily bartered."

"There is room in your journey for such detours?"

"All good roads allow for pauses." He poured tea into two chipped cups, letting the steam warm his face. He handed one cup to Xinyi.

"And there is nothing more patient than Death." A gentle breeze rustled the willow leaves overhead. Mingxuan closed his eyes briefly, feeling the kittens' faint Qi flutter against the larger weave he carried inside himself. Little sparks, yet bright enough to tilt the balance of a single morning. When he opened his eyes again, Xinyi was watching him. The campfire made small flames dance in her eyes, twin reflections of the sparks he sensed within himself.

"They are already teaching us patience," he said. She sipped her tea, then smiled without showing her teeth.

"Then let us study well, Teacher." They set off again a short while later, the music of two mewling kittens rising to join the birdsong as they walked.