Chương 17: Spirits

The dawn came slowly to the fields, without ceremony. Mingxuan had watched it come, the darkness thinning to grey and then to the pale blue of early morning. The Death Qi that had hung over the farmyard during the night was fading now, retreating before the light, though traces of it remained in wisps. He sat in the barn, near the threshing floor, being careful not to wake Xinyi and the kittens.

She had made herself a nest of hay near the west wall, curled around the two small creatures with her cloak pulled up to shield them from the wind that found its way through the gaps in the planking. Even in sleep, the kittens kneaded at her sleeve with their tiny paws. Watching them, Mingxuan felt something perilously close to contentment. He rested his elbows on his knees and let himself remember the night.

He and Yiren had talked for hours, sitting side by side under the pale moon, watching the ghost drift through the fields. They had talked until her voice went rough, and only then had she hobbled back to the farmhouse. The phantom had dispersed almost at once after she left. Mingxuan had stayed. He had tried to reach the ghost, sending careful pulses of Death Qi toward it, trying to weave something that could touch it, perhaps even draw it in. But nothing had worked. The frustration of it sat in him still.

He did not know if his failure came from lack of skill, lack of power, or simply lack of understanding. He did not know which possibility troubled him most. Was there something fundamental about spirits, about ghosts that clung to the mortal world, that a Death cultivator could never bridge? He had no answer. According to Yiren, the spirit had not always manifested so clearly.

In the first weeks after Ren's burial, there had been only sounds, small deceits of the ear that could be dismissed as tricks of the imagination. An axe striking wood, the scrape of boots on grass. A voice, low and familiar, just at the edge of hearing. She had kept these moments to herself, blamed them on grief. They vanished whenever she went indoors, as though the house itself refused to let the dead enter.

Then bandits had killed her son and his wife on the road, and her world had narrowed to a single point of pain. She had endured, for the children. She'd had to. But every twilight that passed, she heard Ren's voice more clearly. A chuckle when the goat kicked over a pail. A whistle as she gathered herbs. Where once she had resisted belief, she began to lean into it. The presence steadied her when she felt herself coming apart.

Though she was never quite certain whether it was truly Ren's echo, or merely her own mind fraying at the edges. She knew the stories. Everyone did. Ghosts that turned hungry for the breath they could never take. Widows who woke with frost on their lips after phantoms tried to slip into their dreams. Travellers lured to their deaths. Pale spectres seeking to steal the flesh of the living. Lingering souls who could not accept death and became twisted, malevolent things.

The tales all ended the same way: souls that lost their memories grew venomous, and the living paid the price. Part of her had almost preferred to believe Ren's visits were nothing more than loneliness given voice. An illusion born of sorrow that would fade in time. Harmless, if she could only bear to endure it. The tales also spoke of shamans who burned incense and chanted to drive spirits away. But she was old, the children were small, and the empire's priests walked in far-flung cities, not backwater farmsteads.

So indecision had become routine. By day, she taught the little ones to weed and count seeds. By night, she let her sorrow bloom beside the fields, telling herself it harmed no one. Then, one frigid winter night, Junyu and Meimei had clutched at her sleeves and dragged her to the corner behind the barn. They had pointed into the fog, wide-eyed. Out in the furrows, something walked. A spectral shape, pacing the farm as if inspecting a crop that was not there.

Yiren had recounted the scene to Mingxuan as though it had happened only yesterday. She remembered the impossible creak of leather, the scent of freshly cut wood on a windless night. Her knees had nearly buckled, she told him. But Junyu, his eyes round and shining, had whispered a single word: "Grandfather." The children saw what she saw. Heard what she heard. In that moment, grief had parted like curtains, revealing something stranger than madness. After that, Ren had grown clearer with every visit.

It was as if acknowledging the phantom had given it power, and the world itself began to remember the shape of his body and fill it in. At first, the appearances were irregular. Sometimes weeks would pass without a sign. But the phantom always returned, and more frequently each time, until Ren's silhouette walked the fields every night, and Yiren was there to watch. She longed to speak to him. To ask if the pain of losing a son reached even the dead. But the words choked in her throat.

Better to keep silent, she believed, than to say something that might shatter the fragile miracle that bound them. Seeing him, even as a shimmering outline, was a comfort she did not think she could survive without. Mingxuan remembered the tremor in her hands as she had spoken. He had felt her yearning and her dread, both occupying the same space, spiralling around Ren's stubborn soul. Even now, with the apparition gone, he could sense the man's Death Qi in the air like mist.

He traced it with his inner sight, curious at how it resisted dissolution, how it clung to love and unfinished duty. His gaze drifted back to Xinyi. Each time she exhaled, strands of hair flickered across her cheek. He found himself wondering, not for the first time, what her passing would leave in the world when the far future came to claim it. Would he have the courage to let her Death Qi flow onward, as it should? Or would he hoard it, circulate it through his meridians until the last spark burned out?

The thought poisoned his calm. Cultivation demanded stewardship, not possession. He knew that. But the ache beneath his ribs suggested that rules bent easily when love entered the equation. The kittens squeaked. Their eyelids fluttered. Xinyi murmured something and adjusted her cloak without waking. Outside, the first shaft of sunlight pierced a crack in the hayloft, turning dust motes into drifting stars. Dawn had truly arrived now. And with it, the need to choose. What am I going to do?

The scholarly part of him that weighed cause and consequence remembered every cautionary tale about ghosts that fattened on devotion, growing bold enough to drain the living dry. Another part, softer and perhaps more foolish, remembered the way Yiren's shoulders had eased as she watched the spectre step across the furrows. Love, even in after-images, had kept her heart intact against storms that would have destroyed a weaker foundation. What right did he have to strip that comfort away?

Yet Death was a river meant to reach the sea. Souls that lingered too long in the shallows surely risked stagnation. And from stagnation came danger. The dead were not meant to linger. He truly believed that. Mingxuan pressed his thumb and forefinger together until they went white, trying to imagine what Thanara would say. Would she call this lingering a trespass against the order she shepherded? Or would she forgive a husband's refusal to abandon his vow when his wife needed him most?

"Mingxuan?" Xinyi's voice pulled him from his thoughts. She pushed herself half upright, bleary-eyed, her hair ruffled with straw. She studied him for a moment, and he knew she saw too much.

"You have been awake all night," she said with a voice still thick with sleep. She brushed straw from her sleeve.

"Tell me what you carried through the dark while the rest of us dreamed." So he told her. The words spilled out quietly, without embellishment. Ren's moonlight silhouette and the phantom farm he patrolled. Yiren's trembling confession. His own attempts to weave Death Qi into something that could touch the spirit, and the frustrating way it slipped through every attempt. He ended with the question that gnawed at him: whether releasing such a ghost would be mercy or cruelty.

Xinyi pulled her cloak tighter, shivering slightly. Her gaze drifted to Yin and Yang, who blinked back at her with bright eyes.

"If it were my parents," she said slowly, "when I had just lost them... would I wish them to linger? Or would I beg some kindly traveller to send them onward, so they could have their rest?" She lifted her eyes to his.

"I don't know. That's not an easy question for anyone to answer."

"I asked myself the same," Mingxuan admitted. He folded the edge of her cloak to make a neater nest for the kittens. Little Yin yawned enormously, and Mingxuan found himself yawning in sympathy. Xinyi gave him a mock glare.

"Well, next you need to ask yourself if you'll be in any state to answer questions and solve mysteries without a single wink of sleep." She bullied him into a short nap after that. When he woke, they cooked thin porridge over a traveller's stove and set out a saucer of warmed milk for the kittens. Dawn spilled wider through a crack in the door, turning the steam into pale ribbons. When the bowls stood empty and the animals drowsed, Xinyi rose and rolled her bedding with brisk efficiency.

"We won't solve this by hiding in the barn and talking about it," she said.

"Let's walk the yard. See what signs daylight offers." They stepped into the morning together, unwilling to leave the farmstead until they had found truth, or comfort, or danger. Whichever named itself first. Water still held dominion in the Celestial Cycle. Though no rain fell, a cool humidity clung to the world, beading the fence rails and laying dew across their hair. Overhead, the sky unfurled in layers of blue. Bright near the horizon, deep as lapis at the zenith, pale as porcelain where the mist thinned.

They began at the paddock, following the fence that circled the gardens. A haze of silver clung to every blade of grass. Beneath it, Mingxuan felt the Death Qi settle in shallow pools. Not flowing, not still, something in between. A roiling cloud in flux. Each corner of the yard offered a different tone: faint near the goat pen, stronger where the threshing floor opened toward the fields, almost absent at the farmhouse door.

"I may have blinded myself last night," he said after a stretch of silence.

"I stared so hard at Ren that I stopped listening to the echo around him. It's the echo that troubles me now. Why should a ghost bloom at night and wither by dawn? Why does it keep to the rows and leave the house untouched? And how does a lingering soul grow more formed the longer it refuses to dissolve?" The finite nature of Death Qi had frustrated him for years. He had learned to hoard it and spend it sparingly, always wondering what marvels lay beyond the horizon of scarcity.

That single Day of Death had shown him what abundance could achieve. Yet here, on this unremarkable farm, Death Qi seemed to gather like breath in a bellows. Drawn in, released, drawn in again. None the poorer for having kindled a flame. The possibility dazzled him. If ending and renewal could exist together like that, perhaps the limits he bowed to were not laws at all. Perhaps they were merely misunderstandings cast by habit rather than truth.

Xinyi tucked stray hair behind her ear, her gaze skating across the furrows where Ren had walked.

"You were exhausted," she said simply.

"We both were. No mystery reveals itself clearly on an empty stomach and half a night's rest." She shifted the sling that cradled Yin and Yang. The kittens' small heads bobbed as they peered about with luminous curiosity.

"Still, it is strange." They moved downslope toward a strip of fallow land where last year's corn stalks had collapsed into a knotted mat. Mingxuan reached with his inner sight and felt the Death Qi thicken, rippling across the soil in low, deliberate currents.

"Here," he murmured, closing his eyes.

"I need to test something." He drew breath through the bottom of his lungs, laced it with practiced stillness, and let his own reserves of Death Qi answer the frail call around him. The air cooled, though no cloud passed overhead. He pictured the black cat whose life he had eased from suffering only days before. Her torn ear. The cautious dignity in her final blink. Her Death Qi still flowed through his meridians, and he called upon it now. A shape gathered before him.

The ghost cat formed in strokes of pearlescent moonlight, her patched pelt rendered in pale fire and midnight ink. Where Ren's outline had been smoky and uncertain, this apparition shone. Every whisker was a silver filament. Every claw a crescent of polished nacre. She blinked wide, luminous eyes and padded forward. Mingxuan dropped to one knee, fingers pressed to the cold soil, anchoring the vision. He felt the Death Qi feeding the shape. Brighter than Ren's. Cleaner. Eager to resolve itself.

Yet beneath that purity pulsed an undertone he had not felt in the farmer's ghost. The resonance was similar but tuned to a different key. One more familiar to him. Still, there was enough similarity between his summoned apparition and the ghost that had wandered the fields last night to spark a thought. Perhaps this farm was not haunted by Death Qi wandering of its own accord, but by power coaxed and guided into shape. The kittens caught sight of the spectre before he could pursue the thought further.

Yin and Yang wriggled violently in their sling, pitching tiny mews that trembled between grief and delight. Xinyi gave a soft cry, barely catching them before they tumbled out.

"Easy, little ones," she whispered, though her own breath caught at the sight. The pair stretched desperate paws toward their spectral mother, meowing so fiercely their small bodies shook. The ghost sniffed the air, then sat, tail curling through fallen husks. Each kitten's wail lanced through Mingxuan's composure. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! He swallowed against the ache in his throat.

He lifted his hand, and at the silent command, the ghost cat turned its luminous eyes to him.

"Rest," he murmured, guiding the gathered Death Qi into dissolution. Light thinned. Its whiskers vanished last. Yin and Yang mewed in protest, confused by the sudden absence. Xinyi held them close, stroking their backs until their cries ebbed into trembling hiccups. Mingxuan exhaled slowly, his shoulders slumping. He could not bring himself to look at the kittens.

"Forgive me," he said.

"I didn't consider how cruel that would be. I should have used the demon's Death Qi, but I didn't want to see that creature, even in spectral form. That was cowardice. And now they suffer for it." Xinyi watched him for a moment, her expression gentle and without judgment.

"Why did you summon a spirit, Mingxuan?" she asked softly.

"I needed to feel the difference," he said, his eyes lingering on the empty air where the cat ghost had faded.

"To know whether Ren's nightly return is some natural occurrence, or the result of a technique. The Death Qi here refuses every rule I understand. Summoning the cat was my way of striking the same note on a different bell. To hear how it rang." Xinyi shifted the kittens higher against her shoulder. Yin nosed at her braid, still searching for the mother who was only an afterimage.

"And what did you hear?"

"Similarity," he admitted.

"Both spectres resonate on a shared frequency. But the tone beneath is different. My shaping of the cat felt… finite. As if the Qi would burn itself out if I left it too long. Ren's haunting, by contrast, draws on a reservoir that refills itself. Either way, it suggests manipulation, not accident. Someone or something is feeding it." Her brows drew together.

"Feeding it with what? There are no other cultivators here. Yiren has never called for a priest. Could emotion alone pour that much strength into a ghost?"

"I believed Death Qi was meant to be rationed forever," he answered.

"At least until I could reach a higher stage. A single passing supplies a single harvest. Once spent, it's gone. But this… This is a field where the stalks regrow overnight. If one can learn to draw without exhausting the earth, then limits are illusions. Yet if another hand has already learned how, and bends that power toward keeping the dead among us, then we're in deeper waters than I guessed."

"You think Ren didn't choose to stay?"

"I think his love anchored him. But an anchor needs a chain. Something forged that chain. Linked soul to soil. And keeps pulling on it each night." He glanced at Yin and Yang, committing to memory the sight of their small, distraught faces.

"The kittens convinced me. Their mother's echo couldn't comfort them. It only sharpened the emptiness. How much sharper must Yiren's longing grow each dawn when her husband melts away?" Silence fell between them. At last, Xinyi said, "Then we must break the chain."

"Yes," he agreed.

"But gently. Yiren deserves peace, not ruin." He looked toward the farmhouse.

"Perhaps we can find the source. Some relic. Some oath. Some memory rooted too deep."

"And if the source is within her heart?" Xinyi asked. Mingxuan's answer came after a long pause. He met her steady gaze.

"Then we help her let go." She nodded, stroking the kittens' heads with her fingertips.

"Of course." Morning light had bloomed to full brilliance, but a damp hush still covered the world. Mingxuan took three strides before a fresh idea tugged at him, as insistent as a child pulling at his coat. If Ren's presence was sustained by an unseen hand, then the diffuse Death Qi could not simply be lingering as a purposeless cloud. It just could not be. There had to be something more. He slowed, his eyes narrowing.

"Go on without me for a moment," he told Xinyi. She nodded, adjusting the kittens so they would not tumble, then continued a few steps along the path toward the farmhouse. Mingxuan remained, pacing in widening arcs. He closed his eyes and let every other sense fall away. He anchored himself only to the slow rhythm of his breath and the muted knock of his heart. Thought thinned to a needlepoint. In that needle's eye of awareness, he searched for the hush behind the morning breeze.

At first, every sigh of wind felt like interference. Every note of birdsong was a distraction. The current eluded him entirely. Twice he thought he had found it, only to have the sensation dissolve, leaving him with nothing but a faint impression. Frustration nipped at him, but he pressed his thumb and middle finger together and told himself: You do not seize a river. You let it carry you. Gradually, the fragments aligned. A cool wisp brushed his wrist. Looped away.

Returned near his shoulder, then sank toward the soil. Mingxuan followed, step by patient step, tracing an invisible pattern that curved around the farmstead in elaborate swirls. The pattern repeated, faint but there. A circulatory route so delicate he might have dismissed it as coincidence, except that it resembled, in vague impression, the lesser meridian that spiralled around his own right arm.

Each completed circuit refreshed itself, drawing new Death Qi from nowhere he could sense, pulsing it onward before the previous draught had even faded. Bewilderment prickled across his scalp as he let himself feel the flow.

"Cultivation," he muttered.

"But... is the cultivator the land itself?" The notion felt obscene and wondrous at once. Impossible and incredible. Hard to believe. But what else could be doing this? On his next circuit, a familiar whisper slid across his inner sight, and the world shivered sideways. One moment he stood amid the furrows. The next, a different season lay before him.

A younger Yiren, her hair black as night, her skin sunkissed, sat on the fence rail, swinging mud-flecked boots while she looked back at him with a smile as warm as summer. Then the vision thinned. Colour bled out until only morning remained. Startled, Mingxuan tightened his focus on the circulating Death Qi while devoting part of his attention to following the circuit. The Qi seemed to treat him as part of the flow, and another fragment unfurled.

He looked through the eyes of another, standing beneath the trellis in midsummer with a babe cradled against his chest. Ahead of him, Yiren was plucking peas from a pod and flicking them into a wicker basket. The sense of a lullaby drifted through the silence and vanished before Mingxuan could gather its melody. After that, glimpses of memory flashed past. Handing Yiren a carved wooden comb. Wrestling a stubborn ox into a yoke alongside a teenage boy who had Yiren's eyes.

Each image glimmered no longer than a heartbeat before dissolving, and every dissolution tugged the pattern of Death Qi farther along its hidden meridian. Mingxuan followed carefully now, afraid a single heavy footfall might scatter the echoes. Gradually, one scene returned again and again. Standing at a small stone shrine on the farm's boundary. Daylight, dusk, even moonlit hours.

The man cleaned the shrine's trough, replaced wilted flowers with fresh stems, and bowed three times before speaking to the small idol housed within, little more than a smooth stone. His mouth moved, shaping worries Mingxuan could not hear. Yet the rhythm of his words felt intimate, weighted by the things a husband dares not burden his wife with until he has first whispered them to the spirits. Mingxuan lost the thread. Regained it. Lost it again.

Frustration pricked at him, but each rediscovery stitched the pattern clearer. The Death Qi spiralled outward from that modest shrine like ripples from a thrown pebble, feeding the phantom until night coaxed it into full bloom. One final flash. He crouched at the shrine beneath a sky red as an inferno, his shoulders quaking with sobs. His wrists were thin and pale.

Vermillion lightning flashed across the memory's horizon, illuminating the moment the farmer pressed his brow to the idol's base, his lips moving in desperate prayer. Then the image shredded, leaving only the hiss of wind in millet leaves. Mingxuan exhaled slowly, realizing he had been holding his breath through each vision. He let the filaments fade from his inner sight and turned toward the barn where Xinyi waited. Together they approached the house. Each step toward the threshold muffled the ambient Death Qi.

By the time he reached the porch, the circulating hush had dwindled to little more than faint wisps. The kittens stirred in Xinyi's sling, their whiskers twitching, as though even they felt the world catching its breath. Mingxuan raised his hand and knocked. Three sharp taps. The door swung back before his knuckles left the wood on the third knock. Yiren stood framed in the threshold, her shawl knotted hastily at her throat, lamplight trembling behind her.

"Is it done?" she asked. Her eyes flicked past his shoulder as if hunting for a lingering shade. Mingxuan bowed.

"The matter is more complex than an exorcism." He kept his voice gentle.

"May we come in? There's much to explain, and none of it suited to a doorway." She stepped aside at once, and Mingxuan moved inside. Xinyi followed, the kittens bundled beneath her cloak. Junyu and Meimei peeked from behind the hearth's brick lip, their faces grave in the glow. Mingxuan waited until the door closed, sealing them inside. At the scarred table, he began with the simplest truth.

"What walks your fields is not your husband's soul refusing rest." A tremor of protest flickered across Yiren's mouth. He raised a calming palm.

"I don't say Ren is absent. His essence permeates this land. Love is woven into every grain of soil. Yet the apparition you see each night is shaped, not manifested on its own. An unseen hand gathers that essence and fashions it into a likeness." Yiren's fingers tightened on her shawl.

"Whose hand?"

"That," Mingxuan admitted, "I don't yet fully understand. Not completely. But I believe it began with a promise your husband made." He described the circulating Death Qi. How it looped like blood through vessels etched in soil. How it thickened after sundown. How a residual will coaxed it into form. He kept the language spare, careful to avoid terminology that would blur meaning for someone even less familiar with cultivation than himself. Yiren absorbed this in silence. When she spoke, her voice was rough.

"If it's no ghost, must it still be driven out?" Mingxuan looked to Xinyi, finding steady eyes that asked the same question.

"Perhaps not," he said slowly.

"But first. I saw visions of Ren tending a shrine on your boundary. He prayed there often. Poured his cares into the idol. Do you tend such a place?" A frown gathered on her face.

"Shrine?" she echoed.

"We hold no shrine. Ren was never one for fancy gods and spirits."

"He tended it in every season," Mingxuan insisted.

"The children would have been small. Perhaps you thought him at other tasks." Meimei crept forward and tugged at her grandmother's skirt.

"There's a broken shed at the end of the millet rows, Nai Nai. The one with the funny stone in it." Yiren blinked.

"That old thing? My father used it to mark irrigation rights. I thought it just a stone like any other."

"Stone," Mingxuan murmured. He felt certainty solidify.

"May we see it?" Yiren hesitated a heartbeat before nodding. Cloaks were fetched, the iron lamp lifted. They stepped outside. Dawn was giving way to a thin overcast that dulled the world to a pewter-aquamarine hue. The kittens squirmed in Xinyi's sling, restless. They followed a narrow path between damp vegetables, past the paddock, and onto the boundary strip where millet bowed under Water's weight. Mingxuan's inner sight sparked the moment his boots crossed the fence line.

Ahead, lost to briar and thistle to such a degree that it would be utterly hidden if one did not already know it was there, crouched a makeshift shrine scarcely taller than little Meimei. Its roof had sagged, and moss blurred the carved eaves. Yet the grain of the wood retained a quiet dignity. A stone trough lay before it, choked with dead leaves. Mingxuan knew it on sight. Like he had already seen it a dozen times before, though his own eyes had never fallen upon it until this moment.

Junyu crept forward, brushing aside nettles.

"I remember this," he whispered, tilting his head in confusion.

"Grandfather brought me here the day after my birthday. I didn't know why."

"Me too," Meimei said. Mingxuan knelt, brushing a sleeve across the idol's face. Beneath the grime, he uncovered a stylized ox head etched into the rock, horns sweeping skyward in patient benediction, faint and faded. An emblem of strength and patience.

"Here," he breathed. The Death Qi spiraled from the idol through the ground in threads so fine he might have wept at their intricacy. He closed his eyes.

"This is the nexus." Wind whispered through the field. A moment of silence passed.

"A land spirit?" Yiren guessed eventually.

"I know nothing of its rites."

"Perhaps a tutelary god once honoured by your forebears," Xinyi offered softly.

"Abandoned as generations passed." Mingxuan closed his eyes again, letting the currents map themselves across his meridians.

"Ren might have sensed its dormancy and offered small devotions. Flowers, stories, worries. I don't think he took it especially seriously, before the end. But when his final hour came, in desperation, he bartered the only coin he had left. Himself." He opened his eyes to Yiren's stricken face.

"I believe he pledged his soul to the spirit—or god, or whatever entity inhabits this shrine—and asked it to watch over you in return. The entity accepted, and knit his essence into its domain. And witnessing your sorrow, wove a semblance to console you." Meimei hugged her doll.

"Grandfather's still helping." Mingxuan's heart tightened.

"In a way, yes. You could say that." He looked at Yiren.

"The decision falls to you, Good Aunt. I don't believe there's any true danger here. Not in the spiritual or physical sense. But..." He thought back to how the kittens had cried out for the ghostly image of their mother. How would they ever heal from their loss if they were exposed to that over and over again, night after night?

"I don't think it would be good for you to keep on as you have been," he finished. The old woman's fingers trembled where they rested on the shrine's sodden sill.

"If it's not truly him," she whispered, "then what walks the fields each night?"

"A kindness, wrought sideways," Mingxuan answered. He kept his tone gentle.

"Whatever spirit resides here sifted Ren's departing breath. Teased loose memories of his gait, his whistle, the scent that followed him. With those fragments, it wove a shell of him with no will of its own. Only echoes curated to comfort you and the children. Each season of grief taught it more about how to manipulate the energy it harvested at his end, so the likeness grew surer. The mannerisms truer. Until you could almost smell the fresh-cut wood on his hands." Junyu edged closer, his brow furrowed.

"Then Grandfather is... pretend?"

"Not pretend," Mingxuan said, choosing his words carefully.

"Everything the entity draws on was once part of him. His memories. His habits. His feelings. But it's not quite his will. Not directly. He wanted the denizen of this shrine to protect you, but I don't think this is what he had in mind."

"He never wished to frighten us," Yiren said.

"No," Mingxuan agreed.

"I believe the being meant to provide solace. Yet even sugar spoils if left too long. A comfort that tethers you to yesterday may keep tomorrow from unfolding." Xinyi stepped nearer, the kittens curled against her heartbeat.

"Aunt Yiren, have you felt lighter for seeing him? Or heavier when dawn steals him away?" The question drew a brittle laugh from the old woman.

"Both. I endure daylight on the promise of nightfall, and curse sunrise for stealing night." She pressed her shawl tighter.

"What would you have me do?" Mingxuan stared at the ox idol.

"Understand first that no malice guides this haunting. The shrine is like a child who paints a likeness because it has no words for sympathy. But that same innocence cannot fathom the cost of pausing time. Your sorrow, unspent, feeds the cycle. Ren's echo thickens, and the spirit grows more skilled at sculpting the impossible. In another year, it might craft a ghost that answers questions and mimics warmth. Perhaps even crosses your threshold. And where would that leave the living?"

Meimei's doll sagged as she considered this.

"If we ask nicely, will it stop?"

"Perhaps," Mingxuan said.

"Truth be told, I'm not overly familiar with spirit lore. My… teacher was not interested in such things, and I was eager to focus on other lessons he could offer. But I suspect you might be able to reach it in the same manner Ren did. By offering words and prayers. Teach it that protecting a family sometimes means letting them learn how to live without someone they loved." Yiren lifted her chin. Wrinkles carved new valleys in her face.

"And Ren? Does he rest anywhere in this?"

"His wish already guards you," Mingxuan replied.

"To free the wish, we honour it. We show the spirit you're safe to walk forward. That might mean tending this shrine with different prayers. Ones of release, not petition. Or it could require other measures. I'm not certain. The decision is yours." The old woman closed her eyes. When she opened them again, resolution shone through wet lashes.

"Tell me what must be done, cultivator. I've buried a husband and a son. I can bury an ache, if need be." Mingxuan bowed.

"First," he said, "we'll tidy this place. Then we'll craft an offering that speaks of gratitude and farewell in the same breath. After that, we'll wait for nightfall. And together, we'll ask the spirit to let Ren's memory go. If that's what you wish." Behind him, Xinyi's sigh mingled with the kittens' faint purr. Above, through the thatched sky of clouds, a single bar of blue sunlight found the ox idol and lingered. As though the heavens listened, too.