Chương 4: Seeking Death

Mingxuan turned three, then four, then five. His early childhood was largely uneventful. A life of tranquillity in a quiet village far enough removed from the machinations of empires and the clash of cultivators that such things belonged only to the realm of stories, as far as its residents were concerned. Woe behold any who disturbed that peace. Yet for all the placidity that wrapped around Seventh Stone, Mingxuan kept a private vigil.

He watched the sky and catalogued each shift in the Celestial Cycle with patience that would have seemed unnatural had anyone known the true depth of his observation. In five years, he had never seen a single day when Death Qi dominated the world. Fire came and went, painting the heavens in shades of vermillion that made the air shimmer with heat. Water followed in cool blues that brought rain and left the paddies swollen.

Earth settled heavy and golden, making the millet stalks bow under the weight of their own abundance. Wood arrived in greens so vibrant they hurt to look at, and Metal gleamed silver-bright across mornings that rang with the sound of distant bells. Dream, Blood, Wind, Lightning, Shadow, and countless others each took its turn painting the vault of heaven, bending the world to harmonize with its particular song. But Death never came. The solution, however, had been obvious.

If Death would not come to him, he had to seek it out himself. He began cautiously. The pull in his chest had always been there, that strange magnetic knowing that told him when something was ending. Now he had learned to answer it deliberately, to follow where it led rather than simply acknowledging its presence. On a pink afternoon when Dream Qi drifted through the air, the tug drew him beyond the ordered rows of millet into the scrubland at the village's edge.

He found a lark beneath a thorn bush, its speckled breast rising and falling in shallow, desperate gasps. Kneeling in the grass beside it, he cupped the small body in his palms and felt the spark flicker against his skin. The bird's eyes found his, and then the spark behind it flickered once and went out. The thread that slipped free was gossamer-thin, barely there at all. Mingxuan guided it through the channels within himself with reverence that all endings deserved regardless.

He committed every sensation to memory: the faint mineral taste on the back of his tongue, the way his fingertips tingled, the coldness that bloomed in his chest and then dispersed. That night, he added the experience to his journal with charcoal that smudged under his careful strokes. Days later, beneath skies gone misty grey, a different pull called him to the irrigation ditch.

There he discovered a line of ants ferrying their dead toward a mound already crowned with wilted petals and the husks of other fallen insects. He watched them for a long time. One by one they surrendered to the damp, their minuscule lives winking out like stars; tiny to him, but vast to them. Each death was a pinprick, barely noticeable, but together they formed a constellation of endings. Mingxuan knelt so low his chin brushed mud.

He drew in each flickering thread, weaving them together until they formed something substantial enough to feel. The harvest was meagre compared to the torrent he had drunk on the day of his birth, but the experience taught him something valuable. Many deaths happening at once created a different quality of qi than a single passing. Like the difference between one note and a chord. He became a student of mortality.

Every shade the sky wore became a potential lesson, every shift in the Celestial Cycle an opportunity to observe how death expressed itself under different conditions. During a blue nightfall, he tracked a trembling echo through stands of bamboo and discovered an elderly toad, half-swallowed by time itself. Its final croak trailed off into a rattle, and the qi that followed tasted of damp earth and moss.

It tingled along his teeth before settling deep in his bones, different from the lark's airy dissolution or the ants' collective surrender. Under skies the colour of sand, he found a desiccated corn stalk giving up its last droplet of sap. Even plant deaths carried qi, he learned. Thin and woody, less potent than animal deaths, but strangely soothing. He catalogued everything with the methodical devotion of a scholar: species, sky colour, distance from the village, his own physical reactions.

The journal filled with observations written in a child's careful hand, each page a map of mortality's many textures. Over time, the once-chaotic tug became a language he could read with his eyes closed. Scents and textures, temperatures and tastes, each death announcing itself in its own particular dialect. Yet even as he harvested these quiet endings, Mingxuan made certain to honour what he took. He whispered apologies over each cooling form, his voice small in the vastness of forest or field.

He buried small bodies when he could, marked roots with braided grasses, set pebbles in cairns for beetles no larger than rice grains. The gestures mattered, he felt. They changed the quality of the qi he absorbed, gentling it somehow. With every respectful ritual, the power settled more peacefully inside him, acknowledging that the boy who collected it also guarded the stories left behind. But when the hush returned and death filled him to the brim, disappointment gnawed at his chest with small, persistent teeth.

No matter how potent the thread he gathered, She never came. He would sit very still after each collection, eyes wide, ears tuned for that soft sigh of worlds parting that he remembered from the space between lives. Yet only wind answered, ruffling feathers or scattering petals over the tiny graves he made. The page in his journal reserved for Her remained blank.

Some nights he tried to conjure her with concentration alone, focusing all his will on the memory of silver hair that moved like smoke and eyes filled with stars. The air would shimmer, teasing him with the possibility of thinning, and he could swear he smelled rain‑drenched lilac. His heart would leap with desperate hope. Then the light would dim, the scent would fade, and he would find himself clutching at emptiness, certain he had only chased smoke and longing. Fragments haunted him in those moments.

The weight of a gentle hand. A smile shaped like sorrow. They hovered at the edges of his thoughts, never close enough to grasp yet too vivid to dismiss. Each failure pricked shame into his chest. If he could not even attract the caretaker of endings, what right had he to gather the threads She left behind? He soothed the disappointment the only way he knew how, by tending his cairns, by redoubling his courtesy toward every death, no matter how small.

Yet longing lingered, braiding itself with resolve until the two became indistinguishable. One day, he promised the empty air, he would meet the keeper of final doors again. Whether beneath deathly heavens or beside churning rivers or at the quiet bedside of an old friend. Somewhere, somehow, they would stand face to face once more. But his focus was not given only to the recently deceased. There was another kind of pull in his chest, and following it drew him to people who were very much alive.

It began with a faint vibration, as if an invisible sparrow fluttered against his ribs. The sensation was different from the clean tug of death imminent, softer, more hesitant, a question rather than a statement. Whenever it arrived, Mingxuan would look up from his journal or his chores and find his gaze drawn inexorably toward a doorway, a garden bench, the shadowy porch where some elder sat tracing bygone years in the dust with a cane tip.

While other children raced sticks along the irrigation rills or competed to see who could catch the most crickets, Mingxuan drifted toward whomever the hush beckoned. Granny Willow-Knot coughing beneath the persimmon tree. Old Sun stitching fishing nets with fingers gone too numb to manage the knots properly, cursing under his breath. Potter Huo gazing at unfired clay, a man saying goodbye to an old friend, knowing that the clay would outlive him by centuries.

Each visit wrapped him in a quiet that only the elder and the nearing horizon could share. He never announced his purpose. Instead, he fetched water when cups sat empty, shooed flies from sleeping faces, listened to stories most precious to their tellers. Granny Willow-Knot spoke of the jade comb she had inherited from her own grandmother, lost now for thirty years but still clear in her memory.

Old Sun recounted the eel that stole his wedding ring while he washed his hands in the river, and how his wife had laughed until she cried. Huo described the glaze formula he had never quite perfected, the one that would have made his pottery shine with colour. Mingxuan recorded none of it on paper, but each tale etched itself into his chest—a diminishing tremolo, a thinning drumbeat, a candle guttering in the wind.

Though polite enough to his face, the villagers whispered that Xinyi's boy was eerie, sitting for hours with old folk while ignoring games of ball and marbles. What kind of child preferred the company of the dying to that of his peers? But the elders welcomed him. More than once, Mingxuan stroked a papery hand and felt tension ease, the tremor inside him aligning with the storyteller's heartbeat in those moments, two strings tuned to the same pitch.

In such instants, he dimly remembered the beep of machines measuring out remaining time and a warm hand turning cold beneath his own. The memories were fragments, incomplete and frustrating, but they guided him nonetheless. Yet for all those bedside vigils, the silver-haired watcher never appeared. Sitting with Huo one late afternoon when the sky had turned the colour of teal pottery glaze, Mingxuan attempted to channel the subtle river of qi to his eyes.

Perhaps, he thought, proximity to death and the right application of power would thin the veil enough to see Her. The shadows brightened. The kiln's outline gleamed pearl-white. Details sharpened until he could count individual pores in Huo's weathered skin. But no lilac scent drifted on the air, no starlit gaze cut through the enhanced vision. Huo chuckled at the boy's distant stare, the sound more wheeze than laugh.

"Watching ghosts, little raven?" Mingxuan merely smiled and adjusted the potter's blanket, tucking it around shoulders that seemed smaller each time he visited. He left each house lighter in spirit yet heavier with mystery. Death courted him with threads and tugs and the slowing cadence of failing hearts, but the weaver Herself remained hidden beyond whatever veil separated their worlds. Still, the practice brought its own comfort. Here, on the living side of the threshold, he could offer something tangible.

A drink of water. A listening ear. Even a respectful silence that honoured both the life lived and the ending to come. Perhaps, he mused during the long walk back to Xinyi's hut, those gifts carried farther than grief. Perhaps they would one day form a path clear enough for Her to walk when the moment finally arrived. On a morning when the sky rippled endlessly red and Fire Qi hummed through the air, Xinyi pressed a bundle of freshly cut mugwort into Mingxuan's hands.

"Steady now," she said, her tone the one she used when teaching him to prepare medicine. It meant: pay attention, this matters. Elder Kao sat on a wooden stool outside the shrine, his ankle propped atop a cracked basin filled with water gone pink from the sky's reflection. He was the Keeper of the Shrine and the self-appointed guardian of village gossip, a man whose stories could stretch an afternoon into evening without apparent effort.

"Caught the thief," he announced while Xinyi rolled up his trouser leg gently.

"But the rogue escaped with my dignity."

"The rogue was a mouse," Xinyi corrected. The bruise covering his leg from shin to heel looked impressive in the red light, a storm cloud of purple and black. Elder Kao hissed but waved off sympathy when Mingxuan approached. Mingxuan crushed the mugwort between his palms to wake its scent, cutting through the morning's thick heat. Around them, Fire Qi shimmered in waves, making the air itself seem to dance.

He tried to coax a tendril of the Fire Qi toward the crushed herbs just like he guided Death Qi through his body. The heat licked his fingertips, briefly responsive, then slipped away before he could grasp it. All he achieved was pins and needles in his palms and a faint burning sensation that made him wince.

"Hands shaking?" Elder Kao teased, though his eyes were kind.

"Did the mouse steal your courage along with mine?"

"No, Elder," Mingxuan muttered, feeling heat rise in his cheeks that had nothing to do with the Fire Qi saturating the air.

"The fire won't listen to me." And it was true. No qi other than Death would answer his call, it seemed. The realization was both vexing and inconvenient, since Death appeared unwilling to ever dominate the Celestial Cycle. Part of him envied the cultivators who existed somewhere beyond Seventh Stone's boundaries, those who could burn with fire or flow with water, who commanded elements the heavens favoured with regular appearance. But he would not have traded his affinity for theirs.

Not for anything in either of his lives.

"Fire never listens," Kao said with a philosophical air that suited his long beard.

"You tell it to cook rice; it burns the pot. You tell it to warm your feet; it sets your shoes ablaze." He ruffled Mingxuan's hair with a callused hand, then winced as Xinyi wrapped the warm compress tight around his ankle. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Xinyi noticed Mingxuan's frown.

"Different qi answers different callers. Don't need to be a cultivator to know that much," she murmured. They waited while the heat seeped into bruised flesh, doing its slow work of encouragement and comfort. Outside the shrine's small courtyard, millet leaves rustled louder than they should have, sap racing to match the sky's fever. Elder Kao's shoulders gradually slackened, the tight line of pain across his brow easing.

"Better," he admitted after a time.

"The mouse might live to see another day." He reached for his coin purse, but Xinyi stayed his hand with a gentle touch.

"Pickled radish will settle the bargain." As she packed her kit, Mingxuan pressed two fingers to the soft hollow behind Kao's knee. The gesture looked like a child's idle curiosity, meaningless to any observer. But beneath the healing warmth of the poultice, beneath skin and muscle and the steady flow of blood, he felt another truth. The pulse was slower than it should be. Fainter. A familiar tug brushed his chest, recognisable as his own reflection.

Elder Kao caught the boy's serious stare and his expression shifted to amusement.

"What mischief do you see now, little Mingxuan? Have I grown a second head? Sprouted horns?"

"Nothing," Mingxuan lied, withdrawing his hand quickly.

"Just counting heartbeats."

"Well, save some for later; I'll need them when the harvest gods come collecting." Kao's laugh was meant to be hearty but emerged as a wheeze, betraying the very truth he tried to jape away. As they left the shrine yard with mugwort smoke still curling in the morning light, Mingxuan walked in silence. Fire Qi gleamed over the rooftops, vibrant and wild and utterly indifferent to his existence.

Yet the tug inside him hummed in a different key entirely, pointing toward a candle that burned low in its wax, nearly spent. He glanced back at Elder Kao, who had risen to shoo chickens from the shrine steps with exaggerated gusto, reclaiming his dignity from the mouse that had stolen it. Months, Mingxuan estimated. Six at best, if the heavens felt generous. Possibly less if the next Water Cycle brought fever with it.

The knowledge sat uncomfortably between his ribs, colder than any fire could warm, heavier than any weight he had yet carried. oOoOo Time taught Mingxuan that Death Qi offered more than simple accumulation. Of course it did. The thought should have been obvious from the beginning. The day of his birth had shown him what experienced cultivators could do with qi, bending it to purposes both wondrous and terrible. Why should his own affinity be any different?

When the heavens shifted to a multitude of greens and Wood Qi sweetened the wind with the scent of new growth, a cart creaked into Seventh Stone. Auntie Peilan rode perched atop the driver's bench, surrounded by sacks of barley and bundles of herbs that filled the air with competing fragrances. She was the apothecary of nearby River Bend Village—which truly was not nearby by any reasonable measure of distance, but it was the closest settlement to Seventh Stone, and it did indeed lie on the bend of a river.

Copper pendants shaped like ginkgo leaves jingled from her medicine chest whenever the cart hit a rut, advertising her trade more surely than any painted sign could have managed. Peilan's visits meant fresh tinctures for Xinyi's stocks, gossip exchanged over tea, and amiable arguments about whether mugwort or motherwort made the better tonic for restless dreams. It also meant, to Mingxuan's eternal irritation, that he would be forced to socialise.

Beside her, wedged between a sack of grain and a basket of dried mushrooms, her son Liangyu swung stubby legs from the tailboard. He announced each bump with delighted shrieks that sent birds fleeing from nearby trees. Mingxuan was sure the boy had been a bird in a previous life, always fluttering around with his head on a swivel, beady black eyes endlessly searching. The jujube tree outside Xinyi's hut quivered in the breeze as if anticipating the arrival.

Xinyi herself was there waiting, mortar already in hand, when the cart rattled to a halt in a small cloud of dust.

"River Bend sends its sunshine," Peilan called, climbing down with a smile for her peer.

"Seventh Stone welcomes you with shade," Xinyi replied, stepping forward. Mingxuan stood at her side, observing as he always did. Liangyu hopped off last, landing in a puff of road dust that made him cough and wave his hands dramatically. The boy was perhaps a year older than Mingxuan, broader in the shoulders and louder in his enthusiasms. He eyed Mingxuan with the assessing look children give potential playmates, weighing whether companionship or torment would prove more entertaining.

"You gonna be quiet again today, skinny?" Liangyu asked, his tone suggesting he already knew the answer and found it disappointing.

"I speak when words are needed," Mingxuan replied slowly. Liangyu rolled his eyes with theatrical exaggeration, a gesture he must have learned from watching adults. Under the dappled shade of the jujube tree, Peilan and Xinyi fell into the talk of their trade. They exchanged remedies and knowledge with the ease of old colleagues. Their conversation wove between medicine and gossip, practical knowledge and shared understanding.

Liangyu orbited them like a restless planet, tugging at Xinyi's sleeve to show her a beetle he had found, poking through Peilan's baskets to see what treasures they contained, finally planting himself beside Mingxuan with a truly despairing sigh, resigned to boredom.

"What's all that scribble?" he asked, his greasy thumb already reaching for the journal Mingxuan had been keeping. The smear it left across yesterday's careful notation made Mingxuan's jaw tighten.

"That was yesterday's sky," Mingxuan said with forced patience, blotting the smear with the edge of his sleeve.

"I track the Celestial Cycle."

"The sky's always there." Liangyu shrugged. There was a dismissive certainty to the child, like he had never considered a thing worth wondering about.

"And it's just going to change again anyway. You're weird." Before Mingxuan could respond, Liangyu snatched the journal and began fanning himself with it, apparently finding the green-tinged heat oppressive.

"Give it back, please," Mingxuan said, his voice clipped but even. Reacting angrily would just spur the petulant child on.

"Make me." Liangyu stuck out his tongue and darted toward the chicken coop, apparently finding this game more entertaining than sitting in the shade. Mingxuan rose with a sigh and gave chase. Despite being physically younger and slighter of build, he caught up quickly, perhaps owing to the Death Qi that trickled through the pathways of his soul even in moments of mundane activity, lending him a vitality that contradicted his thin frame.

He cornered Liangyu between two indignant hens, the older boy's back pressed to the fence with nowhere left to run.

"Give it back, please," Mingxuan repeated, allowing a bit more force into his tone this time. Liangyu's lower lip trembled. Mingxuan stood firm, one palm extended in expectation. The silence stretched between them, broken only by the hens' irritated clucking.

"You're weird," Liangyu said again, louder this time. When Mingxuan merely continued to hold out his hand, the older boy's face reddened like the vermillion sky of Fire Cycles past.

"If you won't play with me, I'll…" He trailed off, the threat strangled in his throat, frustration overtaking articulation. In one jerky motion, he tore a page free. The sound of ripping paper cut through the morning like a scream. The sheet describing last week's pink sky and the bizarre Dream Qi that had accompanied it came away in Liangyu's fist. The journal's spine cracked like a wing bone. Stray charcoal dust clouded the air between them, dark particles floating in the green-tinted light.

Something cold slammed through Mingxuan's veins. It was the opposite of Fire Qi's prickle, the inverse of Wood Qi's gentle encouragement. This was the cold of winter rivers, of earth that had never known sun, of the space where life holds its breath. The Death Qi that normally flowed in gentle circuits through his channels surged forward, responding to his anger with a force he had never experienced. The hens scattered in a panic of feathers and frightened squawks.

Liangyu froze as the air around Mingxuan darkened, a shadow creeping across the torn page he still clutched. Visions burst behind Mingxuan's eyes like stars exploding. Liangyu slipping beneath river ice, the current's grip inexorable, coughing water that filled his lungs. Liangyu tumbling from a hayloft, his neck bent at an angle that spoke of permanent stillness. Liangyu grey-faced under bone-white heavens while a weeping Peilan pressed lotus coins to his lids in the ritual of the dead.

Each possibility struck like a hammer, and Mingxuan could taste them all; the mineral tang of river water, the dusty scent of hay, the funeral incense that would burn beside a small body. Horror burned through him, dissolving the anger that had summoned the visions. The flare of Death Qi recoiled at his revulsion, whipping back into its channels like a serpent retreating to its den. Colour seeped back into the world in slow gradations. The green of Wood Qi reasserted itself. The shadows retreated.

Liangyu stared at him with eyes gone wide and wet.

"Monster," he whispered, his voice small as a hatchling's first peep. Then he bolted for the jujube tree, the torn page fluttering forgotten from his hand, sobbing in great gasping gulps. Silence fell across the chicken yard, broken only by the hens' continued scolding and Mingxuan's own ragged breathing. His knees wobbled beneath him, threatening to give way entirely. He knelt slowly, retrieving the torn page with fingers that trembled despite his best efforts.

He brushed dirt away as though gentling broken pottery, pressing the page back into its proper place in the journal. Regret pooled in his chest, colder than the Qi that still echoed through his marrow. He had not meant to frighten the boy. Had not even known he could do such a thing. The visions had been drawn forth by anger he should have controlled better. Back beneath the branches, Peilan swooped in like a bird protecting its young, gathering her sobbing child into her arms.

Liangyu clutched at her sleeves, words dissolving into hiccups and gasps.

"He turned into a demon, Mama!" The wail held genuine terror.

"His eyes went all dark and I saw—I saw—" Peilan shot Xinyi a look that landed somewhere between apology and alarm, clearly uncertain what had transpired but reading her son's fear as truth. She hurried the boy toward the house, her whispers— breathe, little one, mama's here, you're safe —fading as she moved away from the chicken yard. Mingxuan stood unmoving until the dust his confrontation had raised settled back to earth. The journal felt heavier than such a small collection of pages should have been.

He hugged it to his chest, feeling the rapid hammer of his own heart against its cover. Xinyi approached after a time, adjusting her apron ties in the way she always did before stitching a wound or delivering difficult news.

"Tell me what happened, child," she said gently, her voice carrying no accusation.

"I didn't mean to frighten him." The confession scratched at Mingxuan's throat.

"I got angry when he tore my journal, and my qi... reacted." Xinyi's brows drew together, but no fear coloured her expression. He had confessed to her long ago about his use of qi, and it had come as no surprise to a woman who had witnessed his birth beneath demon-haunted skies. She had watched him grow with that power curled inside him, had seen the way he sometimes tilted his head as if listening to sounds only he could hear.

What he had not explained—what he had not yet quite found words for—was precisely what flavour of qi he cultivated.

"That is the trouble with leaving you to blindly find your way forward with such things," she said, leading him to the bench beneath the jujube. She pressed a half-full mug of warm tea that had been waiting there into his trembling hands.

"But I don't know anywhere near enough to guide you properly."

"Guide me?" Mingxuan looked up at her, confused.

"In your cultivation. In controlling what lives inside you." She paused, choosing her next words with visible care.

"And I don't know enough about your... political status to know where might be safe to seek such guidance."

"My political status?" The words felt strange in his mouth, too large for a five-year-old to be worrying about. Xinyi's lips tightened into a thin line, and Mingxuan knew from experience that she would say no more on the matter when that expression settled on her face.

"It's clear you need training of some kind. Proper training, from someone who understands cultivation." She touched his cheek with one work-roughened hand.

"I'll ask around. Carefully."

"Thank you," Mingxuan settled on saying, because what else could he offer? Through the open doorway of their hut, he could see Peilan rocking Liangyu beside the hearth, murmuring lullabies in a voice that wavered with worry. The boy's sobs had softened to shivers, but his face remained pressed against his mother's shoulder, hiding from whatever demon-child he believed Mingxuan to be.

"I should have been calmer," Mingxuan whispered into his tea, watching steam curl upward to dissipate in the green-tinged air.

"You are five, not fifty," Xinyi reminded him, smoothing a hand over his hair.

"And you carry a candle most adults would struggle to hold steady." She exhaled slowly, her own shoulders sagging with a weight he was only beginning to understand.

"Liangyu's edges were already sharp today. His father drowned three months back." Mingxuan's head snapped up, attention suddenly focused with an intensity that made Xinyi's hand pause in its stroking.

"The Water Cycle peaked at just the wrong moment," she continued quietly after a glance towards the house.

"The river swelled faster than anyone anticipated. He was fishing in the shallows one moment, and the next..." She made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the impassive cruelty of nature.

"Swept along for miles before his body washed up on the banks downstream. Peilan says she still hears the current whenever she closes her eyes." Mingxuan closed his own eyes and allowed Xinyi's description to become sensation. The faint tug beneath his ribs deepened, plunging him into a current colder than any winter stream. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he imagined the river's embrace. Silt coating tongue and teeth with a mineral sting. Water shoving past ears with the weight of entire lakes behind it.

Pressure building against lungs that screamed for air they could not reach. The burn of oxygen deprivation giving way to a strange, cold peace. His heartbeat slowed into a sympathetic pattern. The Death Qi coiled eagerly within him, mapping the drowning's contours: first panic, then thrashing fatigue as muscles exhausted themselves against an enemy that could not tire. Then the long, inexorable slide toward stillness, toward the quiet that waited at the end of all struggles. It was horrible, yes.

Tragic and wasteful and wrong. But it was also elegant in its inevitability, and the qi sang that elegance back to him in harmonies more beautiful than any song he'd heard. That imagined plunge left him tingling with a hunger he knew he should be ashamed of. What would Death Qi taste like at the very instant the river closed above a man's head?

The trickles he had cultivated thus far came from sparrows fallen from nests, from foxes curling under bamboo to breathe their last, from the distant passing of a villager whose candle had gone out before Mingxuan could arrive to witness it. Those threads were thin and cold by the time they reached him, stripped of the texture and richness that must have existed at the moment of ending. But a human life concluding in a single violent rush… that would pour out power, rich and layered and immediate.

Had he been on that riverbank when the fisherman drowned, he might have tested its weight, compared it to the soft drift of a dying beetle or the gradual cooling of an elderly goat. He might have learned the difference between peaceful sleep and sudden terror, between acceptance and desperate struggle. Or indeed, how either would compare to noble warriors falling beneath demon claws while Blood Qi painted the heavens crimson.

The thought curdled in his stomach, souring the scholarly curiosity that had felt so pure a moment before. Each torrent of power he had ever absorbed represented a world ripped open, a family stunned into silence with a child like Liangyu left to drown in grief while his mother listened to phantom rivers in her sleep. His curiosity was a knife sharp enough to cut the hands that offered bread, keen enough to wound the heart that beat in his own chest.

Shame warmed his cheeks as he pictured Peilan's raw eyes and Liangyu's shivering shoulders. The image blurred and shifted, becoming other faces from another life—nurses who had whispered about his devotion, families who had thanked him through tears, colleagues who had called him compassionate while surely wondering to themselves about the one who volunteered for every death watch, who never seemed to tire of bearing witness to endings. Had they seen this hunger in him even then?

This shameful fascination he dressed up as care? The thought bled into a quieter resolve that felt more solid than shame's liquid heat. If he was to balance on the edge between fascination and compassion, between the scholar's detachment and the caretaker's devotion, he would need to know the stories carried in every pulse of power. Just as he had once done, in that hospital whose name he could no longer recall. He would learn about the fisherman who had drowned.

Not just the manner of his death, but the life that had preceded it. The small kindnesses and large sorrows that had made up a human existence. And while he learned to walk this blade's edge between power and principle, he would stop missing the forest for the trees. He would cease this narrow focus on gathering Death Qi and begin to understand what it could truly do.