Chương 8: Outcast

Years passed over Seventh Stone the way colours shifted across the Celestial Sky, one shade bleeding into the next, never quite repeating the pattern that had come before. Mingxuan grew with them, adding muscle to his frame and inches to his height until he could look the shrine's lintel straight in the eye. His hair lengthened into a tail that hung between his shoulder blades, but the white that threaded through the black never faded. If anything, it became more pronounced, salt scattered through pepper.

His eyes, once a warm brown that Xinyi had called the colour of good earth, had darkened to something closer to twilight. The villagers whispered that no sun could darken his skin anymore. They said the light of death had burned all natural colour away. They were not wrong. On those increasingly rare occasions when he ventured into the village alone, Mingxuan watched mothers pull their children aside as he passed. They moved with the same urgency they might show if a rabid dog wandered into the square.

As if his very shadow carried contagion, and merely passing through it might unleash plague upon their families. He felt their eyes on him with every step he took, tracking him like a potential threat. It was almost vindicating, in a strange way. One thread that wove through all his fragmented memories of the man he had been before was that persistent fear, the certainty that people would one day discover his strangeness, his fascination with the final breath.

He had always known it would lead to mistrust and shunning, had spent countless anxious hours in that other life wondering when the mask would slip. Now, in this life, he was proved correct. The validation brought no comfort. Yet life's practical wounds still needed stitching, and Xinyi remained the village's only healer. Her satchel of tinctures remained a fixture at every threshold where fever burned or bones broke. But rumours travelled faster than remedy could work.

Soon, some began to claim that her herbs smelled of grave soil rather than garden loam. That her salves chilled flesh to marble instead of soothing inflammation. A few even whispered that Xinyi herself was conspiring to provide sacrifices for the demon in human skin she had smuggled into their village all those years ago. The morning of the first major incident, the sky had turned the shade of green that meant Wood Qi flowed strong through the world.

Mingxuan had woken to that verdant light filtering through the paper windows, and found himself thinking how the colour made everything look slightly unreal, as if the village existed underwater. A farmer had been repairing the thatch of his roof when he slipped. Mingxuan heard about it from Old Chiang, who had witnessed the fall and come running to fetch Xinyi. The man's arm had shattered on impact, Chiang said, the bone visible through torn flesh.

Mingxuan had gathered fresh bandages while Xinyi prepared her medicines. They walked to the farmer's house together, neither speaking. The silence between them had grown comfortable over the years. Xinyi did not need to fill every moment with words, and Mingxuan appreciated that about her. When they arrived, the farmer's wife met them at the door. Her face was pale, her hands twisted in her apron, but her eyes held something harder than fear. Mingxuan recognised the spite and hatred there immediately.

"We don't want your help," the woman said. Xinyi's expression remained calm, professional.

"Your husband's arm needs seeing to."

"We'd sooner face crooked healing than a witch's curse." The woman's voice rose, shrill enough to carry to the neighbouring houses. She pointed at Mingxuan with a trembling finger.

"We'll not have that... that thing anywhere near our home." Inside the house, Mingxuan could hear the farmer groaning in pain. The sound of it scraped against something in his chest. Here was suffering that could be eased, and pride and fear were preventing it.

"Please," Xinyi tried once more, her voice gentle.

"Let me at least give him something to soothe the pain." The woman spat. The glob of saliva landed at Mingxuan's feet, glistening in the green-tinted morning light. Mingxuan stared down at it. He felt heat rise in his chest, the Death Qi that flowed through him responding to his anger with an eager surge. It would be easy, he thought. So easy to reach out and touch that woman. To show her what real curses looked like. To make her understand what it meant to truly have something to fear.

The thought shamed him as soon as it formed. Beside him, Xinyi's shoulders had drawn tight. He could see the lines of embarrassment etched in her brow, the way her jaw clenched. She had delivered half the children in this village. Had sat vigil through fevers and flux. Had mixed remedies by candlelight when sleep would have been easier. And now this. They walked back to the hut in silence. Mingxuan carried the unused bandages, and they felt heavier than they should.

That night, he sat hunched beside the hearth with his head bowed over a cup of tea gone cold. He had not moved for an hour. The fire crackled, sending shadows dancing across the walls, but he paid them no attention. His thoughts circled like crows over carrion, picking at the same scraps of shame and anger until both were but husks. Xinyi found him there. She set a fresh kettle on the coals, and its whistle was the only sound for a long while.

When it reached a proper boil, she dropped petals into the water—honeyed mint, if his nose could be trusted—and let them steep.

"Ignorance is a barnful of straw," she said finally, pouring the tea.

"A single spark can't help catching." Mingxuan's reply was nearly lost beneath the crackle of burning wood.

"Then I'm the spark. I scorch everything near me, it seems." He stared at his pale knuckles where they gripped the cup.

"They turned you away because of me. You've healed their fevers, birthed their children, and yet one whisper about me and they forget all of it." A tremor slipped into his voice that he tried to suppress.

"What good is my path if it burns yours?" Xinyi poured tea for herself and settled onto the bench beside him. She took a long sip before answering, and when she spoke her voice was measured.

"Listen to yourself. You fear ruining my path?" She shook her head.

"My boy, I walked this path long before your first breath. Villagers gossip because grief seeks a villain easier than it seeks fate. They poke at straw and find embers, but I know which flames warm and which consume." She reached over and covered his hand with hers.

"All three of my mentors warned me of the antipathy that can fall upon a healer when the cruelty of the world rears its head. This is no surprise."

"But this isn't about cruelty." Mingxuan looked up at her, searching her face.

"Or a plague, or a natural disaster. There's no misplaced blame here. You haven't even failed to save anyone. You've been an exemplary healer for them, and yet..." He trailed off, the words sticking in his throat.

"The problem is just me."

"People are stupid," Xinyi said bluntly, and the frankness of it startled a laugh out of him despite everything.

"If it gets too much, we can always move on. Healers never want for work. We're only here because it's remote enough that any enemies who may still be looking wouldn't think to search this far." She squeezed his hand.

"Especially not cultivators." Mingxuan dipped his head.

"I couldn't inconvenience you more than I already have."

"There's no inconvenience here." Her tone brooked no argument.

"I've enjoyed the quiet life in this out-of-the-way place, but I hold no particular attachment to it. Not the way you seem to think I do." Mingxuan sipped his tea, letting the sweetness coat the ash taste that seemed to linger perpetually in his mouth these days.

"Still. Every time they shun you, the river inside me roars louder. Today I wanted to curse them into silence. To make them understand what real fear feels like." Xinyi arched a brow at him.

"Cursing people solves nothing. Compassion does. When a child cries at thunder, do you strike the storm or hush the child?"

"Hush the child," he admitted, though part of him thought that striking the storm might not be such an unreasonable choice in the future. Not from what little he had seen of how cultivators operated.

"Then hush their fear instead. Keep tending births, sitting vigils, offering herbs. Fear shrinks where kindness grows." She reached across and brushed a strand of white from his forehead, the gesture achingly tender.

"Your path is grave, yes, but the flowers it nourishes can still be bright." Mingxuan swallowed hard against the tightness in his throat.

"If I could choose, I would let their suspicion fall only on me. Not on you."

"I chose this roof." Her smile was wry.

"If it leaks a rain of rumors, I will patch it myself." He nodded, and they shared tea in comfortable silence until the kettle emptied. oOoOo For the most part, Mingxuan spent his widening hours of freedom travelling far from the village. He traced irrigation channels until they surrendered to cattail marshes, then followed stag trails into cedar hollows where no charcoal burner had ever swung an axe.

He climbed shale ridges to watch sunrise dye distant peaks in myriad shades, and picked his way through frost valleys where fox prints melted beneath his boots before he had taken three steps past them. Small shrine ruins tucked among reeds became his study chambers. Mossy boulders overlooking waterfall mist transformed into lecture halls where he was both teacher and student. Whenever the tug behind his breastbone twitched, he altered course to follow it.

The sensation had become as natural to him as breathing—more natural, perhaps, since he sometimes forgot to breathe when deep in contemplation but never forgot to heed death's call. Death Qi trickled to him in steady measures during these journeys. Rare songbirds succumbing to winter chill. Old badgers growing still at burrow mouths. Reeds yellowing in hidden bogs where no human eye witnessed their passing.

Each thread flowed into the polished channels he had spent years refining, and while it was not the roaring flood of that bone-white day when Death had ruled over all creation, it was enough to keep his meridians gleaming. He refined the Qi deliberately, following a pattern he had developed through trial and error. Three breaths to gather, feeling the cool power condense in his lungs. Three breaths to circulate, guiding it through the now-familiar pathways that mapped his body like rivers through a landscape.

Three breaths to anchor, settling it into the reservoir behind his navel where it could pool and strengthen. Each small snag he encountered would smooth under patient attention, until the river glided without ripple. When his reservoirs brimmed full, he turned his focus to technique. A whistle, pitched just so, would conjure the echo of a lark to scout ridge crevices where his body could not fit.

A whispered syllable could birth moth wisps that wove frost across spider silk, creating patterns of crystalline beauty that lasted only until the next warm breeze. Each summons left a faint chill lingering in his chest, yet filled him with quiet satisfaction at the control he was developing. He never stopped chronicling the Celestial Cycle. Any larger pattern still eluded him—if pattern there was to find—but by sinking deep into breath and silence, he had learned to sense something new.

A tremor, almost imperceptible, like the final chime of a bell after all sound should have faded. It heralded the moment when one colour would begin its slow roll toward the next. He could not predict which hue would follow, could not say whether tomorrow's sky would burn red or flow blue. But he could recognize that heartbeat that marked an old colour's passing, if he concentrated deeply enough. It was progress, he told himself. Small progress, perhaps, but progress nonetheless.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. His nights often ended on slate bluffs where starlight jewelled the curves of distant rivers. He would lie back against sun-warmed stone that had retained the day's heat and trace constellations with threads of Death Qi, letting faint silver webs form above him. The practice served no purpose. It was not cultivation, not precisely, and it did not strengthen his channels or sharpen his techniques.

But it soothed something in him, these quiet moments spent weaving light against darkness. Thanara haunted those vigils. Part memory, part yearning, she existed in the space between what he could recall and what he could only feel. What ladder, he wondered during those starlit hours, would reach her vantage? Was it mastery of threads he needed, or compassion unmeasured? Or perhaps simply the courage to open the right door when twilight came knocking? The stars offered no answers.

They only gleamed with their cold light, each one a story he would never know, infinite and indifferent. oOoOo Even suspicion and fear could not bar the dying from seeking his patient ear. In fact, Mingxuan had begun to notice a peculiar pattern: the nearer a soul drifted toward its closing page, the more readily that soul invited him to share the margins. It was as if proximity to death dissolved the fear that paralysed the living.

One afternoon beneath a dream-pink sky, he followed the tug to Old Sun the net-mender. The old man's hands, which had knotted a thousand nets in their time, now shook too violently to hold twine steady. Mingxuan found him lying in a frayed hammock that doubled as his sickbed, wheezing with each breath. Mingxuan pulled up a stool and sat beside him.

"Tell me," he said, "about the fattest carp you ever landed." Sun's rheumy eyes brightened at the invitation. His voice, when it came, was stronger than Mingxuan had expected. He recounted how a silver beast had snapped two fishing poles clean through and dragged his dinghy halfway to the sea before finally yielding. His gnarled hands moved as he spoke, shaping the fish's size in the air, miming the pull of the line.

Mingxuan laughed at the appropriate moments, leaned forward when the story grew tense, marvelled at the scars lining Sun's palms when the old man showed them off with evident pride. When the story's final thread frayed into silence, Mingxuan felt the shift. Old Sun's last breath faded, there and then not there. Memories glimmered in the Death Qi that flowed from him—moon-dappled water, nets shimmering with trapped stars, the satisfaction of a good day's work—before melting into Mingxuan's inner river.

Outside the hut, neighbours muttered about ill omens and demon signs. But within those four walls, peace had settled. A few months later, another old woman beckoned him to her sickbed. She was wracked by a cough that clawed her ribs, leaving her gasping between words. Mingxuan brought tea brewed from lotus petals and listened while she spoke. She told him of secret courtings in mulberry orchards, when she had been young enough to climb trees.

Of a husband who sang off-key lullabies to their children and never learned to carry a tune properly despite decades of practice. Of miscarried twins she still cradled in her dreams, babies who would be older than her children now if they had lived, with a lifetime of love behind them and children of their own. Each confession seemed to unknot another tangle in her breathing. By the time she slipped away, her face had smoothed into something approaching contentment.

With every vigil, Mingxuan noticed the pattern becoming clearer. Those closest to death greeted him as ferryman rather than harbinger. Suspicion belonged to the living, with all their fears about tomorrow and next year and the harvests yet to come. The dying possessed no such concerns. They traded only in story, offering up the currency of their lives, and he accepted each coin with the reverence it deserved. Slowly, painfully, doorways that had remained barred against his daylit shadow began to creak open at dusk.

When a resident's breathing turned shallow and their pulse grew thready, hands that had thrown stones at him would beckon with trembling fingers. Grandfather Jun, who had hurled curses at Mingxuan's feet just weeks prior, called him to his bedside to bear witness to tales of salt caravans crossing deserts. The old man's eyes gleamed as he described dunes that rose in the wind and oases that appeared only to the desperately thirsty.

Mingxuan listened and wondered if the stories were true or if dying minds embellished memory into myth. It did not matter, he decided. Jun believed them, and that was enough. Widow Bei, whose sharp eyes had once cut at him whenever they crossed paths, clutched his wrist with desperation as she spoke of a daughter estranged three decades past. A stupid argument over a marriage proposal, she said. Pride on both sides that had hardened into permanent silence.

She asked Mingxuan to find the daughter if he could, to tell her that her mother's last thoughts had been of reconciliation. He promised he would try, though he had no idea how to begin such a search. The promise seemed to ease her regardless. In sharing their stories, the dying breathed easier. In listening, Mingxuan felt the tug inside him align, like an instrument finally tuned to the exact pitch it was meant to play.

Each vigil added another layer to his understanding, not just of death but of the lives that preceded it. He recorded none of these confidences in ink. His journal remained devoted to observations of the Celestial Cycle and rudimentary qi techniques. But he carried these stories inside himself, stitching their echoes into the lattice of his soul, where they hummed alongside the Death Qi itself. Each tale shaped the river in subtle ways. Jun's desert winds lent it breadth, teaching him about endurance.

Bei's longing lent it depth, showing him the weight of regret. Sometimes, when moonlight sifted through the shutter slats and he lay awake reviewing the day, Mingxuan could swear he heard those voices whispering within him. Be patient with wanderers, Jun's rasp would suggest. Write letters before regret dries the ink, Bei would sigh. He did not know if he was imagining it or if something stranger was occurring. He decided it did not matter. The counsel was sound either way. Not all responses were tender.

A miller whose pride had always been as stubborn spat at Mingxuan's arrival, proclaiming that no ghost spawn would steal his last breath. Mingxuan sat beside the bed anyway, silent and solemn. Hours passed. The miller's bluster faded as his pain grew. Fear curdled into tears that carved tracks through the grime on his weathered face. When he finally spoke again, it was about a grandson who had drowned in an irrigation canal twenty years back. An accident, but one the miller blamed himself for.

He had sent the boy to check the water levels after a storm.

"Do you think..." The miller's voice cracked.

"Do you think he waits for me?" Mingxuan considered the question with the gravity it deserved.

"I don't know," he admitted finally, because lying seemed worse than uncertainty.

"But I promise I'll carry your love across with me, if our paths ever align. I'll make sure he knows." The miller died clutching Mingxuan's hand, his grip loosening by degrees until it was no grip at all. Rumour of this encounter spread through the village, mutating as rumours did. Some claimed Mingxuan trafficked in souls for coin. Others said he had made a bargain with demons, trading the living for power. But underneath the fear, something else was growing.

Whispers that suggested those who had scorned him most loudly found their nightmares soothed when he visited their dying kin. That death came easier in his presence. Mingxuan pondered the phenomenon during his walk home beneath an azure sky that made everything look clean and new. The closer they step to the doorway, he mused, the clearer they hear the end calling my name. Perhaps fear was a flame that guttered when its fuel—life itself—ran low.

Or perhaps they sensed something of Thanara's gentle shadow around him, the promise that death need not be a violent thief but could instead arrive as a shepherd leading them home. At Xinyi's hut, he voiced the riddle aloud. She looked up from grinding herbs, her pestle pausing mid-rotation.

"We clutch the future like a fragile bowl," she said after a moment's thought.

"Always worried about dropping it, about the shattering. The dying have already set theirs down. They needn't fear the cracks anymore." Mingxuan considered this while he went about his evening chores. If that were true, then his path straddled two worlds in a way that would always earn him suspicion from those afraid of losing their grip on tomorrow. The living clung to hope and possibility with white-knuckled desperation. He walked among them carrying the certainty of endings. No wonder they flinched.

Yet with each vigil, he felt something shift. The fear wore thin in places. Housewives who had once barred their doors now sent their children running to fetch him when a grandfather's cough deepened to something ominous. Those same children still stared wide-eyed when he passed, but some edged closer now, curiosity beginning to overcome horror. The lane between him and the villagers remained, certainly. But it narrowed with every story he shepherded home, with every peaceful passing he witnessed.

They were far from warm toward him, but they were learning that his presence had its uses. That death walked alongside them whether they acknowledged it or not, and perhaps having someone who understood its language was not the curse they had feared. It was not acceptance, Mingxuan knew. Not really. But it was something. A beginning, perhaps, of understanding. oOoOo The Celestial Cycle wheeled through nine complete rotations, and on a morning when starlight silver painted the sky, Mingxuan turned nine years old.

He marked the occasion alone on a hillside he had claimed as his thinking place, legs dangling over mist that filled the valley below like a second sky turned upside down. Despite his daily cultivation, his progress had plateaued. His channels gleamed bright when he turned his inner sight upon them, polished to mirror smoothness by years of patient refinement. But the insights that had once arrived like gifts had ceased coming. No new doors opened. No fresh melodies emerged from the Death Qi's hum.

He practiced his wisp summons until they responded to his will with ease. He studied the possible futures that branched from every living thing like threads from a loom. The power hummed stable within him, reliable and strong, yet fundamentally immobile. Like a spinning wheel that produced no thread because it was anchored too firmly to the ground. Frustration had begun to crack at his patience. Some nights he replayed the memory of the rabbit's blackening fur, felt the temptation to test those boundaries again.

To see what else might be possible if he was willing to pay the price. Each time, the memory of Thanara's soft gaze rose to chasten him back from that edge. The woman whose eyes held galaxies would not approve of such experimentation. He knew it in his bones. Still, the question persisted: Without guidance, without a teacher or a manual or even another cultivator to compare notes with, would he forever tread water? Circling the same small pond while the ocean waited beyond hills he could not climb?

He sat on that hillside watching the silver sky and pondered futures. Perhaps he should seek out a sect when he was older. Find someone who could teach him properly instead of this fumbling in the dark he had been reduced to. The answer arrived on a metal-grey afternoon in early spring, though not in the form Mingxuan had expected. He knelt outside Xinyi's hut sorting dried motherwort, separating stems from leaves in a manner that seemed almost meditative.

The sky had been grey for days, the colour of old iron or storm clouds. Metal Qi, he had noted in his journal that morning, though it felt different from the usual Metal days. Sharper somehow. Charged with potential energy that made his teeth ache. The sky flickered. Mingxuan's hands stilled on the motherwort. He looked up just in time to see the clouds wrench apart as if hooked by invisible spears. Two figures erupted from the breach, distant but vast as myths.

They trailed plumes of lightning and black smoke in their wake, tearing through the sky like cosmic javelins. Their clash cracked the air hard enough that Mingxuan felt it in his chest from miles away. One wielded a blade of what looked like spun starlight, each arc cleaving through thunderheads and leaving wounds in the sky itself. The other answered with a cyclone of blood-red petals that shredded clouds like rice paper.

Every collision birthed storms of colour and Qi that overwhelmed the grey: wind-silver gashes opened in the air, lightning-blue veins spiderwebbed across the vault of heaven. Around Mingxuan, the village erupted into chaos. Women shrieked and grabbed their children. Goats bolted from their pens. Dogs yelped and scrambled beneath carts, trying to hide from the apocalypse unfolding above them.

Old men who had seen much in their long lives stood frozen in their doorways, faces turned skyward in expressions of awe and terror. Mingxuan froze as well, but not from fear. The motherwort he had been holding slipped from slack fingers and fluttered to the ground, forgotten. Death rushed from the battle in waves so dense and bright they were almost visible, intoxicating in a way that only the Day of Death had surpassed. Even from miles distant, the tide pressed against him.

His channels vibrated like harpstrings struck by a master musician. He tasted charred wood on his tongue. Acid rain. The metallic tang of blood. This was what cultivator combat looked like. This was the power that beings of the higher realms could wield. And one of them, at least, was about to die. The death would be unlike anything else he had experienced.

He could feel it in the way the tug behind his sternum had become a physical pull, as if someone had thrown a rope around his ribs and was hauling him toward the battle. The magnitude of it made every death he had witnessed before seem like dewdrops before an ocean. He had to get closer. Above, one of the figures faltered. The starlight blade dimmed. A final crimson cyclone engulfed the warrior, petals swirling in a vortex that twisted reality itself. In a blazing arc, the figure plummeted.

Their fall traced a comet's tail of tattered Qi across the sky, heading earthward toward the foothills that lay past the meadow where he had spent the Day of Death. Mingxuan felt the tug snap taut inside him, become an undertow that promised depths of understanding. Answers to questions he had been asking for years. He abandoned his motherwort and ran. His feet pounded against packed earth as he vaulted the fence at the garden's edge.

He crossed irrigation ditches in two strides, his body moving with a grace that years of Death Qi refinement had granted him. Behind him, he heard villagers calling out in fear and confusion, their voices small against the thunder that still rolled across the sky. He did not look back. Could not afford to. Tall grasses whipped at his shins as he ran. The victor's silhouette had already shrunk into the sundered clouds. Ahead, the foothills jutted like broken teeth against the grey sky.

Smoke swirled at their roots, marking where the fallen warrior had struck the earth. Mingxuan's pulse drummed in his ears, half dread and half wonder. His breath came in gasps. The Death Qi inside him surged in response to his excitement, making his vision sharpen until he could see individual leaves on trees half a mile distant. He did not know whether he would find a corpse at the end of this run, or an immortal clinging to their last moments of life.

He knew only that the tug of death had never called to him so loudly, had never promised so much. Chest burning and heart louder than the thunder that still echoed across the breaking sky, Mingxuan plunged into the swaying silver grass and ran toward whatever awaited him beyond the next hill.