Chapter 6: A Name Written in Water

  The bell did not ring again.

  No one else in the vilge mentioned it. Not Elder Pan. Not the trader who came with salted fish. Not even Shen Liang’s own mother, whose hearing was sharp enough to catch the rustle of a squirrel at dusk.

  Shen Liang didn’t speak of it either. But he knew what he had heard.

  It hadn’t sounded close. Or far. It had sounded true.

  That night, he dreamed.

  Not the usual fragments of plowed fields or cracked rooftiles. This was different.

  He stood in a courtyard he did not recognize, under a sky he had never seen — a deep shade of grey-green, as if color had bruised the heavens. Tall pines surrounded the courtyard, their needles long as daggers, unmoving in windless silence.

  And in the center, a bowl of still water. Clear. Shallow. Waiting.

  He didn’t feel fear. Only… recognition.

  He stepped forward.

  Looked down.

  There was no reflection. Only a shape — faint, faint — like a character drawn in dust beneath the surface.

  A name.

  He couldn’t read it. But it was his.

  And when he reached out to touch the water, he woke.

  *****

  The morning was too bright.

  Birdsong hurt. His muscles ached like he had run all night. But there was nothing to expin the sweat on his back, or the scratch on his palm in the same pce his fingers had brushed the water.

  He told no one.

  Instead, he took to walking. Not far. Just to the edge of the forest and back. Just enough to listen.

  He couldn’t say what he listened for.

  Sometimes it was the absence of sound — no crickets, no rustle of leaf or fur. Sometimes it was the pull of light — where sunbeams bent wrong, shadows curled too tightly.

  Sometimes, it was the sudden knowing of things he should not know.

  Like how many steps it would take to cross the elder’s bridge without making it creak.

  Or where a fallen sparrow y, before he turned the corner.

  Or how the pattern of moss on the western stone wall had changed — not grown, changed — in the shape of something watching.

  *****

  One evening, he returned to the split evergreen.

  He sat beneath it this time.

  Not to wait.

  To ask.

  “Who am I?” he whispered. Not to anyone. Not even to himself. Just… into the air, to the soil, to the thing beneath it.

  No answer came.

  But in the silence, he remembered something strange.

  Something that didn’t belong in any of his years, any of the seasons he had lived.

  A voice — soft and dry — speaking in a temple that didn’t exist:

  “You have died before.

  This is not your first sky.

  Remembering is the cultivation of the soul.”

  His breath caught.

  When he looked up, the leaves of the tree had not moved.

  But they were no longer green.

  They were gold.

  (End of chapter)