Chapter 14: Beneath the Evergreen, the Root Sleeps

  The vilge had returned to silence.

  Not peace —

  just a quiet that strained at the edges.

  The kind that made children speak softly, though no one told them to.

  Shen Liang sat beneath the old evergreen.

  He had not moved for hours.

  The bark was rough against his back. Its scent was resin and shadow and something almost warm.

  He listened.

  Not for sounds. For absence.

  Because since the stranger left, the world had felt… not quite full.

  As if something had stepped out of pce, and the space it left behind hadn’t decided what to become.

  “Staring at trees won’t make you a cultivator,” came a voice.

  He didn’t turn.

  It was Lin Xiu, a boy his age, older by days, dumber by years.

  Shen Liang said nothing.

  Lin Xiu dropped a stone in front of him. It clinked against a root.

  “You’ve changed,” Lin Xiu said. “You hear that thing st night? Sounded like a branch cracking in the sky. Elder says it was just thunder, but…”

  He trailed off. His voice lowered.

  “You saw him, didn’t you? The one who came without walking.”

  Shen Liang nodded once.

  Lin Xiu didn’t ask more. He just stood there for a while, then left.

  It was easier that way.

  *****

  Later that night, Shen Liang returned home and found the tea bowl the stranger had touched.

  It was empty.

  Still, he held it like it meant something.

  And when the wind pushed through the cracks in the wood walls, it whispered in a voice that was not a voice:

  “You are beneath the edge.

  Soon you will stand on it.

  And if you are not careful…

  You may fall inward.”

  He dropped the bowl. It didn’t break. But the tea leaves at the bottom had rearranged themselves.

  Into a pattern.

  A spiral.

  Spiraling inward.

  *****

  That night, he dreamed of the evergreen.

  But it was no longer a tree.

  It was a tower.

  And at the top — above clouds, above time — sat someone with his face, older by centuries, eyes like ash.

  The dream-him said nothing.

  But he bled from the palms, and the blood fell like rain, and where it struck the ground, roots grew.

  Shen Liang woke up with dirt under his nails.

  And when he looked outside, the grass was still bent. Bowing.

  Toward something buried.

  Waiting.

  (End of chapter)