Chapter 18: The Weight of an Unturned Stone

  The rains had passed, but the vilge road still bore the memory of them—soft, pliant mud that whispered with each step. Shen Liang didn’t mind. He walked slowly, not from fatigue, but from reluctance. There were questions in his mind now that didn’t want to be answered.

  At the edge of the vilge stood a small shrine. It was pin: stone, worn by wind and time, with no roof and no offering. Once, it had been for the river spirit, back when the river still ran.

  Today, it was for something else.

  Shen Liang knelt before it and pced a single pine cone on the altar. Not because it meant anything, but because it felt like the kind of thing one should do when the world began to breathe differently.

  “You’re early,” said a voice behind him.

  He turned.It was the old woman who sold dried plum skins and fortune sticks in the market. Everyone called her Nai Nai1- Nai Nai (奶奶): A common Chinese term for "grandmother" or "granny," often used affectionately for elderly women in a community., though no one knew whose grandmother she was. Her robes were threadbare, but her eyes were sharp.

  “I didn’t know I was coming,” Shen Liang replied honestly.

  She smiled. “That’s how the road works. You don’t walk it because you pnned to. You walk it because something remembered you.”

  He didn’t know how to respond to that.

  So she sat beside him.

  “For most people,” she said, “life is a circle.2- The Circle: Symbolic of ordinary life and its cyclical nature—birth, work, aging, and death. Often contrasted in cultivation stories with those who step beyond mundane cycles. Family, harvest, sickness, death. Round and round. But sometimes—someone steps out of the circle. And everything that turns stops pretending it knows where the center is.”

  Shen Liang looked at her. “Is that good or bad?”

  She shrugged. “Neither. It’s just the beginning of something that doesn’t end.”

  They sat in silence. Not peaceful, not strained. Just quiet.

  Until Nai Nai added, “The stranger wasn’t looking for signs. He was warning them.”

  Shen Liang stiffened. “Then why didn’t he say it pinly?”

  “He did,” she said, patting the altar stone. “Just not in words.”

  He stood.

  Something was pulling him now—not like curiosity, but like gravity.

  Like remembering something he hadn’t lived yet.

  “Go to the roots,” she said suddenly. “The tree remembers what men forget.”

  He hesitated, then nodded.

  As he walked away, the old woman hummed a tune that made the birds go still.

  And the pine cone on the altar cracked open.

  *****

  The evergreen at the vilge edge had not grown.

  It had always been that tall.

  That wide.

  That old.

  Its bark smelled of cold rain and fire. Its base was wide enough to seat a family of five, if they dared lean against something that watched more than it stood.

  Shen Liang pced his hand on it, the same way the stranger had.

  This time, the bark felt warm.

  Not with heat.

  With memory.

  A breath moved through the leaves.

  It was not wind.

  He closed his eyes.

  And somewhere, beneath thought and blood and dream, a voice he did not know but had always carried whispered a name.

  His.

  But not the one he used.

  The one that was waiting.

  (End of chapter)