After walking half a lifetime, she has finally arrived at journey's end. This place is still and silent, much …
After walking half a lifetime, she has finally arrived at journey's end.
This place is still and silent, much like that drifting black chest from long ago, wrapped in the half-light of dusk.
She closes her eyes, and it is as though her whole life might begin again from the very start.
She is young once more, told by her Master to circulate her Qi in the quiet chamber.
Eyes shut, her ears stretch out as far as they can reach. The trees are alive with cicada song. Senior Brother Zhang Wanshi is scolding Master again. And that man... the soft rustle of turning pages drifts through the room like a summer breeze through leaves.
What could he possibly be reading? A slim little booklet, only a few dozen pages, yet he returns to it again and again as though it holds something inexhaustible. What is it that keeps him there?
Unable to help herself, she quietly stirs her inner Qi. Her spirit slips free and drifts to his side, straining for a glimpse of the words on the page, when a sharp rap lands squarely on her forehead.
"Still your mind if you want to guide your Qi."
Strange. How had Master known her thoughts were wandering?
That one knock drives back her reaching hand and pulls her stray Qi back into the present.
Indeed... so much time has passed. The restlessness of her younger years has long since settled into the still depths of a quiet pool. The clamor of clashing ideals is gone, leaving only the cold, steady turning of interlocking gears. Her Qi has grown vast enough to awaken the Deriviation formation, yet she can never return to that summer afternoon alive with the sound of cicadas.
As the formation pivot anchors to her meridians, bringing an agony that gnaws through to the bone, she finds herself wishing above all else to remember one particular fragrance.
It was a winter night in her early years at Mohist Hill. She had stopped to right an injustice on her way home and arrived late again, soaked to the skin and shivering with cold. But the moment she pushed open the door, a sweetness like honeyed flower cakes washed over her. Whatever had been worked into the candlewick carried the scent of the sweets she loved most.
Porridge simmered on the stove. Senior Brother Zhang Wanshi sat absorbed in repairing a wooden eagle. Master had already drifted off to sleep. And that man had simply, quietly set a soft cushion beside her usual seat.
No one called her name. Yet within that warm, honeyed fragrance, she suddenly understood what it meant to have a home. Such warmth. Once, she had wished to stay inside it forever.
But the fires of war rose again, and refugees crowded the roads in tears. Amid the fighting at the front, she looked toward villages where cooking smoke should have curled into the sky and found only smoldering ruins. It came to her then: the Haven the Mohists sought was simply a world where thousands like her could each have a thread of hearth smoke to look toward, and a home to return to.
And so she turned to face the storm and walked out beyond the mountains. She threw herself into the study of formations, hoping that one day she might read the workings of the world entire and bring lasting peace to the realm.
The years passed. Leaving behind her a trail of broken promises, she rarely caught that sweet warm scent of candle smoke again. Now and then, passing a lone cottage in the wilds and seeing a faint glow through the window, she could not help but stop for a moment. She wondered whether someone in there was also coming home worn and weary, and being gently held by the warmth waiting inside.
When the world's troubles are at an end, I too shall go home.
Slowly, her heartbeat fell into rhythm with the turning gears, and the fragrance that had once waited for her grew harder to recall. Master had said, "Still your mind to guide your Qi." She thought she had finally learned how.
Yet when every last thought went quiet, a single birdcall was enough to bring it all flooding back: the old memories, and that warm, sweet smell.
...Wait. Why is he here?
Perhaps she had never stopped believing that if she kept walking, forward and upward, she would one day reach up and take the moon from the sky. When that day came, he would surely make his way through the crowd and find her at a single glance. Then, pretending not to notice that the woman before him was a habitual breaker of promises and a bringer of death, he would simply smile and say,
"You're back."
Amid the scent of honeyed flower cakes, she finally read the page he had lingered on for so long.