Faint, threaded into the air as though it had seeped from the bamboo itself. He straightened; sharp eyes fixed on the window. The sound came not from the village but from beyond, where the grove's shadows pressed close.
This time it did not drift like sorrow. It came in fragments, halting yet deliberate. A note, then a pause. A low rise, then a sharp fall. Each gap stretched long, as though the player wanted him to notice the shape of silence between the sounds.
Qiyao's brows furrowed. His mind, trained in discipline and strategy, could not hear it as mere music. The spacing was too careful. The rhythm too measured.
Not song. Pattern.
The memory of Granny's voice tangled with his own unease: A voice without words. The silence is waiting.
He reached for the page he had written before, scanning the clumsy lines. A voice without tongue, a cry without lips… Hollow reed… you sing to no one— and yet I hear.
His throat tightened. Had he written those words, or had they been given to him?
The notes came again, three low, one high. A pause. Then two short, another pause, long enough to make his pulse catch.
Qiyao shut his eyes, forcing the sound deeper into himself, as though his chest were an empty hall that could hold the echo until it revealed its shape. The notes came again, halting, uneven, but deliberate. He let them replay in memory, over and over, until they etched themselves like cuts along the inside of his skull.
Too precise. Too heavy with intent.
He had heard such discipline before. Not in lutes or zithers, not in the idle strumming of inns, but in harsher places:
—The pounding of war drums rolling across a valley, every strike commanding men forward or forcing them back.
—The whip of banners in the wind, a single shift in pattern enough to change the tide of battle.
—The shrill pierce of whistles, short and long, sharp and soft, each a code only the soldiers knew.
It was never about beauty. It was about meaning.
And the flute tonight—no matter how sorrowful, how broken—carried the same iron weight.
Qiyao's breath caught. The realization pressed against his throat like a blade.
Is it… a language?
Up, down, low. The fragments were not melody. They were shape. They were trying to say something.
His eyes snapped open, sharp, shaken. A laugh almost tore itself out of him, but it stuck in his chest, breaking into a breathless choke instead.
Impossible. Ridiculous. The thought of it—
And yet.
And yet.
The more he denied it, the more the rhythm burned against his skin, refusing to fade.
Then His gaze dropped to the table, to the pale little petal still lying where no wind could have carried it. Out of season. Out of reason.
The jade at his hip—each time the notes stirred the air, it chilled, as if the stone itself were listening.
The dreams that tormented him—always the same: bamboo bending in moonlight, silver water trembling, a figure faceless yet lifting a flute to lips that did not move.
And Granny Xuemei's riddles, scattered like crumbs across his path: the silence is not emptiness, but waiting.
Waiting.
His hands clenched so tightly his knuckles whitened.
All of it—all of it—came crashing together. Like numbers aligned after months of error, like the stroke of ink that solved a scroll's riddle, like the one elusive pattern a soldier drilled into bone until it revealed itself in the heat of battle.
The moment snapped into place.
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