In the days that followed, their routine transformed into something Zhì Yuǎn had begun to call, in the silence of his mind, cultivation.
The word had come from Yù Qíng. On the fifth night, when he had tried to describe the flow of Qi within their bodies, she had interrupted him with a gleam in her eyes.
"It is cultivation," she had said, with the certainty of someone who had heard old stories in childhood. "My grandfather spoke of men who cultivated the breath of the world. That's what they called it."
Cultivation. The word had stuck, and now he used it for himself.
He had not neglected his own path while helping her. Every morning before sunrise, he sat on the back veranda and breathed the Yang rhythm. Every night after Yù Qíng fell asleep, he returned to the clearing where the moonlight fell unobstructed and absorbed the Yin flow. The Qi within him had grown, and with it, his ability to see what had once been invisible.
Now, when he closed his eyes and plunged into his inner vision, he no longer saw only scattered points and an empty receptacle. He saw numbers.
They were not written numbers, nor screens like the ones accountants used. It was a sensation, a count his mind performed effortlessly, as if the Wisdom translated the flow of Qi into something he could comprehend.
One thousand two hundred and forty-three points, he calculated one morning. Two hundred and eighteen already absorbed. The rest still scattered through the body.
The meridians he had expanded with Yang and consolidated with Yin now carried a steady flow. There was room for more—much more—but he sensed he was approaching a limit. Like a bowl filled to the brim, the next sip would overflow into something new.
A few more days, he thought. Then the next expansion.
When he observed Yù Qíng, he saw different numbers. Her receptacle was smaller than his—not a flaw, but a natural difference. Where he had needed two hundred and eighteen points to reach the verge of overflowing, she was approaching the same threshold with only one hundred and sixty.
But her meridians told another story.
Drier, he noted on the sixth morning, as his hands traced her back, guiding the flow. Narrower. Even after expansion, they are more fragile.
He did not know how many expansions it would take for her to reach what he already had. Nor how many for himself. The Wisdom showed him the path, but not the full map.
We'll discover together, he promised himself, as the sun rose over the bamboo grove.
---
On the morning of the eighth day, they were sitting on the veranda when a sharp voice cut through the silence.
"Zhì Yuǎn!"
Yù Méi came running through the bamboos, her face red and her hair flying behind her. She arrived gasping, braced her hands on her knees, and panted for a moment before she could speak.
"You—" she gasped, "promised—" another breath, "you were going to play with me!"
Zhì Yuǎn raised an eyebrow.
"I did?"
"At lunch! When you played those old songs! You said one day we'd play tag in the bamboo grove!"
Yù Qíng, who had been sitting beside him, opened her mouth to protest, but Zhì Yuǎn stopped her with a gesture.
"It's true," he admitted. "I did."
"So come! The other kids are already there!"
He looked at Yù Qíng. She had her arms crossed, her lips pursed, but there was no real objection in her eyes. Only that possessiveness he had learned to recognize.
"Go," she said after a moment. "But I'm coming too."
Yù Méi made a face, but did not dare argue.
---
The bamboo grove behind the house was a world of its own. The stalks grew so dense that sunlight filtered through in thin golden lances, creating a chessboard of shadow and gleam where the village children loved to hide.
There were five of them when they arrived: boys and girls between eight and twelve, children of farmers and miners who worked on the Yù lands. When they saw Zhì Yuǎn, they stopped their racket and watched him with curious eyes.
"Is he the one who plays the flute?" whispered one boy.
"Yes," Yù Méi answered proudly. "And he's going to play with us."
"I am," Zhì Yuǎn confirmed, kneeling to be at their eye level. "But you'll have to teach me the rules."
Tag in the bamboo grove was more complicated than the version he had known as a child. The children had created territories, safe zones, and a rule that allowed the "tagger" to stay still for three breaths before moving again.
He entered the game with the same attention he gave to the coal records. He watched the children's movements, the paths they chose among the bamboos, the moments they hid and the moments they ran. And soon, he began to anticipate.
He did not use Qi—he did not need to. His senses, already sharpened by cultivation, were more than enough to follow the children's light steps, the tinkle of their laughter, the rustle of dry leaves under their feet.
The first time he touched a boy's shoulder who thought he was safe, the boy let out a shriek and the children exploded in laughter.
"You're so fast!" Yù Méi exclaimed, as he chased her among the bamboos.
"You're so slow," he answered, and she laughed as she ran.
Yù Qíng watched from the edge of the clearing, sitting on a rock, arms still crossed. But Zhì Yuǎn saw the corner of her lips lift from time to time, and knew she was not as displeased as she pretended.
It was during a pause in the game that it happened.
Yù Méi tired first, as always. She leaned against a bamboo stalk, breathless, and he approached to make sure she was all right. It was something he had done since the first years after his adoption, when the girl was still small and tired too quickly to keep up with the others.
"I'll be fine," she said with a weak smile. "I just need to rest."
He sat beside her, and while she caught her breath, his inner vision kindled out of habit. There was no intention to investigate; it was merely the reflex of someone who had learned to see what was invisible.
And then he saw.
Her meridians were broken.
Not just narrow, not just dry. They stopped at several points, like roads meeting impassable chasms. In some places, the channels simply vanished, leaving emptiness where there should have been a path. In others, they were atrophied, reduced to nearly invisible threads that led nowhere.
And the receptacle… the receptacle was a shadow. The empty space existed, but its walls were thin as eggshells, and it already showed cracks, as if something had tried to break through long ago and had not succeeded.
She cannot absorb Qi, he understood, the thought chilling. Even if she tried, there would be no path for the Qi to travel. The receptacle would not hold.
"Zhì Yuǎn?" Her voice pulled him back. "You're looking strange."
He forced a smile.
"Just thinking."
"About what?"
"About how fast you've grown. Seems like yesterday you were running and tripping over the bamboos."
She laughed, and the worry in her eyes dissipated.
"You're getting old, brother-in-law."
The other children began to disperse, called by their mothers for lunch. Yù Méi was the last to go, still a little pale, but cheerful.
"Will you come again tomorrow?" she asked.
"If there's no work," he answered.
"Promise?"
He hesitated for an instant, then smiled.
"Promise."
She ran off, and silence settled back over the bamboo grove. Yù Qíng rose from the rock and came to him.
"What was it?" she asked, reading in his face what the children had not seen. "Did you see something?"
He took her hand and pulled her down a more secluded path, where they could not be overheard.
"I watched Yù Méi," he answered, lowering his voice. "While she rested."
She frowned.
"Watched how? With that vision of yours?"
He nodded.
"She cannot cultivate, Yù Qíng. The paths inside her are broken. The receptacle cannot hold."
She stood still for an instant, and then her eyes widened.
"You mean she is… defective?"
"No." He raised a hand, stopping the word before it could settle. "Not defective. It's like a vessel that came into the world already cracked. Not by her fault, not by failure. Simply… she was not made for this."
She pressed her lips together, and he saw the struggle in her eyes: fear for her sister, the question already forming in her mind.
"So not everyone can?"
"No." He looked at the sky, where the sun was nearing its zenith. "I can. You can. But not everyone."
"And the others? The other children who were in the grove today?"
"I didn't look. They were too far away, and I wasn't paying attention. I only noticed because she was beside me."
She was silent for a long moment. The sunlight filtered through the bamboos, drawing shadows that danced across her face.
"Don't tell her," Yù Qíng said at last. "She is fourteen. She dreams of big things. I don't want that dream to die before its time."
"I won't tell her."
"And the others? If they find out we can do what they cannot…"
"They won't find out. Not yet."
She rested her head against his shoulder, and he felt her weight—not only physical, but something deeper.
"Why us?" she asked, her voice low. "Why you and me?"
He thought of the vision he had had at the peak, the voice that whispered in his mind, the thread that had woven him before existence.
"I don't know," he answered. "But I think we are going to find out."
She lifted her face and kissed his cheek, quick, almost shy.
"Then find out quickly. I want to know why I deserved you."
He did not answer. He only pulled her closer, feeling the warmth of her body against his, the rhythm of her breathing synchronizing with his own.
They walked back to the house in silence. Yù Méi had already disappeared toward the Yù house, probably running to tell Sū Huì about the game.
And on that path, under the midday sun, Zhì Yuǎn held his wife's hand and thought about the fragility of all that was human.
Some are born whole. Others, broken.
And some—perhaps only he—are born twice.
---
End of Chapter 6