"You've come... Ling San."
The voice was neither loud nor soft, but it echoed with the weight of centuries. It rolled across the bamboo grove like mist from the ancient mountains, cool and unrelenting.
She stood there, serene and sorrowful, dressed in a flowing crimson robe that fluttered in the moonlight like a candle in mourning. Her hair was arranged in a traditional Tang-style coil, adorned only with a single white plum blossom.
Her eyes held lifetimes. Her sorrow… even more.
Behind her, the forest sighed.
The bamboo stalks bowed gently in the breeze as though the earth itself was paying homage to a sacred reunion.
Overhead, the stars burned fiercely against the velvet sky, no longer the smoggy night of Bangkok,
But a celestial canopy, ancient and unmoved.
Akin stood opposite her.
He was disheveled, his once-crisp white shirt now torn and soaked in blood, black slacks ruined from the fall, yet the pain of his wounds did not reach him.
What reached him…was the silence between heartbeats, and the weight of a name he did not yet remember.
Ling San.
She had called him that. The name clung to him, familiar as a forgotten melody,
The ghost of a past self buried in time.
Twenty paces separated them, but they felt like lifetimes.
And so he stepped forward.
But before he could reach her…..
"Akin!"
A voice, cracked and raw, shattered the illusion like a thrown stone through still water.
The grove dissolved.
Now, the air was thick with the scent of disinfectant.
Cold white walls. A buzzing fluorescent light. And in the center… a steel bed with a lifeless body lying beneath a white sheet.
The contrast was cruel.
The ethereal forest had vanished, replaced by the harsh geometry of death.
There she was, his mother. Dressed in a long, simple cotton dress, her Knees buckling as she wept quietly beside him.
No hysteria. No scream.
Only silence that cut deeper than any blade. The kind of silence born from a grief so vast, no word dared trespass.
Akin, his body lay still, peaceful in death. Yet his mother's trembling hands reached for him with hope, with desperation, with a mother's eternal blindness to the reality of loss.
"Akin… my son… please wake up…"
Her whisper pierced worlds.
And in the bamboo grove, between dreams and reincarnation, Akin heard her.
He turned, breath caught in his throat.
"Mother?"
But the stars offered no reply.
The wind carried only the sound of rustling bamboo.
His voice broke again, louder, more desperate.
"Mother!! I'm here!"
His cry rang through the grove, but nothing answered …only the eerie stillness of a world beyond return.
He tried to run, but his feet were rooted.His body did not move. It merely trembled beneath robes he did not recognize. His soul stretched between two realms, one of blood, one of rebirth. It was then that he understood,
He could see her, but she could not see him. His voice could not cross that veil. No matter how loud he screamed, no matter how hard he begged…
The world he had left was already grieving. And the one he had entered…
He was still waiting for his awakening.