Night still clung to the peaks when Taiyi opened his eyes.
He had not slept.
Sleep was a door he no longer passed through. But grief—grief entered without knocking.
The mountain wind pressed against the wooden shutters of his hall, carrying a faint trembling in the world, the kind that only someone who understood the weight of power could feel.
It was not thunder.
It was not fate.
It was the last flare of a life burning itself into silence.
Nezha.
Taiyi lowered his head. Not in shock. Somewhere behind the ribs he had always known the boy would walk toward his own burn. Children touched by Heaven always chased freedom sharper than their bodies could hold.
Power is a gift that demands repayment.
Nezha had simply paid early.
He exhaled once, and the lanterns in the hall flickered as if bowing.
He remembered the child's stubborn laughter. The way he absorbed teachings not as commands, but as choices. He remembered the day he left a lotus with that family at Chentang Pass—a small, quiet insurance against the cruelty of Heaven.
He had known, when he offered it, that he was gambling against the sky.
Now the wager had been called.
Taiyi rose to his feet, heavy not with age but with knowledge. His robe fell around him like dusk returning to earth. He reached for the staff in the corner—not because he needed it, but because rituals still mattered, even for those who had outgrown them.
Outside, the clouds parted in a narrow seam, the kind the world made only when something sacred was about to move.
Taiyi stepped into the cold morning air.
Today, he would walk down the mountain.
Not as a master.
Not as a sage.
But as someone who had lost a child whom Heaven should never have touched.
The lotus waited.
And Nezha was not finished.
---
The manor courtyard had not fully brightened, yet the world already felt emptied.
Madam Yin sat beside the stone steps, hands resting uselessly in her lap, as if grief had drained even the strength to hold herself together. Nezha's red sash lay folded beside her knees, its fabric faintly scorched at the edges, the last warmth long since gone.
She had cried until tears no longer came.
Now the quiet hurt more than the weeping had.
Somewhere beyond the walls of Chentang Pass, the war still existed. The Dragon King still reigned beneath the sea. Heaven still turned.
But here, within the courtyard, time felt broken.
Her gaze drifted to the horizon. She did not know what she was waiting for—only that something should arrive.
Something must.
A mother's heart always felt the shift before her mind could name it.
---
Li Jing stood alone by the training yard, armor only half fastened, breathing slow but unsteady.
He had always believed structure could hold a man together. Schedules. Orders. Duty.
None of those things helped him contain the silence left in his son's absence.
He looked at the packed dirt where Nezha used to train barefoot, chasing his own shadow with boyish pride, twirling the spear that was almost bigger than he was. The memory felt too close. Still warm, as if the boy might race past him at any moment, laughing.
"Forgive me," he whispered.
Not into the air. Into himself. Into the part of him that had watched and hesitated instead of stepping forward.
A father who fails to protect learns too late what it truly means to protect.
He clenched his fists until his knuckles whitened. The vows he and Madam Yin had spoken in the dark hours before dawn still sat hot in his chest: they would not let their child's sacrifice vanish into Heaven's indifference.
If Heaven demanded the life of a child, then Heaven's order needed to be questioned.
Even if he lacked the power to do it himself.
He turned toward the courtyard gate—
—and paused.
The world had gone still.
Even the wind held its breath.
Footsteps approached.
Slow. Certain. Echoing through the early morning like the first note of a forgotten prophecy.
Madam Yin pushed herself to her feet, trembling. Li Jing stepped beside her, instinctively taking half a step ahead of her, old training turning into protection without thought.
The gate opened on its own, though no hand touched it.
Taiyi Daoren stepped into the courtyard.
He looked older than he had the last time they saw him—
not in face, but in spirit, as if he were carrying the weight of something even the sky could not bear alone.
His eyes were calm, but the edges were rimmed red, like a man who understood grief too intimately to show it loudly.
Madam Yin covered her mouth.
Li Jing bowed his head, unable to speak.
Taiyi did not offer consolation. He did not offer excuses.
He simply stood before them, grief and responsibility folded together in his silence.
"Take me to him," Taiyi said.
The words were soft, but they carried the certainty of someone who already knew there was no body to find, only a place where a life had burned itself away, and a thread Heaven had left untied.
Madam Yin's fingers shook as she gestured toward the inner hall, toward the shrine they had set up in desperation when there had been nothing to bury.
Taiyi bowed once—deep enough to honor parents, deep enough to acknowledge the irreversible—but not deep enough to suggest defeat.
He had not come for mourning.
He had come for the boy.
The lotus he had once entrusted to this family glowed faintly in the depth of his sleeve, as if answering something only he could hear.
Nezha's story had not ended.
Not yet.
---