Chapter 25 – The Summons

Wang Su walked the village perimeter in the first month of the third year and told me things I didn’t want to hear.

“Prefect Shen’s forces are repositioning north along the Qinghe border, and the Meishan prefecture has gone quiet.”

I cupped my chin in thought.

A quiet Meishan was worse than a loud one. Prefect Shen going silent meant either he’d been given orders to consolidate or he’d been told to prepare for a larger undertaking. It could be a campaign towards our position in the Western Reaches once the peace treaty ends the winter of this year, or he could be mobilizing for a war to the north.

Regardless, I increased the militia’s conditioning sessions that week and said nothing to the village yet since I didn’t have more information to go off on.

It was during this time of concern that I found Mother asleep in the clinic when I stopped by.

Or so I thought.

She lay on the bed near the window, blanket pulled to her chest, breathing shallow and slow. I stood beside her and counted the breaths the way I’d been doing for months without telling anyone. Twelve per minute in the first year. Ten in the second. Eight now, on a good day. The intervals between inhales stretched longer each season.

I leaned closer and placed two fingers against the lung mai point on her wrist. The pulse was there but thin, and the qi density beneath it had dropped since my last reading two weeks ago.

Her eyes opened.

“What are you doing?”

I pulled my hand back. “Checking your pulse.”

She sat up, and the motion cost her a cough that she barely managed to swallow down. “How long have you been doing this?”

I didn’t answer.

“How long, Liang?”

“For about two years now.”

She stared at me, and her gaze made me want to divert my eyes from her. “Stop looking at me like I’m already dead.”

“Your breathing is shallower than last month.”

“I know what my breathing is. Suyin monitors it and she’s better at it than you, and she at least has the decency to do it when I’m awake.” She pulled the blanket aside and swung her legs off the bed and motioned for me to sit.

I sat down.

“You’ve been different since your father died,” she said. “A mother knows these things. The way you spoke changed, the way you thought changed, and the boy who threw rocks at birds and stole vegetables from Old Chen’s stands hasn’t come back from that grief.”

My hands balled into fists.

“Hao sees it too. Whatever happened to you when your father died, whatever burden you put on yourself to protect this village and everyone in it, it changed you at the root.” She looked at me. Her eyes were clear, bright, as sharp as ever. “I need you to hear something-“

“Mother…”

She raised her hand. “I’m not finished.” She steadied her breathing.

“Sun Ai told me something when I was your age. She said that a person must cultivate their own life, or else cultivation will own their life. I didn’t understand it then. I was young and the work was everything.” She paused. “But I do understand it now. And I see you making the same mistake that same mistake.”

She paused to stifle a cough.

“You built walls and forged weapons and trained fighters and killed a man who threatened your village. And now you’re checking your my pulse because you’re waiting for the next thing to fight. The next crisis that justifies spending every waking hour planning instead of living.”

The words landed in places I’d been avoiding. I unfurled my fists and looked down at my hands that began to tremor once more. Would this be the time to tell someone, anyone, who or what I truly am? That I’m not from here? That the son she knew is gone and I had somehow taken his place?

“Mother. Would you believe me if I told you that I am different now? That something changed in me and I’m afraid to admit what comes with it?”

She reached forward and took both my hands. Her grip was thin but firm. She looked me in the eyes and held me there.

“Chains weigh you down even when they are removed. The only person who can allow you to be yourself…” She lifted one hand and pressed it against my chest. “Is you.”

I sat there with her hand on my chest and felt the truth of it settle through me like water finding level ground. The chains she meant weren’t the ones I carried from my old life. They were the ones I’d forged here. The planning. The control. The relentless forward momentum that never paused because pausing meant feeling, and feeling meant admitting that the logistics coordinator hiding inside a farmer’s son was terrified of the life he’d built because he’d never accounted for the people in it.

Hao didn’t have this problem. Hao had never had this problem. He loved freely, built family instinctively, opened his arms to three wives and four children and an entire village without once stopping to calculate the risk. I’d spent three years wondering how he did it, how he moved through the world with that openness, that warmth, that refusal to hold anything at arm’s length.

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This must be how he naturally lives.

“Now go,” she said. “I have work to do and you have that look on your face that I recognize all to well,” She raised a hand to my cheek. “And Liang?”

“Yes, mother?”

“If I catch you checking my pulse while I sleep again, I will hit you with the grinding stone.”

I smiled and nodded at her words. “Yes, mother.”

I left my home and ventured to the clinic counter when I found Suyin in the storage room sorting through notes.

She’d laid out Mother’s health notes in chronological order. The notes ranged from pulse readings and breathing measurements to qi density readings from the pressure points she monitored weekly.

She looked at my as I walked in and pointed to one of the notes and said, “Look at the trend line.”

I looked.

The progression was systemic.

I had assumed due to her cough that it was a pulmonary disease of some kind, but the qi readings showed a gradual decline in baseline density across all twelve mai, not just the lung pathway. Whatever was happening to Mother, it was constitutional.

“Why are you only showing me this now?” I asked her, my tone was more short than I had intended it to be.

She didn’t flinch. “I’ve been working the problem alone because I thought I could solve it. I couldn’t. The progression doesn’t match anything in the Mother of Healing or in the clinical notes from the neighboring villages.”

“Working the problem alone….” I said the words to myself and exhaled a deep sigh.

Suyin perked a brow at my words.

“Suyin. I need to tell you something.”

She waited.

“At the feast, what I said to you…” My hands were trembling again so I pressed them flat against the counter. “I panicked. I felt that you liked me and I didn’t know what to do.”

She was very still.

“I told myself I was protecting you but the truth is, I miss holding your hand,” I looked at her. “I’m sorry for not being honest with my feelings.”

Suyin’s eyes searched my face. I saw the moment she read me, the way she read patients, looking past the surface to the feeling underneath.

She put her hand over mine on the counter and her fingers wrapped around my trembling ones and held them still.