The house was quiet now.
The kind of quiet that seeps into the bones, not from lack of sound, but from the absence of someone who used to hum while stirring soup, who used to scold the chickens like children when they snuck into the garden.
Mei was gone.
The bed felt larger. The days longer. But Ye Zai did not try to fight the emptiness. He let it live beside him, like the shadow of a good memory.
Lian visited often.
She would sit on the porch where her mother used to knit, watching the wind stir the old oak tree. She was older now—strong, spirited, but thoughtful like her mother. The grief showed in her, too. But not in tears. In the way she paused before laughing. In the way she carried her words carefully, as though each one could wake a memory too soon.
One evening, as the stars began to bloom across the sky, she spoke.
"Father," she said. "Will you teach me?"
He looked up from the worn book he was holding, surprised. "Teach you what?"
She hesitated. "To cultivate."
Ye Zai was silent for a long time. The air between them felt fragile.
"It's not an easy path," he said eventually. "It changes you. Slows the world. Speeds your thoughts. It asks for parts of you you may not know how to give."
"I know," she said. "But I want to walk that path—with you."
And so he agreed.
They began the next morning.
They walked barefoot into the forest beyond the hills, where the trees grew thick and the streams whispered. He taught her not the forms first, but the stillness. How to sit. How to breathe. How to feel the rhythm of the earth beneath her. Cultivation, he said, wasn't about reaching upward—it was about sinking in, finding the pulse of all things.
"Close your eyes," he said, seated across from her. "Listen."
"To what?"
"To everything."
It was difficult at first. She was impatient. Her thoughts darted. Her heart burned to grow stronger, to protect, to become something more. But Ye Zai was patient.
He remembered what it was like to rush. To chase power and forget the purpose behind it.
This time, he would guide her differently.
Days turned into weeks.
They meditated at dawn. Practiced slow movement through the orchard. He taught her how to draw energy from the world without taking more than she needed. How to let power flow through her rather than seize it.
Sometimes, they said nothing at all. Just sat beside the river as wind moved through the grass like fingers through hair.
One night, after a particularly difficult session, she slumped against the porch rail, frustrated. "I'll never catch up to you."
Ye Zai sat beside her and chuckled.
"You're not supposed to," he said. "You're supposed to become yourself. That's the point."
She looked at him, the way she had as a child, before all the questions had answers. "And who are you becoming?"
He paused.
"I'm still learning," he said softly. "Still walking."
Ye Zai cultivated in silence each night after she fell asleep. He sat beneath the stars, cross-legged in the garden where Mei once planted violets. Energy stirred around him like a tide, slow but immense.
He wasn't what he once was.
But he was still moving forward.
And now, he wasn't alone.
The wind carried no omen.
That morning, the sky was the soft gray of unspoken thoughts, and Ye Zai rose to make tea like always. He waited for Lian to return she had gone to the mountain pass to settle a dispute between cultivators who threatened a nearby village.
She had grown strong. Too strong, perhaps. Brave, perhaps too brave. But she was his.
And he had let her go with a quiet nod and a warning: "Do not fight unless you must."
But when the storm came at dusk red, unnatural, split with thunder that screamed like grief he knew.
She did not return that night.
Nor the next.
When they brought her body down the mountain, broken and still wrapped in the robes she'd embroidered herself, Ye Zai did not cry. He held her, carried her inside, laid her on the bed, and sat beside her as if she were only sleeping.
He stayed there until the candles burned down and the walls smelled like wax and silence.
And then, he stood.
He walked into the field.
The air bent around him. Grass blackened in his wake. The stars flickered nervous.
His voice, quiet at first, was the whisper of storms beneath oceans.
"You watched," he said to the sky. "You let her die."
He wasn't speaking to the heavens.
He wasn't speaking to the world.
He was speaking to the Almighty the inverse Author. The puppet master who stood in reflection of the one who wrote everything, who gave Ye Zai power and then took everything from him, one piece at a time.
"You wanted a tragedy," he said, his voice rising. "You wanted growth. You wanted pain. You wrote her death like a page turn. Like a plot point. Like it made me deeper."
His eyes burned now not with light, but with something worse. Awareness.
"No more."
He stepped forward.
The world around him ripped open. Not exploded ripped, like paper torn by something far too sharp.
Beyond it stood the Almighty, draped in golden robes, faceless and radiant, smiling with the emptiness of purpose.
"You would defy your own creator?" it asked, serene. "Her death was necessary. For your evolution. For the narrative."
Ye Zai's hands trembled not with weakness, but restraint.
"She was not a paragraph. She was my daughter."
And then, with no ceremony, no declaration of war, he struck.
The Almighty's form shattered across planes, bent across realities. Universes burned as collateral. Logic buckled. Words died in their sentences. But Ye Zai kept moving forward, through layers of fiction, through frames and fonts and logic trees until he saw past the mirror.
Until he saw him.
The real Author.
Not the embodiment.
Not a character.
Not a reflection.
But the one who sat in a quiet room, fingers on keys, typing his life as though it were his own to break.
And Ye Zai whispered, not in rage but in grief deeper than any god could bear:
"You created her so I would lose her. You created me to feel that loss. And now, I will destroy even you."
The page trembled.
The pen cracked.
The Author, sitting in the real world, looked up from his screen only to see Ye Zai step through.
The boundary between fiction and reality screamed.
Ye Zai no longer walked through worlds. He walked through the concept of writing itself.
And this time, he would not stop.
He had lost his life 3 times First, he literally lost his life second, he lost his family and third he lost his family again but completely this time.
Ye Zai said to the author One day, I will remove your authority from this verse and become the author myself, and you the author will be trapped in a story yourself