The house breathed again as if a withered tree had now come back alive with branches that could stretch inch by inch to offer some perches to the birds that had so long circled, searching, for a place to rest.
Right at the threshold, Zhenwu sank down with his mother, forehead pressed against the icy ground in a sullen mark of prostration that had never been closer to the depth of a kowtow. "Forgive me for leaving you. Forgive me for hurting you. Forgive me for not coming back sooner."
His father, with hands still calloused from years of hard work, pulled him up.
"No more of that," Liang Jianguo growled, but his eyes shone with tears. "You're home. That is all matters. You're home."
The inside was the same as he had left it. The room had everything in it just as he had last seen it-dark-brown floorboards, a made bed, a couple of books stacked on a wooden desk. His old clothes still hung in the wardrobe, looking like they were waiting for him to outgrow them. His parents seemed to have been waiting in suspended animation all this time, like people do when waiting for someone to enter through a door and resume what they had interrupted.
Aunt Chen was also there, sitting at the kitchen table and letting the tears fall down her weathered face. She had helped raise him when his parents were out of the house working sixteen hours in the fields, and being in her presence hit him like the punch of a gut.
"Aunt Chen."
She rose up and slapped him. Hard. In the small room, it echoed like a gunshot.
"That's to scare us half to death," she almost shouted. Then she made the hug bone-crunching. "And this is for coming home alive, you stupid boy."
Mu Weifeng froze at the sound of Chen Nalan's slap. In an instant, she stepped forward and pulled her son behind her, like a mother cat bristling when her tail is stepped on.
"Nalan, enough," he said. "My boy just got back."
"Hmph… I have treated him as my own son all this time," Nalan murmured to herself, the trace of a smile tugging at her lips as she wiped the last of the tears from her eyes.
Zhenwu stepped on his foot and stopped.
In a corner, there was a small altar, and he saw his own picture inside it. The incense burned half, and at this time, it seemed to him to be staring into his own death.
His father also turned, face stiff, wet eyes. For four years, he had spoken to that pile of ash.
Suddenly, the mother broke down, crying, and shouting, "Take it away! Now! Our son is home-don't make him stand here staring at his death!"
They all sat around that kitchen table, the one with wear marks all over it. The same table where he had done his homework by lamplight, where they had eaten. The table where his mother had taught him how to fold dumplings really well.
Wu Meifeng couldn't keep from touching him, his hand, his face, his shoulder, like she needed constant assurance that he was real and solid and not just another dream. She was still crying, but at least they're happy tears now.
"Where were you?" she asked for what must have been the tenth time. "Where did you go? How did you make it through the river?"
And again, for the tenth time, Zhenwu echoed the words he'd given previously: "I was swept downstream. Hit my head on the rocks. I had amnesia for three years. Only remembered who I was last year, and it took me this long to find my way home."
He was yet another embedded lie. An excruciatingly necessary imposture, but an imposture nonetheless. Ashes, he felt, in his mouth. And how would he explain to them the worlds of cultivation and the ascension to becoming an emperor? How would he explain to them the fact that he had been yanked from Earth by forces that were inconceivable to them and had spent subjective millennia bending nature itself like clay?
He couldn't do that. So he lied, and he hated himself for it.
During the family gathering, Auntie Chen looked on silently as the warmth returned to the household with the son's arrival. A little while later, discreetly and without uttering a word, she sneaked out so as not to disturb the joy.
Auntie Chen was a widow living in the village of forty-one years of age. No children of her own. All alone after her husband died, she lived on the good nature of the neighbors. Probably that is why she grew a protective nature towards them, treating families around her as if from her own blood. Zhenwu was no exception; she had long regarded him as the son she never had.
Time passed until the candles were almost finished. Wu Meifeng started to unwind; finally, the last of the tension with which she had been holding herself together for four years disappeared. The next thing the others knew, it was past midnight, and she had now gone to sleep, her head resting on her arms.
Liang Jianguo gingerly lifted his wife up and on to their bedroom. When he returned, he and Zhenwu sat on the front steps, gazing into the village where Zhenwu had been raised.
"There is something we need to talk about," his father uttered slowly. "Concerning Lin Xue. And the child."
"I know about Xuanxuan."
"Yes, well," Liang Jianguo said. "She is such a darling. Just like her mother. Brave like..." He looked at Zhenwu. "Well, we shall see what she inherits from your side. Anyway, it was nice to recall the old times."
They sunk into a pleasant silence for a little while. Sitting here with his father, as he used to do when he was a little boy, felt great.
"Mr. Lin's angry," Liang Jianguo said after some time. "Angry and hurt and scared out of his wits. For months, he's been looking after that child while watching her sicker by the day. He blames you."
"Let him."
"So maybe. But blaming doesn't help. You are here now. What are you going to do about it?"
Zhenwu looked at his father—really looked at him. Liang Jianguo always made few words, but they didn't lack weight. No answer was asked for, no excuses; he would demand action.
"I'm going to take care of them," Zhenwu said. "All of them- Xue, Xuanxuan, you, and Mom. No one in this family will ever suffer again."
Liang Jianguo considered his son's profile in the moonlight. There was something in the boy-man-old now that he couldn't quite put his finger on and had never noticed before: stillness, a confidence that hadn't been there earlier.
"That's a hell of a promise son."
"I can keep it."
"How? You don't have a job, no money, no education past high school. Xuanxuan's medical bills alone would break a rich man."
"I'll handle it, Ba. Trust me."
Liang Jianguo was quiet for a long moment. Finally, he stood and patted Zhenwu's shoulder.
"Your mother needs her rest. And you... You should sleep too. Tomorrow's going to be a long day."
He paused at the door. "Son?"
"Yeah, Dad?"
"Whatever happened to you these past four years... whatever changed you... I hope it was worth it. Because the cost was damn high. For all of us."
Zhenwu listened intently for a change in his father's breathing. When he felt that at last both parents were truly asleep, he rose and moved silently across to their bedroom.
His mother was tiny, look so fragile. He saw the telltale signs of injury wrought upon her face by the past four years. But beyond just seeing—his augmented senses were feeling it. The heart weakened from worry, blocked arteries, and damage inflicted from stress-they were all killing her slowly, from the inside out.
Uncle Weiming had been right about one thing. She was sick. Extremely sick.
Zhenwu laid his hand gently over her heart, allowing just a few drops of healing. Nothing too obvious—just a trickle, really. Just enough to ease the worst of the blockages, strengthen that poor muscle, and start undoing a bit of the damage that grief and worry had wrought upon her body.
She stirred slightly, and her breathing grew deeper and more even.
Just as he had for his father - curing the arthritis in his joints; eliminating the chronic back pain that had plagued him from decades of manual work; fighting high blood pressure coming from stress and poor diets, and above all: watching his son evaporate thin air. A little touch here and a little in there, but bringing them something like years earlier than they would with little changes here and there.
The "m" form he would come. After completed Zhenwu again returns to the room that he left the same way-dirt, book, and their clothes. Even, the wooden animals he created along with Uncle Weiming. He picked up a small wooden bird and ran the thumb over it surface smooth.
He had changed a lot. He was beyond human comprehension, endowed with powers that could reshape the universe itself. But in this room, amidst the artificial remnants of his child-hood, he felt like that seventeen-year-old boy who had run to the river, sinking into despair four years ago.
It has been a boy, who made the biggest of mistakes and is trying to atone for it each and every day.
The carved bird was set back on the shelf and eyes closed. Another of those precious moments before he had to leave the sanctuary entered into the night's most difficult challenge-his daughter healed and convincing her grandfather of the benefits of some promises.
---
In the village, a dead silence reigned outside, where Zhenwu could just have stepped." Even the dogs were asleep, and there remained only the distant chirping of crickets. He did not walk toward Lin Yuheng's house because walking would take too long, and being seen would be out of the question.
He evaporated into thin air like a ghost.
In the back courtyard of the Lin family, Uncle Lin Yuheng was seated on a wooden stool, his cigarette trickling embers, illuminating the surrounding area in otherwise pitch-blackness. The ground around his feet lay strewn with crushed cigarette butts, reputed evidence of two solid hours filled with waiting, cursing, and generally smoking away his frustrations.
"Damn that boy," he muttered, inhaling again. "Always talking yet never doing. Just like before." His gnarled fingers trembled just a bit as he raised the smoke again. "Four years of silence, and now he thinks he can go in there with smooth talk and empty promises."
Another cigarette finished. Another butt ground underfoot.
He has cursed this boy for two hours now, two solid hours in which enough filthy words-feh-to make any sailor drop his throat have come out of those thin, poisonous lips. With every tick of the clock, his certainty deepened that Zhenwu had come to prove he was still that selfish boy who had abandoned their daughter in her moments of greatest need.
"If he doesn't show up tonight..." Lin Yuheng stopped speaking all of a sudden. His gaze, however, remained focused on the entrance of the courtyard, and there was a mixture of hope and fury that was battling within his chest.
Zhenwu, however, was invisible to the bitter old man and had already started his mission.
He appeared inside the small bedroom where his daughter was and had a burning fever. The room itself was small and empty. There was a single bed, a wooden chair, and a small table with medicine bottles that indicated sleepless nights and desperation.
Zhenwu was utterly undetectable with his special abilities. There was no sound, no scent, and no disturbance of air that would give his presence away. He was a phantom over his own living heart, invisible to the world and watching over it.
Next to their daughter's bed, Lin Xue was seated on a chair. She was holding the girl's hand and cooling Xuanxuan's burning forehead. The woman he was once acquainted with was vibrant and cracking up, was now a mere silhouette of what once was. His was now with sunken cheeks, hallowed eyes of fatigue, and clothes that draped over the bony frame of unkempt worry.
Tears streamed down her cheeks as sobs escaped her lips praying for assistance from worn out deities and shifting her lips silently as if offering prayers she had forgotten long ago.
"Please," she echoed outwards as though she was pleading with the void. "Don't take her from me as well. She is the only thing that reminds me of him. She is the only thing remaining that is good in this horrible world." "He returned," she said through chocked sobs. "I was never attuned to the order of the world. I was unaware of the noise. I saw... I saw him. I covered my face with my hands. I remember the burn of his touch and the sweat of my hands. The images swim around. I had thought I was carrying something precious. A life. A treasure. A love child but our daughter is dying and I don't know how." She moved her lips to the forehead of the girl. "I don't."
The ache in his heart grew stronger as he saw the change in her, more than his mind could comprehend. All of this will never to him. The four years he had taken away from them, learned all this and time was irrelevant at this moment.
Four years have passed since she alone began to fight this battle.
Four years they have watched as her health markedly deteriorated while he learned to bend reality itself.
Four years Lin Xue had grown old without him, sharing the burdens that should have been shared.
He wanted to drop down to his knees right then, to break his disguise and beg her forgiveness, to hold the two of them close in his arms and promise that the haunting dream was over. But not yet. First things first.
*Forgive me, Xue,* he thought, the words ringing loudly in the silence of his mind. *Forgive me for leaving you to carry this alone. Forgive me for being too weak to stay when you needed me the most.*
He moved closer to the bed and studied his daughter's face, flushed with fever. Sick as she was, she was beautiful, with delicate features inherited from her mother, fever-softened small hands clutching a long-abused stuffed rabbit. Small and fragile like a flower trying to bloom in the midst of a storm.
His child. Their child. The miracle he had fled from in terror and cowardice.
Gently, with utmost care not to disturb the air around her, Zhenwu directed his consciousness toward her and probed the insidious illness that had taken possession of her small body. The findings made his jaw clench. The fever was a mere symptom beneath it lay something far worse, a hereditary condition that would require some delicate work to heal completely.
*Rest now, Xue,* he thought, returning his focus to Lin Xue. *Let me give you the peace you've been denied. Tomorrow, you shall wake to see our daughter, healthy and whole. Tomorrow, everything changes.*
With the gentlest caress of his power, he called upon Lin Xue a wave of deep, restorative sleep. Her eyes closed like wings of butterfly, her breath, deepened, and for the first time in what seemed, months, the worry lines had faded off her face.
Now Zhenwu, with mother and child snuggled into peaceful slumber, could begin the most important work in life.
"Xuanxuan" he breathed.
She stirred as his voice became audible. Eyelids fluttering for a fleeting moment, he thought she might wake, but she just sighed back to an agitated sleep.
"Daddy... Daddy's home now... don't leave again..."
Zhenwu knelt beside the bed, hands shaking as he reached to touch her forehead; she was burning with fever, waging a battle her small body could not possibly win.
But from with her, another trance of icy blood ran through her father's veins.
The faintest trace of purple energy was blurring her periphery, just like deathly smoke around an extinguishing flame. Almost gone, just barely there, but Zhenwu instantly recognized that energy.
Void energy. The very same corrupted qi leaking from rifts he had sealed along with Xiao Tu.
His daughter was not sick merely with leukemia; she was slowly poisoned by interdimensional toxins that had no right to exist almost near Earth.
That means the Void Eaters were not randomly targeting his home planet.
Or else they've been specifically targeting his family.
Let us hope none of his deductions turn out to be true.