He could not crawl.
He could not speak.
He could not even lift his head without trembling.
And yet—he had seen it.
The shimmer in the air, the breath that bent the world, the pulse that whispered through roof and floorboards alike.
This was not the gray world he remembered.
This world breathed.
And though he was no more than a helpless infant, the rhythm of that breathing was already pressing against him, pulling him into its current.
The first word came like a stone dropped in a still pond.
"Qi."
He did not understand it—not truly—but the sound burrowed deep. It was not just a sound; it carried a weight, a vibration that lingered in his gray self long after the voices around him had faded.
Later came another.
"Dao."
The baby's small body twitched at it, as though some hidden muscle deep in his chest responded. He did not know why. The word was a stranger, and yet it pressed on him like a command.
The voices of adults blurred together most of the time. Warm sounds, sharp sounds, lullabies that rose and fell like tides. But when those words appeared among the babble—Qi, Dao, cultivation, meridians—something inside him stirred.
He could not string them together.
He could not form meaning.
But each time, the gray part of him felt a pull, as though scraps of a forgotten book were being shoved into his hands, too tattered to read, too precious to throw away.
Sometimes he would hear them spoken while the man moved in the yard, slow as mountains, fast as storms. The word "Qi" would fall from his lips as his body carved patterns in the air.
Sometimes the woman whispered "medicine," "roots," "pill," as she crushed herbs with her stone mortar, the bitter smell filling the room.
The child's baby-self squirmed and drooled, unable to hold even his head steady.
But his gray-self listened.
It listened with a hunger born not of milk, but of something far deeper—something that trembled in him each time the air shimmered around the man's fists.
Yet confusion ruled him still.
Were these words real?
Or fragments of fever-dreams bleeding into his helpless consciousness?
He could not ask.
He could not speak.
He could only listen, trapped between hunger and silence, while the rhythms of this strange, breathing world pressed closer and closer.