The first word came like a stone dropped in a
The word Qi haunted him.
It came again and again, spoken in tones that shifted like weather—firm, soft, commanding, questioning. Always it carried that same weight. Always it pressed itself into his gray-self like a brand.
But he could do nothing.
His tongue was too soft, his mouth too clumsy. When he tried to shape a sound, all that spilled out was drool and broken gurgles.
When he tried to lift his head toward the man's voice, his neck betrayed him, trembling until it collapsed again into the bedding.
The world of words loomed above him, immense and unreachable, while he lay in the prison of flesh too small to even sit upright.
"Dao."
That one was worse.
He heard it rarely, but each time, it struck deeper. The air seemed to thicken, as though the word itself carried weight. His baby-fists clenched when it came, without meaning to.
He wanted to know.
To hold the sound, to unravel it, to make sense of why it felt like more than language.
But all he could do was whimper, saliva dribbling from his lips, as the adults spoke over and around him—never to him.
There were other words, too, though they slid past his gray-self like half-forgotten dreams.
"Roots."
"Meridians."
"Pill."
Each left faint scratches in his mind, as though carving marks into stone with a dull blade. He knew, in some hidden place, that they mattered. But knowing only deepened his helplessness.
For what use was knowing, when he had no voice, no hands, no way to even crawl to the door and see what the words meant?
The worst was at night.
When the house grew quiet, and only the crickets hummed, he would lie in the darkness with his small limbs twitching, his gray-self awake within. He would replay the words again and again in his silent prison, afraid they would fade by morning.
But dawn always came, and with it new sounds, new humiliations—milk dribbling down his chin, the sharp scent of crushed herbs, the booming echo of training strikes outside.
The words remained.
Yet he could do nothing but store them, like stones gathered in a broken bowl.
In the gray world he had once lived, words had meant little. Deadlines. Reports. Meetings. They had been air, empty and gray.
But here, words lived. They vibrated with a power that pressed against his soul.
And he, trapped in his infant flesh, could only endure.