One morning, as the pale light seeped through the thin walls, the word Qi came again.
But this time, it did not vanish.
It lingered.
The sound of it—spoken by the old man outside—did not fall flat into silence. It echoed, vibrating inside his small body. The air itself seemed to carry the resonance, a faint hum that crawled across his skin.
His baby-heart stuttered. His gray-self froze.
This… this is the same.
The shimmering he had sensed before—the strange current in the air, the warmth that sometimes pulsed from crushed leaves, the weight that pressed on him when voices grew stern—he felt it all gather under this single word.
Qi.
Later that day, as he lay half-asleep, another word struck him—meridians. The syllables were sharp, clipped. The speaker's tone firm.
And again, something stirred.
Deep inside his chest, in places he could not reach with thought or hand, a faint pressure moved. Like a thin stream trickling against stone.
It was not his heartbeat.
It was not his breath.
It was something else.
The gray-self recoiled, terrified.
But the baby-self, the body, responded without him—tiny fingers curling, chest fluttering as though it knew.
That night, when he woke to darkness, he lay very still.
The words—Qi. Dao. Meridians.
The sensations—warmth, vibration, pressure.
They were not separate. They were bound.
He could feel it. Dimly. Helplessly.
Like a man chained in a cave who has glimpsed a torchlight far away, too faint to reach.
And that helplessness was worse than before.
Because now he knew.
There was something here. A force, a path, a power.
And he, trapped in this fragile infant body, could not touch it.
He closed his eyes, forcing the baby's body to still. The murmurs outside drifted away into night.
But inside him, the echoes did not fade.
Qi.
Dao.
Meridians.
They pulsed against the gray of his mind, like drops of water falling endlessly in a cave.
The body stirred. The gray-self recoiled. And between them stretched a silence thick with hunger.
A truth had brushed against him, raw and luminous. Yet he could do nothing. Nothing but lie there, helpless in the dark, as the rhythm of a world greater than him whispered just out of reach.
And so he drifted into uneasy sleep, caught between despair and a yearning he could not name.