Han-woo stirred in his crib. The world was quieter than usual, though not completely silent. There were sounds—soft shuffles of feet, low murmurs, the faint scrape of wood across floorboards. He could not understand them. He could only feel their weight, pressing gently against the edges of his small mind.
Something was different.
He noticed it first in the air itself: the warmth seemed more even, less sharp than the night before. The faint pressure that had once made his tiny chest ache was lighter, though it did not vanish entirely. It was as if the world had been pressed into a subtle shape, folded around him like soft cloth.
His mother's touch was careful now, measured. Every lift, every sway, every adjustment of his blanket was deliberate. Han-woo felt it, not fully knowing why, but it made him feel both safe and strangely constrained. His cries were muffled, soothed quickly, leaving him only fragments of the panic that had flared yesterday.
The father moved through the room in silent patterns, hands brushing lightly over the furniture and the walls. He did not touch Han-woo directly, but the child could feel the presence—something in the father's motion seemed to guide the air, to fold it so that nothing escaped notice.
Han-woo tried to roll, tiny muscles straining, but found his movements carefully limited. Not forced. Not cruelly. But every motion was subtly guided, controlled, like the currents of water around a boat. His small mind could not understand the reason, only the sensation: the world had become a gentle cage.
And yet, within that cage, he could feel something stirring.
A faint warmth, a whisper of pressure in his limbs, like a shadow of the Qi he had felt before. It was quiet, tentative, almost shy. He could not move it, could not call it by name, could not claim it—but it was there.
The careful walls his parents had built were protecting him, shaping him, keeping him small—but also letting him sense, ever so slightly, the rhythms of the world outside.
Han-woo's tiny fists clenched, not in understanding, but in instinct. Something inside him stirred, a faint echo of the man who had once lived in gray, threading through the helpless infant body. He did not yet know what it meant, but it made his chest rise and fall with an awareness he could not name.
The world, for now, was hidden. But he could feel the shadows of its touch.
And though he could not see or speak, a tiny part of him—Han-woo, Gray, both—knew it was real.
The air was never still. Han-woo began to notice this—not as knowledge, but as sensation. Sometimes the air pressed faintly against his skin, sometimes it drew away, leaving him cool and unsettled. It was like breathing without lungs, like hearing without ears. The patterns came and went, delicate as threads brushing his fragile body.
When his mother hummed low in her throat, that pressure softened. When his father paced the room, it sharpened, becoming dense, close, almost metallic. Han-woo could not name it. Yet something in him, buried deep, trembled with half-recognition.
This is not ordinary air…
The thought was too large for his infant mind. Instead, it came as a pulse of unease, a tugging at the gray edges of his awareness.
He whimpered, small and voiceless. His mother's hand descended, warm and steady, patting his chest. At once, the air gentled again. The sharpness dissolved. The strange pressure withdrew.
Han-woo's body stilled. He did not understand. But he felt it: her presence could quiet not just his cries, but the very rhythm of the world around him.
His father, meanwhile, lingered at the doorway. Han-woo's unfocused eyes tracked the silhouette. The man moved slowly, purposefully, each gesture as if weaving an unseen veil. And though Han-woo could not grasp it, he felt safer whenever the father's hand traced the frame of the room. As though something vast outside could not reach him so long as those motions were made.
At times, the baby body failed him—hunger surged, or his limbs kicked uncontrollably. But each time, his parents' careful care folded the world back into order. Their voices wove over him, low and cautious, words he could not understand but tones he could feel.
And beneath it all, still whispering: that shimmer. That almost-soundless hum in the air. Not yet a force he could grasp, but a veil of presence pressing gently at the edges of his tiny chest, his closed fists, his half-dreaming mind.
Han-woo drifted between waking and sleep. In that twilight, he sensed the world as a trembling balance: his parents building walls of secrecy around him, the strange shimmer pressing to enter, his small body caught between.
And though he could not yet name it, though he was helpless to act, some fragile instinct whispered to him:
This is not the world you knew. This is a world of power.
Han-woo's lids grew heavy, his cries fading into hiccupping breaths. The warmth of his mother's chest and the steady rhythm of her heartbeat folded him into drowsiness. The shimmer that had been brushing against him did not leave; it followed, sliding down with him into sleep.
In that half-darkness, colors bloomed.
Not colors as he once knew them—not red, not blue—but hues without names, bleeding through the gray of his dreaming mind. They pulsed like embers in the void, swelling and fading with each tiny breath he drew.
Threads of pale light curled in spirals, teasing at the edges of his vision. When his father shifted outside the cradle, those threads bent, recoiling like grass before a heavy step. When his mother whispered, soft as lullaby, the lights grew warmer, their edges melting into waves.
He did not know the word Qi.He did not know what he saw.
Yet he felt it—alive, aware, pressing at him like hands that wanted to mold his fragile body into something else.
Shapes flickered: towers rising out of mist, rivers winding through air instead of stone, figures in flowing robes whose faces blurred like smoke. And always, above it all, a vast horizon stretching endlessly into gray, a boundary he could not cross.
Han-woo whimpered in his sleep. His hands, tiny fists, twitched as if grasping at those unreal threads. The lights darted away, then returned, playful, insistent, circling closer.
Inside him, two selves stirred—the old and the new. One whispered in fear: This is not yours, not meant for you. The other leaned toward it, drawn by something older than memory, older than language.
The colors pulsed. The dream-shapes bent closer.
And then, with a fragile shudder, Han-woo's breathing deepened. The lights dimmed, the visions sank back into the gray, leaving only faint echoes curling in the hollows of his tiny chest.
He slept on, unaware that his dreams had touched the first brush of the force his parents feared most.
…The lights dimmed, the visions sank back into the gray, leaving only faint echoes curling in the hollows of his tiny chest.
Han-woo slept on, breath small, body curled.
And the dream carried him, weightless, into a silence where even the colors dared not follow.