Dawn came thin and gray, the sky like a wound stitched into pale cloth. Lin Tianhai woke to the sound of his mother moving about the small courtyard—quiet footsteps on worn stone, the scrape of a broom across an unwashed floor. He lay still, pretending sleep, listening to the familiar rhythm that had become the measure of their days.
When he slipped outside, she was already at the gate, her sleeves damp with the morning chill. Her hair was tied back in a tighter knot than usual; the lines at her eyes had deepened overnight. A kettle hissed on a brazier, but she did not stir it. Instead she watched the road, as if waiting for someone—anyone—who might look upon them with mercy.
"Tianhai," she said when he stepped close, voice small as if afraid to wake the world. "We must go to the elders today."
He swallowed. He had expected worse things than petitions and cold rice, but the heaviness in her face made his stomach turn. "What for?"
She met his eyes and, for a moment, the exhausted courage in them reminded him of his father. "To plead. To ask for—at least—permission to stay in the estate. To ask for work that can feed us. I will go to the elders. I will go to the side branches. I will beg. I will do whatever is necessary."
He wanted to tell her to stop. Pleading had never helped; it had only deepened the mockery. But the tremor in her hands, the way her shoulders hunched before she set her jaw, made him quiet.
"You won't beg for me," he said instead.
Her laugh was a dry slip of sound. "I will beg for you, Tianhai. For your sake I will eat shame like it's grain. You are my son. If the world leaves you nothing, then I will bear everything."
They left before the sun rose higher—two figures moving through the estate, heads down beneath the curious eyes of servants already up for work. At the steward's hall, doors that once opened freely now closed with deliberate slowness. A single attendant took their names, then slid a scroll across the table with the same neutrality he used to hand out dog-eared bills.
"Elder Lin Yusheng is in council," the attendant said, not looking up. "Come tomorrow."
Tianhai watched his mother's face. It did not flinch. She folded her hands and left without a word.
They walked the long way through the market lanes. Outside the estate gates, the world looked sharper—merchants calling prices, children weaving through legs. Here, however, there was no respect to be bartered; only the quiet cruelty of common tongues.
An older woman in the market, one who used to be a nurse to the main branch, stopped them. Her eyes were soft but guarded.
"Lin Xia," she said to Tianhai's mother—using the diminutive that had been her name before marriage—"I heard. I'm sorry. There is a small dressmaker who needs a helper. She's willing to take you for a month's work. It's not much, but it's honest."
Relief almost broke the mother's face, then shame cut it down. "I cannot leave the estate. If I take work, they will take Tianhai's place as well. They will call me selling our name for coin."
"You are selling nothing," the woman snapped, sharper than her years. "You are buying time. Time is worth more than the pride of those who have already turned their backs."
Lin Xia nodded once, too quick, and accepted the name and directions. She thanked the woman with a voice that trembled and then masked the trembling with a briskness that Tianhai had not seen in months.
Inside the estate again, rain began—small, fine needles that blurred the world. They took shelter beneath a veranda where two cousins lounged, arms crossed, and the air smelled faintly of wine.
"Didn't expect to see you here," one of them said loud enough for everyone to hear. "Come to beg for another bowl?"
The mockery washed over them like cold water. Lin Xia's hands tightened on the woven basket she carried. She lowered her head and said, "We only ask for work. So we may be useful."
"Oh, how noble," the cousin sneered. "Useful. As if you were ever useful before. Perhaps you can teach him to be invisible—seems he's already mastered that."
A laugh rolled around the courtyard. Tianhai felt each word as if it were a hammer. His vision tunneled and the world narrowed to the sound of his heartbeat and the weight of his robe upon his shoulders. He wanted to strike, to shatter the sneers with the tiny pulse of qi he still hid. But his mother's hand found his sleeve, and the touch was a tether.
She walked on, head bowed, and for each mocking step they took, she straightened a little more, as if stuffing her dignity into an invisible bag that she would one day set on a table before the very ones who had mocked them.
That night, while Tianhai practiced in the yard, moving like a ghost around the wooden dummy, his mother did not sleep. She counted the days in a ledger—small debts repaid, small favors returned. Every person she managed to appease, no matter how little, was a promise kept to her son's future. Her back ached. Her hands were raw. But she hummed quietly as she stitched, and the tune was a cracked sort of lullaby.
When the household went to bed, she lingered by Tianhai's door and watched him, a silhouette moving in the lamplight. Tears slipped silently over her cheeks. She pressed them back with the flat of her hand and whispered into the dark, "Live, Tianhai. Live for me. If I must be a blade in the back of the family's mouth, let me be. If I must eat slander, let me swallow it whole. As long as you live—my life is not wasted."
Tianhai opened the door and found her there, ruin and resolve braided together. He knelt without thinking and pressed his forehead to her hands. "Mother," he said, the single word carrying the weight of everything they had lost and everything they still might win.
She smiled, and it was the smallest, sharpest thing. "Tomorrow," she said, "I will return to the elders. I will beg again. For you."
He wanted to promise her victory, but he had no proof. Instead he closed his fist until the bone creaked and thought of the Sutra's fragment glowing in the night. The pulse he'd woken in the mist was small, but it would not die if he fed it. He would not let his mother's hunger be for nothing.
Outside, the clan estate slept and schemed in equal measure. Within the thin walls of their borrowed corner, a mother bartered her pride and a son sharpened his shame into a secret blade.
One would go out and beg. The other would rise when the world slept.