The rain had not changed in thirteen years.
It fell the same way that night in early spring: thin, cold, endless, drumming on the tiled roof of the dormitory like countless tiny fingers trying to get in. Li Shui sat on the edge of his narrow bed, elbows on knees, staring at nothing. The window was open a crack; the damp air carried the scent of the river that ran along the edge of the city.
He was sixteen now: tall, lean, pale-skinned, with sharp features that carried a quiet, distant melancholy. His messy black hair was long, tied low in a simple ponytail that fell between his shoulder blades. His eyes were deep blue, unreadable, always looking somewhere just past the person in front of him.
He wore plain dark cultivator robes, but over them hung the half-and-half cloak that never left his shoulders. The left half was solid deep blue, faded from years of wear; the right half was patterned with subtle rippling waves in lighter blues and whites. The cloak was loose, the hem brushing the floor when he stood, giving him an air of quiet detachment, as though he belonged more to mist and water than to the world around him.
His fingers traced the seam where the two halves met. He had done this thousands of times.
Memory came without warning, the way it always did.
He is three years old, maybe a little more.
Everything is too big: the world, the hunger, the rain.
His stomach is a hollow drum. His legs no longer obey him.
He falls face-down in cold mud beside a wide, dark river.
The rain keeps falling.
He curls around the small scrap of deep-blue cloth that has always been tied to his wrist.
He does not cry. He has no strength left for tears.
Then the rain… changes.
It does not stop, but it becomes quieter around him, as though the storm itself steps back.
A shadow falls over him.
Cool hands lift him from the mud as easily as lifting a fallen leaf.
A pale water-blue robe settles around his shivering body, warm despite the rain, smelling faintly of clear springs and distant snow.
He is wrapped so completely that only his face shows.
He tries to open his eyes, but everything is blurred: long dark hair, a face like still water, eyes that look through him rather than at him.
No words are spoken.
None at all.
After that, there is warmth, food, quiet.
He remembers fragments of the year that followed.
A small stone house beside a mountain spring.
Mornings watching mist rise from the water while the silent woman practiced: rain turning into perfect mirror blades that hung in the air, streams freezing mid-flow at a gesture, dew gathering into crystalline lotuses that floated above her palm.
She never smiled. She rarely spoke.
When she did, it was only simple things: "Eat." "Sleep." "Don't wander far."
He learned to walk properly again.
He learned a few words.
He learned to sit still for hours watching water move, because that was what she did.
Then one dawn, by another river, she knelt in front of him and adjusted the cloak that had become his constant covering.
She looked at him for a long time: longer than she ever had.
Her voice, when it came, was soft and even.
"Live well."
That was all.
She carried him to the gates of a city orphanage, set him down, and walked away.
He stood in the road watching her back until she vanished into the morning mist.
He did not cry then either.
He simply turned and walked inside, the oversized cloak trailing behind him like wings he did not yet know how to use.
The memory faded.
Li Shui drew a slow breath. The dormitory was silent; the other boys slept. Tomorrow was the day of the public resonance awakening ceremony in the city square: the day every sixteen-year-old would step forward to have their resonant palaces measured and graded.
He had no expectations.
A war orphan with no bloodline, no resources, no mentor beyond distant memories.
Most likely a low-grade resonance, if he even awakened one at all.
He folded the cloak carefully and laid it beside his pillow.
The pale water-blue half caught the faint moonlight, shimmering like a fragment of a forgotten dream.
He had never learned her name.
No one at the orphanage knew anything about the woman who had left him at the gate with nothing but the cloak and a pouch of coins.
The memory of her face had grown hazy over the years, like a reflection disturbed by ripples.
Still.
Every time it rained, he remembered being lifted from the mud.
Every time he felt the cloak against his skin, he remembered the silent year of kindness he could never repay.
Li Shui lay down, eyes open in the dark.
Tomorrow the world would measure his worth in grades and stages.
He would step forward wearing the cloak that had once been too large for a starving child.
And whatever resonance he awakened: high or low, strong or weak, he would carry it quietly.
Because someone once thought a dying boy was worth saving.
Because someone once gave him a year of their life without asking anything in return.
Because he had been told, in the only words she ever offered him, to live well.
He would try.
The rain kept falling outside, soft and steady, as though the river itself was waiting to see what shape the water would take.