Chapter 6
He heard them before he saw them — his mother's voice first, low and careful, then the lighter sound of his sisters behind her. The shed door swung open and the pale midday light spilled in around their silhouettes.
He had managed to get his sleeve across his face once, but it wasn't enough. He knew by the way his mother's expression changed the moment she saw him — the shift from concerned to something deeper, something that moved faster than words.
She crossed the shed in three steps and dropped to her knees in front of him on the dirt floor, completely without hesitation, her eyes moving quickly over his face, his hand, the smear of blood on his trouser leg.
"Guowei." Her voice was steady but her eyes were not. "What happened? What's wrong? Why are you crying?"
Behind her, Lihua took one look at her brother's face and immediately began to cry herself, the way young children do — not because they fully understand what's wrong but because someone they love is hurting and that's reason enough. She pressed herself against her mother's side, one small hand reaching out toward her brother.
Guowei opened his mouth. Closed it.
He knew he needed to say something — anything — because silence would only make it worse. He could see the worry already spreading across his mother's face and the last thing he wanted was to add to what she carried. He tried to find words that were true enough without being the whole truth.
He couldn't find them.
And then his mother stopped waiting for him to.
She reached forward and pulled him into her arms, both hands pressing him against her, one on his back moving in slow steady circles the way it probably had when he was small — when this body was small, when this life was just beginning and she was already holding it together with both hands.
"Guowei." Her voice was quiet, close to his ear. "It's okay to cry when it hurts. No one will think you're weak."
He had not been held like this in his previous life. Not once, not that he could remember clearly enough to count. His family had been the kind that occupied the same spaces without quite reaching each other, that came apart slowly and without drama because there hadn't been enough warmth to hold anything together in the first place.
This was different.
It was the simplest thing — a mother's arms, a dirt floor, a shed full of old tools — and it broke him completely open.
The tears came without asking. Not the desperate, clawing grief from before but something quieter and more total, the kind that arrives when the body finally believes it's somewhere safe enough to let go. He didn't try to stop them. He couldn't have. They came as they pleased and his mother held on through all of it, patient and steady, her hand never stopping its slow movement across his back.
After a long moment she pulled back just enough to look at his face.
"How old are you now," she said softly. Not really a question. The kind of thing you say when you're reminding someone — and maybe yourself — that they're allowed to still be young. "It's okay. Come inside."
Noon came and went without a meal.
There was nothing to make one from, and for once Guowei didn't argue with that reality. He sat with his family for a while in the main room, not talking much, letting the quiet do what quiet does. Then he excused himself and went to lie down.
He lay on his side facing the wall, one hand tucked under his cheek, and listened to the house settle around him.
In his pocket were a hundred yuan. Useless here — the wrong era, the wrong world, currency that belonged somewhere the stone no longer seemed willing to take him. He could feel the folded bills against his hip and he hated how they felt. A reminder of everything he'd almost had access to and couldn't reach.
He told himself he was being rational. He told himself there were other ways. He told himself a lot of things and none of them stuck.
What stuck instead were the what-ifs.
What if he had stayed longer. What if he had worked through the rest of the day on the other side. What if he had spent every last yuan on rice and oil and carried it all back before the stone went cold. What if he had been smarter, faster, less stunned by the novelty of it and more focused on what mattered.
He turned each one over like a stone, looking at what was underneath, and found nothing useful there. Just the familiar weight of a man blaming himself for not knowing what he couldn't have known.
He pressed his face into the thin pillow and let the self-reproach run its course, which took a while.
He didn't know when he'd drifted off, but the light through the window had shifted — the sharp white of midday softened into the long amber of late afternoon — when he heard small feet in the corridor.
The door opened.
"Brother." Lihua's voice, gentle for once, the boundless energy dialed down to something careful. "Dinner."
"Not hungry," he said to the wall. "Go ahead without me."
A pause.
Then a small fist connected with his back. Not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to mean something. One solid thump, delivered with great conviction, and then the rapid patter of short legs retreating down the corridor before he could respond.
He turned over.
She was already gone.
He stared at the empty doorway for a moment. Then something in his chest shifted — slowly, like a heavy thing being moved by a small force applied with enough patience.
He thought about her. Really thought about her.
At eight years old she had already learned to be careful around food. Not greedy, not demanding — careful. Measured. Like someone who had looked into an empty bowl enough times to know that wanting too much only made the emptiness louder. She tracked portions with eyes too old for her face, ate slowly, never asked for more. That wasn't a child's instinct. That was something learned from necessity, pressed into her before she was old enough to understand what was pressing.
She should have been worried about games. About which friend she'd play with tomorrow, about some small rivalry with another girl in the village, about nothing heavier than what children invent for themselves when the world is leaving them alone. Instead she was eight years old and already understood scarcity.
And Xiaomei. Thirteen, but when had she last looked thirteen? She moved through the house like someone decades older, measuring everything — her words, her portions, her energy. Watching their mother with a quiet vigilance that no child should have to maintain. Already becoming the person she'd need to be rather than the person she might have wanted to be.
Guowei looked at the ceiling.
The last light of the day came through the window in a long slanted line, warm and indifferent, the way sunlight is.
I'm a modern man, he thought. I should be able to do something.
And then, because he was being honest with himself: I wasn't anything special. Not in that life. Corporate drone. Average grades, average job, average everything. No special skills. No expertise. Nothing remarkable.
He almost let that settle into another round of self-pity.
And then a thought surfaced, small and quiet.
Wait.
He could fish.
Not expertly. Not professionally. But he knew how — he'd spent enough slow weekends at the river in his previous life, more for the silence than the catch, but the skill was there. Basic and real and actually his.
He turned it over carefully.
The river wasn't far. He'd seen it in the inherited memories of this body — a good river, running clean out of the mountain. And fishing for personal consumption wasn't speculation, wasn't trading, wasn't anything that would draw the wrong kind of attention as long as he was sensible about it. A boy from a struggling family catching fish to feed his household. Nobody would look twice at that. People had been doing it since before there were rules about anything.
It wasn't the shed. It wasn't a market full of modern goods and possibilities.
But it was something. Something real and doable and available tomorrow morning.
He felt the plans begin to form, slow and practical, filling in the space where the panic had been. Where to go. What to use. How much to take without drawing notice. Whether Xiaomei could help him smoke or dry whatever they didn't eat fresh so nothing was wasted.
The amber light faded to grey.
Chen Guowei closed his eyes.
For the first time since the stone had gone silent under his foot, his breathing was steady.