The wind blew softly across the scrubgrass. It appeared as if the world itself was exhausted, worn out from the years and seasons, and hardly responded to the stillness of the day.
There was no cry, no noise, no voice of life. The world was silent, frozen, waiting for something, or maybe waiting for nothing.
The clouds above hung heavy and motionless. They drifted across the sky like a shroud, with no hint of rain. The day seemed to last forever. The sun did not exist; there was no heat, no indication of life or movement. It was a lost day.
On the edges of a village that had succumbed to dust and neglect for many years, a young boy sat on a stone.
He was six, or maybe seven, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Time didn't matter much when no one ever called your name. No one scratched a notch on the doorframe to mark how tall you'd grown, and no one lit a single stick of incense when your birthday came. You start to wonder if you are growing at all, or just staying the same.
His name vanished too. The old woman who had given him the nickname "Little Rat" was no more, her life claimed by sickness years ago. Nobody searched for her.
He was there, and he had watched her die in the corner of the room, and he hadn't cried.
He didn't know how.
Then he'd moved into the hollow under the old tree at the back of the abandoned shed. It wasn't shelter—it ran water and stank of mildew—but it was not territory anyone else occupied. And that was sufficient. He filled it with grass and rags. Claimed it. He even dug a shallow trench in which to deposit his waste, like the dogs.
The villagers hardly even knew that he existed. Someone had stoned him for stealing rotten yams at some point. There was a time when a farmer passing by by mistake took him for a ghost and sprinkled salt over him. That had made him laugh.
He survived on other people's garbage. Rotting grains. Rotting turnips. Insects, when famished to the point of desperation. He drank rainwater collected in broken terracotta fragments. He watched life go on as if he was not a part of it.
At times, when fortune smiled upon him, he came upon fragments of dried meat stuck between shattered tiles near the food hall.
He did not beg. Begging was looking. Begging was humiliation.
It was more advantageous to remain mute. More advantageous to dissipate into the periphery.
The bruises on his arms weren't from beatings but from brambles, rusty nails, and rodent bites while he battled territorial rats. His nails were full of dirt. His knees had permanent bruising as he crawled through broken holes in fences and buckled roofs.
He did not despise this life.
He simply… existed within it.
His hair was matted and knotted, long, and spoke of the years of neglect he was used to his whole life. His body was thin, and the bones protruded from beneath the thin coat of skin. But his eyes were the most striking of all. They were clear—unnaturally clear.
A child's eyes should have something in them. Wonder. Curiosity. Fear. His did not. No child's spark in them, no innocence. His eyes were different—nearly too perceptive for a child so young.
He was observing.
Below him, on the ground and in the dirt and dust, a line of ants marched in tidy, regimented columns. They worked hard, each of them carrying a piece of leaf or crumb many times its own size, moving with harmony. They dug, they carried and they fought. They did what they were created to do. They never faltered.
The boy sat and watched them for hours, chin on knee, eyes straying as he stared on in awe at their relentless labor.
"You are so tiny," he whispered, "and you work so strenuously."
One ant struggled under the weight of a twice-as-long seed pod. Another was dragging the body of one who had fallen. A third chased off an intruder. And still the colony went on. Unbroken.
"But why?" he exclaimed.
"You have no name. No dream. No choice. You wake, you move, you die. And not a single thing in the world weeps for you. Not even the sky."
"Is it the same for me?" he questioned himself. "If I died today... would the world care? Would it even blink?"
"You serve without knowing what you serve. You live without knowing you're alive."
The ants did not react.
He inched ahead, his breathing disturbing the ground. The ants were unaware of him. They continued. They turned, they twisted and they marched. They appeared to have no other purpose, no other drive but to work, to continue, without question or hesitation.
What had driven it? Survival, for the mere reason? To feed the queen, to grow the colony? That was all? Or was there something more?
"They don't question it," he breathed, his gaze tracing the route of an ant struggling to carry a chunk of seed much bigger than itself. "They just do it. No questioning. No doubt."
He watched the little creature, its legs trembling under the load. It halted, readjusted, and crawled on, inch by inch, its tiny body determined to see it through.
"You labor without knowing why," he said, his voice full of wonder. "You exist without ever wondering what the reason for it is."
He tilted his head to one side, thinking. There was a nobility and futility to the ants that appealed to him—something dutiful, loyal and obstinate. But to what? What was the value of their tireless toil when their lives were so brief, so tiny? What was the purpose if it was nothing?
His thoughts moved. "You will never look up towards the sky. You will never see what is on the other side of the pile of earth. The earth will claim you, and another will claim your place."
He could not feel for them. Life was a cycle to them—a straightforward, animal rhythm. There was no doubt, no room for variation. The world was fixed, and so were they.
The boy's eyes became icy.
"What happens if I kill you?"
He gazed blankly at the ants scurrying about, their mission futile in his eyes.
"You work. You build. You carry burdens ten times your weight. But if I crush you now… who will mourn you? Who will remember?"
"Nobody will mind. Nobody will care. You will be gone, and the world will still be the same."
A faint breath escaped his lips.
This is truth. Not cruelty.
He grasped a stick. A dry, light thing. He tested its balance and pressed it into the ground.
Then thrust it into the colony.
Crunch.
The branch split the ground, and the anthill started cracking apart. The earth moved, and the ants were in a desperate panic, fighting to hang on to their home, their colony. They lined up, fought to defend, but could not stem the tide.
He remained there. Still. Cold. Distant.
Not a child performing cruelty.
A mind doing an experiment.
The boy did not experience any victory. He did not experience anything. He just stood there, empty and conscious of what he had done.
"You believed your struggle was something," he said on a breath, his voice still and low. "But struggle isn't enough."
"Meaning doesn't come from suffering. Purpose doesn't emerge from sacrifice."
"Power determines who will live under the sky… and slay those that crawl."
The boy looked at the flat hill, the small bodies of the ants scattered everywhere on the ground. The stillness was total, near peaceful.
Then he looked up.
The sky stretched out above, pale and wide and empty. It had no eyes, no mouth, no heat. Only endless silence.
In the stories the villagers whispered at night, the sky was called a god. It watched. It judged. It rewarded the pious.
But the boy knew better.
"The sky did not stop me," he whispered.
"It's not a god."
"A ceiling," he gasped, eyes never once wavering. "Just a ceiling."
"A ceiling, that's all. And I won't live under it."
Not rage, not sorrow.
Just determination.
He did not know what lay beyond that ceiling, but he knew this—one thing—he would not crawl. He would not obey. He would not die forgotten like the ants.
Behind him, the shallow breathing sound seemed to come. An almost-invisible one. The light breath of a person trying not to breathe.
He slowly turned his head.
There was a girl standing behind him. She was young, perhaps slightly older than his age.
Pale. Dirty. Thin.
Her dress was in shreds, her cheeks sunken. But her eyes were gentle. Too gentle for this world.
She had seen him earlier. The kid who gazed at insects and did not speak to anyone.
She had intended to offer it to him. To say, Here. I know that you are there.
But she did notice the hump. The stick he held.
The silence in his eyes.
She had no idea what she was witnessing. But something primal in her blood said to be afraid of it.
She spun and ran.
He watched her go, her bare feet skimming over the gravel, leaving behind footprints in the dust. The bun dropped from her hand, bouncing once before rolling into the weeds.
He did not follow behind. He did not make a noise. He simply returned to the devastation of the ant colony and looked at the wreckage in silence. His fists did not relax.
After some time, he returned to the tree at the rear of the shed.
To the decay. To the silence. To the space no one cared to look.
....
Her name was Yun'er.
She was nine.
A little bit older than the boy.
She had seen the boy before. A brief shadow behind the woodcutter's hut. A boy scooping rain in cupped hands. He never talked. Never begged. Never played.
He was odd. But today… he seemed even more odd.
She'd trailed behind him without knowing why. She held onto her dry bun like a charm.
Her little feet made no sound in the grass. Her brother had always told her to walk quietly—"like a rabbit" back when he was still around to say anything.
She'd planned to say something. Perhaps to offer him half. Perhaps simply to sit beside him in quiet.
And she saw what he did.
Not the way other boys did. Unlike the boys who kicked street dogs for fun or threw stones just to see something twitch. She'd seen that sort of heartlessness before.
This was not like that.
He destroyed them. Slowly. With such precision, it seemed almost religious.
Not play. Not rage. Something else.
That's what made it worse. He didn't kill the ants to laugh. He didn't hate them. He didn't love them either.
He simply watched.
And destroyed.
Because he could.
She had watched the mound crumble. Watched the ants disperse, fight and die. She heard his voice afterward—so gentle and so soft, yet ringing in her bones louder than any shriek.
"The sky did not stop me."
Something in her shrank. She stepped back, and a rock slid under her foot. His head swiveled. Their eyes locked.
For one brief moment, her universe came to an end.
She felt it then—not evil, not danger—but something harder to describe. A lack. An emptiness like silence that was not merely soundless but full of void.
He looked at her—not hatefully, not cruelly—but with a coldness so deep that it was indifference.
It was not that she had witnessed death. She had witnessed enough.
It was that, in that instant, she knew she could vanish. And no one would notice. That to him, she was no more than the ants.
Disposable.
She turned and ran.
She didn't think to keep the bun. She did not feel the scorching of her scuffed knees. Yun'er ran until the twisted wooden fences of Xinhui Village reappeared like a scattering of broken ribs. Even then, she ran only until her lungs were seared and her knees shook.
She ducked beneath a very old red prayer banner, its colors faded to a pink mist. The writing—Blessings from the River Goddess—had worn so thin it resembled seeping scratches. It didn't improve her mood.
Nothing did.
Not after what she had seen.
She wrapped herself up beneath the table of her grandmother, where the scent of dried herbs clung to every splinter. Her hands kept shaking.
She wrapped her arms around herself.
But the cold lingered on.
She still felt his stare. That gaze. Not bitter. Not biting. But heavy. Like it was capable of cutting through things.
He never once used a bad word. He had not even looked angry. But Yun'er had caught something in his eyes that she couldn't understand.
And it terrified her.
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