Power is no longer for protection.
It's for justification.
-Xie Wu Ming
The silence continues.
Not calm. Not peaceful. Just....endless.
The kind of silence in which time gets lost. Where air grows thick with unuttered words. Where you can hear the weight of your own heartbeat, pounding like a prisoner trying to break free of its ribcage.
It has been days. Or hours. Or lifetimes.
I don't know how long I've existed in this state. Crammed into myself, eyes wide but not seeing, as if I'm attempting to remember how to see. Not simply light, but meaning. Form. Purpose.
The cave remains as it was when I entered. The same broken bones. The same silent decay of the dead who preceded me. But I... I am not the same.
I haven't eaten. I haven't moved. Just thinking. And not even in sequence. Just flashes. Smears of memory. Sadness closing in on itself like a fist too exhausted to unclench.
Grief is a strange god; it speaks through silence. It answers with absence. It teaches without mercy.
Initially, I thought that silence would soothe me. That if I just sat there in silence long enough, the madness would subside, and I would begin to make sense of myself again. But silence does not heal. Silence sharpens. It turns thought into blade.
Memory into fire. The longer I stay in this dark, the more the silence starts to hum. And then it starts to ask.
"Why are we here?"
Why are we here? To eat? To crave? To hurt? To hold hands and let go? To seek out the notion of light so that we can die with our eyes open?
What is the meaning of life?
I believed cultivation would make me stronger.
I believed that strength would provide answers.
But all I have are bones and specters. A heartbeat sewn from remorse. A lullaby I am unable to cease singing.
My throat aches from having whispered it.
"At the plum tree I stood, your hands in mine, moonlit eyes. But stars drop swiftly, and plum trees die— yet I would love you amidst the ruin.
If I forget the sky, forget my name, I hope you sing it back to me. The sky may break, the plum may burn, but don't forget to sing to me."
Her voice. I try to summon it up like a spell. But it's already gone. The song remains, and even that is frayed at the edges.
I press my nails into my palm until it hurts. Good. I must have something that isn't loss. Something that isn't her.
Why did she compose that song?
Why did she opt for tenderness in a world that opened human beings up for sport?
Why would individuals opt for kindness?
Is it defiance? Or denial? Or something holier, something I've never understood?
She lit candles to gods who never answered. Smiled at strangers who would steal from her. Gave when she had nothing to give.
And I—I mocked her for it. With the cynicism of the wounded. The arrogance of the abandoned.
But now?
And I would set the world on fire to again feel that softness.
She believed in goodness.
And I do believe in her.
And maybe that's why it hurts so much.
I look down at my hands. The same hands that held her after the blood had dried. The same hands that trembled when they should have acted. That reached too late.
And now they're stained. Not with blood—though that too—but with intent. With choice.
I decided to survive her.
I decided on it.
To walk into this tomb and claim something cursed and ancient, just because it promised I wouldn't be weak again.
But is that power?
Or is that desperation with a mask?
I believed I wanted freedom.
But what then is freedom really?
Is it the lack of pain? Or the power to bear it and not break?
Is it the right to make a decision? Or the courage to bear what those decisions bring?
And what did I choose?
To be something almost, but not quite, human. To consent to a journey that does not lead to salvation—merely power.
I don't even know what I'm attempting to be anymore.
And perhaps that is the most terrifying aspect—this formless hunger within me, developing teeth. I reached into the darkness for power and discovered a mouth softly speaking my own name back to me, as though it had been patiently waiting. As though I was always destined to bow down to it.
Is that my destiny? Or is that decay?
Does it matter?
There are times today when I do not believe the voice of my own thoughts. They sound...foreign. Or worse—familiar in a way that makes me ill. Like hearing your mother's voice distorted into a threat.
But do you want to hear the irony? The turn of events that makes me chuckle in a voice not quite my own?
Even today… even after all this, a part of me still longs to be loved.
Still wants someone to examine the ash and say, yes, even this can be beautiful.
What a ridiculous thing.
To slaughter your innocence and still beg to be held.
It disgusts me.
But it's human, isn't it?
That's the last thing I have left. The sickness of wanting to be understood.
Even in my very worst hate thoughts—even when I curse the body of Heaven under my breath—I would like for someone to nod and say, I see you. I understand why you burned the whole thing.
I don't need forgiveness.
I want comprehension.
And that is the most selfish of all sins.
Because I will not stop.
I cannot stop.
I have a hunger inside of me now, a hunger that is not for food. It's a hunger for meaning.
I imagined cultivation as transcendence.
A cutting away from the ordinary. A light so clear it seared illusion from the eyes. I believed enlightenment would feel like freedom, like air after drowning. That it would lift me up above sorrow, above shame—above her.
But all it's shown me is how much of me was hollow to begin with.
As if digging into a mountain in anticipation of treasure and finding nothing but ash, with the remains of all the selves that I had tried to eliminate.
Is that the cost?
No one prepares you for step one being not glory. It's filth.
Not a blooming lotus in the mind, but the scent of your own soul decomposing. It's the way your spirit gurgles in its own bile while you claw through its remains, desperate to name the thing that died inside you without your permission.
They don't say that stepping beyond humanity begins with burying part of it.
You don't ascend. You molt. You flay. You betray everything you once knelt for.
And maybe—just maybe—the only way to remain human is to carry your dead with you.
To fold their names into your marrow until your bones whisper them in the silence between heartbeats. To tattoo their songs onto your breath so even when your voice is gone, the melody remains in the exhale.
Do the dead breathe in dreams?
Do they forgive?
Or do they watch in silence from behind the veil of unbeing, wondering why we couldn't save them?
I wonder if she's watching me now.
From somewhere. Or from nowhere.
I wonder if the kindness she wore like skin was enough to buy her peace. Or if peace was just another story we told ourselves to make grief taste like something other than failure.
I hope her last thought wasn't of me.
I hope it was of wind through plum leaves. Of soft earth between bare toes. Of stars undrowned by smoke.
Because what am I, if not the one who let her die?
There are moments I wish I could cry. That something could pierce the dam and let the grief pour out in rivers. But my sorrow isn't liquid anymore. It has turned to salt. Fossilized into the shape of my spine. It is not something I feel—it is the architecture of what I am.
It is not a wound.
It is my silhouette.
And gods, some days, I want to forget her.
Just enough to stop the ache. Just enough to sleep.
But I also want to remember her so vividly it brands every cell with the fire of her existence. I want the rupture. I want the agony. Because it means she was real. That I was real, once, when I loved her with a heart not yet calcified by failure.
That not every part of me was made of ash and apology.
And that's the cruelty of memory:
It is both the last mercy we are given, and the sharpest punishment we endure.
I haven't moved in hours.
Not because I can't—but because I'm afraid. Afraid that when I stand, nothing will have changed. That all this grief will echo into nothing. That her death will ripple nowhere, leave no mark, change no law.
That all of this pain won't mean a damn thing.
I keep thinking, maybe there's a version of me out there who did save her.
Who ran faster. Who fought harder. Who didn't hesitate.
Who held her hand before the light dimmed.
Who didn't freeze in that moment and think of fear before love.
But I don't live in that story.
I live in this one.
And in this one—I failed her.
There's no redemption arc in this chapter. Only unanswered prayers.
I think true cultivation isn't about strength.
Not the kind people think of—where you move mountains or crush stars.
No.
It's about the courage to remember.
To look your ghosts in the eye when forgetting would be so much easier.
To let them ride your shoulders as you walk forward. To let their voices haunt you—but never dictate your steps.
To carry the ache, and still climb.
I breathe.
Not peace.
Not clarity.
But choice.
And maybe that's enough.
Maybe pain isn't the enemy.
Maybe pain is the price.
Maybe clarity is not a light, but a bruise that refuses to fade. Something you earn only after screaming every question that has no answer—until the silence itself becomes your teacher.
And in that silence, you speak again.
Not because it listens.
But because you refuse to be voiceless.
Maybe that's what conviction is.
Not knowing you're right.
But choosing to stand when you've stopped caring whether or not you're wrong.
So I will stand.
I will burn.
I will carry every ghost, every scar, every whisper of a song long gone.
I will become the answer.
And when they look at me and say I am lost—
Let them.
Because I know her name.
And I remember her song.
And that will be enough.
"You sang beneath the plum tree's shade,
with starlight caught behind your eyes.
I should've held the world in place—
but all I did was lose the fight.
It wasn't time that stole you, love,
it wasn't fate, or gods, or war—
it was these hands that shook too late,
this heart that couldn't open more.
I can't bring back the sky or spring,
but I remember every note.
I hum it. Quietly. Like a spell.
There is no salvation waiting at the end of this path.
Only reckoning.