The inner hall was quiet—quiet in the way grief hollows out a space.
Incense smoldered low in a single copper bowl, its thin thread of smoke curling upward as if searching for someone who would never walk through the door again. No funeral rites had been performed. No body had been prepared. Only this hush remained—the silence that follows when something sacred has been interrupted mid-breath.
On the offering table lay the Red Armillary Sash.
It looked almost peaceful, its crimson silk dulled at the edges where fire had kissed it. The light within it had gone dormant—not extinguished, but waiting, the way embers wait beneath ash.
Taiyi understood what that meant.
The sash had been born alongside Nezha—not given, not bestowed, but woven into existence at the same moment as the boy himself. In all his seven years of life, it was the only thing that had ever been truly his. Not a gift from Heaven. Not an inheritance from his father's legacy. Not even a treasure granted by his master.
It had come into the world with him, and it alone had refused to leave.
Now, severed from him, it mourned.
Footsteps approached behind him—careful, hesitant. Madam Yin entered first, her movements small and precise, as if any larger gesture would tear her open. Li Jing followed, shoulders squared by habit more than strength.
Taiyi's voice was low. "His body has returned to origin?"
Madam Yin swallowed once and nodded. "There was… nothing left. Only this."
Li Jing forced his throat to work. "He dissolved into light," he said, each word heavy as stone. "As if Heaven reclaimed what it gave."
Taiyi's jaw tightened.
*Heaven does not give*, he thought. *Heaven loans. And it had demanded its loan back with interest.*
But the sash—the sash had never been part of that loan. Perhaps that was why it remained.
---
At last, Taiyi let his fingers brush the silk.
The moment skin met fabric, something stirred—not his own memory, but an echo carried within the sash itself. Dormant warmth rekindled at his touch. Not as a weapon recognizing a wielder, but as a piece of someone recognizing that its other half was gone.
*Nezha at five years old, standing at the base of Qianyuan Mountain, too small for the journey ahead but already burning with questions.*
*Nezha at six, arguing with the wind during training, insisting he could outrun it if he tried hard enough.*
*Nezha at seven, the morning before he descended the mountain, asking: "Master, is freedom something I earn… or something I take?"*
Taiyi's breath hitched. The sash trembled faintly in his grasp, grief made silk.
He had taken the boy in at five. Trained him for two years. Watched him grow from a child who did not understand why the world feared him into a child who understood too well—and refused to accept it.
And then he had let him go home.
Home, where parental love waited. The only love Nezha had ever truly craved. The love he had killed for. The love he had died for.
Madam Yin's quiet voice broke the silence. "Daoren… tell me. Does he still suffer? Wherever he is?"
Taiyi turned toward her.
For a single, unguarded heartbeat, his expression cracked—revealing the grief of a teacher who had failed to keep his brightest student alive.
"No," he said at last, voice steadying. "Not suffering. Only… waiting."
He did not elaborate.
Some truths were heavy enough to crush a grieving mother's heart.
---
Li Jing stepped forward, squaring his shoulders the way he had before every battle.
"You knew this day might come." His tone held no accusation. It was a fact spoken between two men who understood that power always carried a price.
Taiyi did not deny it.
"When a child carries a fire greater than the world permits," he said quietly, "the world will always try to douse the flame."
Li Jing's fists closed at his sides. "And now?" His voice sharpened. "Is the flame extinguished?"
Taiyi lifted the Red Armillary Sash, letting the fabric fall over his arm. The dim light within it flickered at his touch—faint, but present. Still alive, in some way that defied the absence of its bearer.
"No fire is ever truly gone," he replied. "It only changes form."
Li Jing stared at him, hope and suspicion warring in his eyes. "You… intend something."
Taiyi did not answer immediately.
Instead, he reached into his sleeve and drew out a single, dormant lotus seed.
Not a blossom—a seed. A promise.
It was the very one he had entrusted to this family years ago, when Nezha was still a child of three and the future was not yet written in blood. In his palm, it shimmered with quiet luminescence, each fine vein on its surface etched with the faint whisper of life, rebirth, and contradiction made manifest.
Madam Yin gasped softly. "You said it was only a blessing…"
"A blessing," Taiyi replied gently, "can also be a contingency."
---
He placed the lotus seed beside the Red Armillary Sash.
Light curled between them at once—thin and bright, like two parts of the same whole recognizing each other across a chasm of sorrow. The shimmer from the sash steadied. The lotus seed brightened. For a moment, the hall felt less like a tomb and more like an intake of breath.
Madam Yin pressed her hand to her lips, holding back a sound that was half sob, half prayer.
Li Jing stepped closer, voice low but trembling. "Daoren… is resurrection even possible?"
Taiyi looked down at the seed and the sash. Weariness lay deep in his eyes—the weariness of someone who knew the cost of defying Heaven, and had already decided to pay it.
"His spirit has not scattered," Taiyi said. "Only dissolved. It lingers in the imprint this sash holds—the sash that was born with him, that carried his essence from his first breath. It waits for a vessel that can bear its fire."
He laid two fingers upon the lotus seed.
It flared—sudden, warm, white light flooding the hall and throwing their shadows long against the walls.
"I gave your family this seed for this very reason," Taiyi continued. "Not because I foresaw his death—" his voice wavered, just once "—but because I feared the world would demand it."
Madam Yin's knees weakened. Li Jing caught her by the shoulders, his own eyes burning but dry.
Taiyi closed his hand over the lotus seed and the sash together, binding warmth to warmth, memory to promise, origin to origin.
"When a child seeks freedom," he murmured, voice now edged with iron, "Heaven calls it rebellion."
He lifted his gaze, and for the first time since he had entered, the air around him felt like a storm about to turn.
"But I," Taiyi said, "call it truth."
He turned toward the doorway, his robe sweeping the floor like a tide reversing its course.
"Prepare yourselves," he said. The master had returned. "The resurrection of Nezha begins now."
As he left the hall, the lantern flames bowed low, bending in the wake of his passage—as if even the light acknowledged the defiance of a teacher who refused to let his student be erased.
---