The first winter after Li Mei's death came in quietly.
No storm like the one that had taken her voice away piece by piece.
No screaming wind, no snow flung sideways against the walls.
Just colder mornings. Longer shadows. And the strange way sound seemed thinner inside the house, as if even echoes refused to linger.
Life in the Li house didn't get better.
It just kept going.
Li Shen woke before dawn most days now.
Not because he wanted to.
Because the sound of stone striking steel in the next room had become a command. The first sharp tchik of flint on metal carried through the thin wall and hooked into his bones the same way his mother's voice once had.
He lay there a moment in the dark, eyes open, watching nothing. Then he pushed off the quilt, the cold slapping his skin awake, and shuffled out.
His father was crouched by the hearth, shoulders rounded, hands steady. Sparks jumped, caught in the dry grass, and then a tongue of orange threaded up, licking at the chopped wood.
"Bucket," Li Heng said, without looking back.
Li Shen took the bucket.
Outside, the air bit hard enough to sting his teeth. Frost filmed the hard-packed ground, crunching under bare feet. Smoke rose in thin grey lines from a few other roofs; most houses were still dark, windows blank.
The path to the well was muscle-memory now.
He passed the spot where his mother had once stopped to catch her breath and pretend it was only to fix his collar. The memory flickered, dulled by overuse. He did not slow.
Old He was already at the well, rope in hand, scarf wrapped twice around her thin neck.
"You're early," she said.
"You too," he answered.
"Old people don't sleep," she snorted. "We just close our eyes and argue with our bones."
The bucket hit the water with a hollow splash. She watched him while she hauled it back up, eyes narrowing at his wrists, the way they showed sharp under skin, and at the new hardness around his mouth.
"You eating?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Enough?"
He hesitated a heartbeat too long.
"Enough," he said again.
"Hm." She squinted. "Your father still alive?"
"Yes."
"Good. Give him this."
She fished a small bundle from her basket and shoved it into his free hand. Later, he'd unwrap it to find nothing grand: some strips of dried root, a pinch of something bitter that clung to his fingers.
"Boil it with his porridge," Old He said. "His back's about to give up before his brain does."
"He won't like it," Li Shen said.
"He doesn't have to like it," she replied. "He has to keep walking."
That was the shape of the advice people gave them now, in a dozen different forms.
Keep walking.
Keep working.
Keep breathing.
Nobody finished the sentence:
Because if either of you stops, the other one dies.
They survived the winter.
Not comfortably. Not cleanly.
But they crawled through it and came out the other side.
There were days when the porridge was closer to hot water than food. Days when Li Shen's hands split and bled from hauling wood, scrubbing tools, dragging sacks. Days when his father came home moving like someone under a load no one could see, every step careful, as if the ground might break.
They didn't speak about whether they could keep going.
They just did.
At night, when the fire sank to red embers and the house went dim, Li Heng would sometimes sit at the table and stare at nothing. His hands, however, still moved: checking the smoothness of a hoe handle, mending a strap, turning a blade toward the light to judge the edge.
From his mat, half-curled under a worn blanket, Li Shen watched the silhouette of his father's back and felt something twisted grow inside his chest.
He remembered that day his father had forced the bowl into his hands.
I am walking because if I stop, you die.
He hated that sentence.
But he couldn't un-hear it. So he started to wrap his own words around it, clumsy and unsteady.
If you're walking so I can live, then while I'm alive, I have to walk too.
It wasn't yet a belief. Just a thought with teeth. But it made his feet swing off the mat when the flint cracked in the dark.
He carried water.
He chopped kindling while his father took the thicker logs.
He patched the lean-to roof with numb fingers before the snow settled.
He took small day-jobs when Li Heng's back was too tight to work extra fields.
"Boy works like there's a debt chasing him," Old Wu muttered once, watching him haul a sack that bowed his shoulders.
"There is," Li Heng said. "Food doesn't appear out of pity."
They didn't talk about it later at home. They never said the word "debt" where Li Mei's name might hear it.
They didn't need to.
The day of the first anniversary came with clear skies.
The air was sharp, but the sun sat pale and high, a thin disc behind a veil of cold. Frost outlined every blade of dead grass, every crack in the path. From one of the far houses, a dog barked at something only it could sense.
Li Shen woke before the flint this time.
He didn't know the number of days that had passed. He hadn't scratched them into the wall or tied knots into a cord. But his body knew. The date sat on his ribs like a weight.
His father moved through the morning as usual: fire, water, something warm in their stomachs. Then, instead of reaching for his tools, Li Heng opened a small cloth bundle he'd set aside the night before.
Inside lay a flat cake made from their best flour and a few dried wildflowers, flattened and colourless.
"Put on your coat," he said.
They left the village without a word.
The burial ground lay just beyond the last houses, where the land rose slightly and the soil drained better. Low mounds broke the frost in uneven humps. Some had carved stones. Most had wood. Some had nothing but a rock to mark where one life ended and the rest went on.
Li Mei's grave sat on a small rise, a little apart. Old He had jabbed her stick at the ground there and said, "She hated mud. This place is less offended by rain."
The mound was settled now, the earth sunken in and firm. A single stone stood at its head, plain, uncarved. They had talked once, briefly, about saving for characters. Then Li Heng had muttered, "She'd scold us for wasting grain on a stone," and that was the end of it.
Li Heng went ahead the last few steps and knelt stiffly.
He unwrapped the cloth, set the cake on the stone, and pushed the dried stems into the soil with calloused fingers.
"Waste of flour," he said, almost by habit.
Then, more quietly, "You always said offerings should be eaten by the living."
He fell silent.
Li Shen stood beside him, hands hidden in his sleeves, eyes fixed on the hump of earth.
One year.
A whole year since the night the house had gone truly quiet.
A year of mornings without her humming over the fire.
A year of evenings without her complaining about Wu's stinginess or laughing with Old He.
A year of never hearing, "Let me see that," as she reached over his shoulder to correct a crooked number.
He had expected, somewhere in the fog after her death, that time would blur the edges. That if he waited long enough, the hurt would dull on its own.
It hadn't.
The hole she'd left hadn't closed. It had just collected other things around it: the memory of his father's rough hand shoving a bowl at him, the ache in his shoulders after long days, the chill of water on his wrists in the dark.
"Mother," he said.
The word felt heavy in his throat. He didn't use it much anymore; it scraped on the way out.
"We're…" He stopped, swallowed, tried again. "We're still here."
It sounded ridiculous as soon as he said it, but he couldn't take it back.
"We didn't fall apart," he added, softer.
Beside him, Li Heng let out a breath that might have been a laugh if it hadn't sounded so tired.
"No," his father said. "We didn't."
He didn't bow. He didn't fold his hands. He just stood, then rose slowly until his knees popped, eyes never leaving the mound.
"You spent a lot of strength on us," he said, as if speaking to the dirt itself. "On him, especially."
Li Shen's head jerked, but his father didn't look over.
"I won't say we used it well," Li Heng went on. "But we aren't throwing it away, either."
He reached out, brushed the top of the stone with one fingertip. A gesture so small the wind nearly erased it.
"I keep walking," he said. "He does too. That's what I can tell you."
The cold held the words in place for a beat.
They stayed there a little longer, not enough to freeze, not enough to turn it into a ritual with rules. Just long enough for Li Shen's toes to go numb, for his breath to settle into something steady.
He wanted to promise more.
To say, I'll become strong, I'll never let this happen again, I'll tear power out of the world if that's what it takes.
But each promise he tried on felt oversized, like a borrowed coat. He couldn't see the path from this small patch of frost to anything like that, and he had learned the hard way that saying things didn't make them real.
So he settled for something smaller, something he could at least try to pay.
"I'll keep working," he said, barely above a whisper. "I won't waste what you gave."
It sounded childish and too heavy at once.
Still, when he spoke it, something in his chest shifted. Not relief. Not healing. Just a slight change in how the pain sat.
Li Heng turned to him then, reading his face for a moment.
"Good," he said. "Let's go. The wood doesn't chop itself."
Coming from him, it was as good as a blessing.
They walked back with the low winter sun on their backs. Behind them, the mound remained—a small bump of dark earth under a thin skin of frost, watching nothing, needing nothing.
Spring came late.
The frost clung to the edges of the fields long after it should have retreated. When it did melt, it left behind patches of stubborn ice that lingered in the shadows while the rest turned to mud.
Sowing was heavier than usual.
The soil resisted the hoe, clumped around the seeds, held too much water one week and not enough the next. People grumbled at the well, voices tight.
"Too much cold," a man said. "The earth's sulking."
"The earth always sulks," Old He replied. "That's why we beat it with tools instead of talking nicely."
The seeds went in anyway.
The shoots came up, thin and brave.
Li Shen watched them with the same wary distance he now reserved for hope. He had seen what happened to living things that tried hard and still lost.
He and his father worked from grey dawn until the light bled out.
Their patch of land was small, but every strip had to pull its weight if they wanted to stay ahead of hunger. When other fields needed hands and coin changed hands for a day's labour, Li Heng went if his back allowed. If it didn't, Li Shen went in his place.
He came home most nights with arms trembling and legs heavy, shirt glued to his spine with sweat.
"Skin and sticks," the owner of one field snorted once, watching him try to lift a sack that should have taken two. "But he doesn't fall over. I'll give him that."
"Sticks can still hold up a roof," Li Heng said.
At the end of the day, they didn't count coins.
There were never enough to be worth counting.
They counted sacks.
Grain eaten. Grain left. Grain promised to others. Grain needed for seed.
One evening, as they sat in the dim flicker of the hearth, Li Heng studied the three sacks huddled in the corner like exhausted men.
"Medicine chewed through more than we had," he said.
He didn't look at his son when he said medicine. He didn't look at the empty corner where a pallet had once been.
"It kept her longer," Li Shen said.
It wasn't a defence of medicine. It was a refusal to let her suffering be catalogued only as loss.
His father nodded once.
"It bought time," he said.
He rubbed at the bridge of his nose with rough fingers.
"Time costs."
There was no anger in it, no accusation. Just the blunt accounting of a man who had accepted the trade and would now live with the numbers.
Li Shen followed his gaze back to the sacks.
He imagined them empty. Imagined winter sidling in again with its thin light and hard ground, and no buffer between them and hunger. Imagined Old Wu's sharp eyes watching their stores drop, the small talk turning into offers to "help" that would come with hooks buried deep.
"We'll make it," he said, more out of refusal than conviction.
Li Heng didn't answer right away.
"If the harvest holds," he said at last. "If my back doesn't break. If your legs keep moving."
Three ifs. Two people.
Even at his age, Li Shen understood how thin that margin was.
The name of Han entered their house in passing.
At the well, a woman cursed as the rope burned her fingers.
"Old Han's shouting again," she said. "Says he's short on hands this year. Says the field ate two of his sons and half his patience."
"His patience was small to begin with," Old He muttered. "Field didn't have much to chew on."
The woman laughed, then leaned on the well's stone edge.
"He's hiring boys," she went on. "Any village on this side of the river. Two seasons' work for grain. Says he'll feed them, work them, and send them back heavier if they don't break."
"Big words," someone else sniffed.
"He has big fields," the woman shot back. "And more mouths than he can fill alone."
The talk drifted into other complaints. People left with their buckets, with their gossip, with their worries.
The words stayed with Li Shen.
Two seasons.
Grain.
That night, after they had eaten, after Li Heng had checked the tools and stretched his aching back, they sat at the table with the fire painting shadows on the wall.
The sacks in the corner seemed smaller.
"Father," Li Shen said.
"Hm."
"We won't have enough for next winter," he said. "Even if the harvest is decent."
Li Heng's jaw tightened.
"No," he admitted. "We won't."
"We could borrow," Li Shen said, though his stomach twisted at the idea.
"We could," his father said flatly. "Then spend years paying it back—with work on other people's land, and favours, and bowing when we don't want to."
He shook his head.
"I don't like owing people who smile with their teeth covered."
He didn't have to say Wu for both of them to see the man's face.
Silence settled between them.
Li Shen pressed his nails into the rough wood of the table.
"Old Han needs workers," he said.
His father's eyes lifted.
"You heard that at the well," he said.
"Yes."
"He pays in grain," Li Shen went on. "Two seasons. If I work hard, it's more than we could ever pull out of these strips alone."
"You," Li Heng repeated, slowly. "You think Han wants a boy from a poor row of houses?"
"I'm not a baby," Li Shen snapped, heat rising uninvited to his face. "I cut wood, I carry water, I keep up in other people's fields."
"You're still a boy," his father said quietly.
"So were you," Li Shen shot back, "the first time you worked someone else's land."
The words hung between them, sharp. He regretted them the moment they were out, but he didn't take them back.
"If I stay," he went on, forcing his voice level, "we'll watch those sacks empty and pretend it surprised us. If I go, we get more grain. You don't have to break your back doing every extra day."
He hesitated.
"And if we end up borrowing and can't pay, we drag other people into it," he said. "I don't want that."
He thought of his mother's face when she'd spoken about debts. The way she'd said, "Owing the wrong person can cost more than money."
Li Heng studied him for a long time.
"You've been thinking about this," he said.
"Yes."
His father looked away, gaze tracking back to the sacks, then to the door, then back to his son.
"Han works his own like beasts," he said. "He doesn't waste blows, but he doesn't believe in soft days."
"I don't either," Li Shen said.
For once, the words didn't feel borrowed.
Li Heng exhaled through his nose. It wasn't resignation. It wasn't approval. It was something in between, forged out of necessity.
"All right," he said. "We'll talk to Han."
"We?" Li Shen echoed.
"You think I'm letting you walk to that bourgade alone?" his father snorted. "I'm tired, not stupid."
Something behind Li Shen's ribs eased.
He hadn't realised how much he'd braced for a flat refusal, or worse, for a careless yes that would have meant, Do what you want, I don't care.
"Tomorrow," Li Heng said. "Or the day after. Before the planting's too far gone."
He pushed back his stool. His knees cracked.
"Sleep," he said. "You'll need it."
Li Shen lay down, but sleep didn't come with him.
Going to Han meant leaving.
Not forever—two seasons wasn't a lifetime—but long enough to matter. Long enough for his father to eat alone. Long enough for the house to feel even more hollow than it already did.
He imagined the evenings: his father sitting by the fire, bowl in hand, staring at the opposite wall where nobody would sit. The air feeling one body short.
He imagined the burial ground just outside the village, the small mound on the rise.
Since the day they'd shaped that earth over her, his mother had not moved a single step. It felt wrong that he would.
The thought of turning his back on that patch of ground, even for a while, made his stomach knot. It felt like abandoning her a second time. First by failing to save her. Now by walking away.
He stared at the ceiling.
If he stayed, they risked watching hunger peel the house down to its bones. If he went, he left his father and his mother's grave behind for the sake of a few more sacks.
Between the two, only one choice did anything to keep what was left alive.
The knot in his chest didn't loosen, but it settled into a shape he could at least name.
Before he talked to Han, before he took one step toward the bourgade, there was someone he had to face.
Not a neighbour. Not his father.
The woman who had stretched the last of her life just to buy them a little more time.
Tomorrow, he thought, closing his eyes on the dim glow of the embers.
Tomorrow, before anything else—
I go to her grave.