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Chapter Fifteen : The Seeding
Dr. Wei traveled alone.
No team. No announcement. No luggage, aside from a soft leather satchel that held nothing that hummed or blinked. He carried no electronics and no badge. He had only a folded train schedule written in pencil, and five black atomizers cradled in cloth like fragile seeds.
He had put symbols in wax on the vials, and something inside him told him to use each one only once. He would follow his impulse, knowing that somehow it would be enough.
His first stop was Beijing.
The train doors opened just before dawn, but the station’s emergency lights still blinked, casting sickly pulses down the corridor. A body was in the far corner, doubled over, face blotched. A masked paramedic sat beside him, unmoving, exhausted. There was no backup, no urgency. Just waiting for transport of yet another fatality in an unending stream.
Wei passed by, determined that this scene would not be carried out in this place again. He could not bring the dead back to life, but he could offer the still living something that moved more quietly.
He walked the rest of the way.
In the city, most shops were shuttered. Windows bore hand-scrawled signs, some hopeful, some grieving. The scent of disinfectant lingered near the hospitals, but farther from the center, it gave way to incense.
At a courtyard tucked behind the temple in Shichahai, the elder was waiting.
They sat together on a stone bench, drinking weak tea.
There were no introductions, no questions. Just two men, breathing the same thin air that still held traces of illness and ash.
Between them, sparrows picked at dropped grains beneath an empty offering table. A cluster of chrysanthemums wilted in a chipped vase, meant for someone’s grandfather.
Finally, the elder asked:
“Do you have something for the ancestors?”
Wei nodded.
He unfolded a piece of red paper and offered it with both hands. On it, a single character:
静 -- jìng-- stillness.
The elder tucked it into his sleeve.
“We lost five last week,” he said. “Three were my students. One of them was only six.”
Wei’s face didn’t change. But he bowed his head in acknowledgment. Not pity or shock, just respect.
“Tomorrow is Qingming,” the elder said. “We will sweep their graves with silence. It’s all we have left.”
Wei reached into his satchel and produced the atomizer. “This will carry,” he said. “Press it just once. Use it before sunrise, when the air is still, then give it away.”
The elder examined the vial, tested the weight in his hand, ran a finger across the wax. “What happens if someone sees me?”
“They won’t,” Wei said. “And if they do, they’ll think it’s nothing.”
The elder nodded slowly. “Mist as offering. Wind as priest.”
He tucked it away. “And if it changes us?”
“I hope it will,” Wei said.
They sat together a little longer, listening to the city hum through its grief.
That night, Wei returned to the lake.
Around him, the city coughed into dusk. Ambulances still moved, less often now that there were fewer for Death to choose from, but each siren cut sharper than before, not with panic, but with the weight of inevitability. Grief had been rehearsed too many times.
At the water’s edge, people gathered with food they could barely taste. A boy in a surgical mask held his sister’s hand too tightly. A woman lit three incense sticks and whispered the names of the dead into her coat.
Wei sat at a wooden table, marked with initials, slightly scorched on one corner. He rested a second atomizer beneath the bench, under a decorated cloth.
Someone would find it, and the symbols in wax would instruct them. He knew that someone would lift the cloth and see a tool. It was not only for survival, but also for remembering how to be human.
From his sleeve, he withdrew a third. He waited for the wind.
And when it came as a soft breath that stirred the lanterns and lifted a curl of ash from the sidewalk he pressed the atomiser once. The mist released with no sound, and a scent followed: almond, peppermint, and something warm like candle smoke and rain-wet wood.
People didn’t turn toward him, but they paused.
The little boy stopped fidgeting and his sister looked from the ground up to the stars.
The woman with the incense closed her eyes and smiled through her tears.
No one noticed the source, but they breathed deeper, and something shifted.
Only slightly. But enough.
