"I bestow thee this gift, as proof of the love and mercy I hold for you."
The woman who spoke wore robes the color of old parchment, frayed at the hem from centuries no calendar could measure. She knelt before the golden bowl, her reflection showing on the surface of water. Her hair was the grey of cold ash and white, something you typically see with the elderly, yet her skin held the smoothness of someone who had never aged a single day past twenty. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and rough at the edges — and yet it carried the particular weight that belongs only to those who have judged a thousand lives and never once been wrong.
She was the one mortals prayed to when they had run out of other gods to blame. The one who forgave the broken-hearted and the foolish, and who judged without mercy for those who built their lives on other people's suffering. Men called her many names across many tongues. She answered to all of them, and to none.
Tonight, she was not here to judge.
She lifted her sleeves, dipped two fingers into the still water, and watched the surface ripple outward in slow, widening rings. The reflection trapped within it flashed a different picture — a young woman's face, slack and unmoving, machines breathing for her in a hospital bed in a city of nine million strangers — distorted, scattered into light, and dissolved into clear, empty water.
"You loved without being loved back, in the life before this one," the goddess murmured, more to herself than to the soul she addressed. "You forgave too easily, and trusted where trust was never earned, and it cost you everything. I could not undo what was done to you. But I can give you eyes that see what others cannot — so that this time, you will know exactly who stands beside you, and who only wears a kind face."
She paused. Far below her, in a world she could touch only through water and dust, a heart that had not beaten properly in three hundred and twelve days gave one slow, deliberate thud.
"It is not only a gift," she added quietly, almost like an apology. "It is also a debt. The dead will find you now, child, whether you wish it or not, and some of them will want more from you than you can safely give. But you were always too soft to refuse a person in pain — even in your last life, even when it broke you."
The goddess withdrew her hand. The water stilled into a mirror so perfectly clear it looked solid.
"This time," she whispered, eyes still fixed on that vanishing reflection, "I wish thee happiness."
The golden bowl went dark, and somewhere in the waking world, Ding Jia's eyes flew open.