By the time the wind turned sharp enough to make the roofs creak at night, the change in the Li house could be measured in chores.
Not in screams. Not in blood. In buckets.
"Take the water," Li Mei said one morning, tying her hair back with fingers that moved just a fraction slower than they used to. "The well is complaining we don't visit enough."
She lifted one bucket, then set it down again almost immediately.
"I'll do both," Li Shen said quickly. "You can… you should… rest."
She clicked her tongue. "If I rest every time you look at me like a cracked bowl, I'll never get anything done."
But she pushed the second bucket toward him with her foot instead of her hand.
"Take one," she said. "If you don't spill today, we'll discuss you earning the right to carry two tomorrow. Maybe."
He gripped the rope so hard it bit into his skin.
"You always carry one," he muttered.
"I carried one before you were big enough to drown in the well," she said dryly. "Now that you can argue with the sky, you can argue with a bucket too."
He hesitated.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
She rolled her eyes and leaned briefly against the doorframe as if the wood were an old friend.
"If I fall down dead while you're gone, I promise I'll wait for you before I start haunting the stove," she said. "Go. Before your father comes back and steals your job."
He went.
Outside, the air had that particular bite that said the season was thinking about turning. The sky was a hard, pale blue. The fields beyond the village looked tired.
At the well, the usual knot of children had gathered, their voices fogging the air with half-breathed stories.
"Your mother's not here?" Qian Mei spotted the difference immediately.
"She sent me," Li Shen said.
Zhou Liang spread his arms theatrically. "Look at him. A man now. Next thing you know, he'll be lecturing Old Wu about interest."
"I don't know what that is," Da Niu said.
"It's when Old Wu pretends he's doing you a favor while he takes more," Qian Mei answered.
Li Shen lowered the bucket. The rope hissed through the pulley, rough against his palms. The bucket hit the water with a hollow splash, sending up the echoing smell of damp stone and old wishes.
"Is she sick?" one of the younger boys asked, wide-eyed. "My mother says people only stop coming to the well if they're sick or dead, and she's not dead, so—"
"She's tired," Li Shen cut in, sharper than he meant. "She's been doing this longer than all of us."
A few of the kids exchanged glances.
"Tired" was the kind of word adults used when they didn't want to say something else out loud.
He hauled the bucket up. The weight dragged at his arms. Water sloshed over the side and splattered his trousers.
"Don't spill," he muttered to himself. "Don't spill. Don't—"
The bucket reached the lip of the well. He dragged it toward him, muscles burning.
"Careful," Qian Mei said quietly.
He got it onto the stones without dropping it. His shoulders ached.
"You see?" Zhou Liang announced. "Our village's future sect leader. Look at those arms."
"I thought you were going to be the sect leader," Da Niu said.
"I changed my mind," Zhou Liang replied. "Leaders have to get up early."
Li Shen didn't answer. He wrapped the rope neatly, picked up the bucket and started back toward home.
Halfway there, his grip slipped. For a heartbeat the bucket tilted wild, water surging.
He tightened his fingers until his knuckles hurt and saved it.
When he stepped back into the house, breath steaming slightly in the cold, his mother was exactly where he'd left her—by the stove, one hand on the rim of the pot, the other braced on the table.
"Still alive," she said. "You're disappointed?"
He set the bucket down more roughly than he meant.
"It's heavy," he said. He hated how it sounded—like a complaint.
"That means there's water in it," she replied. "That's better than the opposite."
She crossed the room to lift it.
For a moment, the movement looked like every other morning of his life. Then his eyes caught the tiny tremor in her fingers when she gripped the handle. The way her lips pressed together when she straightened.
It was gone by the time the bucket hit the stand.
"You're breathing harder," he said before he could stop himself.
She drew in a long breath through her nose, then let it out slowly.
"I just sprinted across a whole three steps," she said. "My body is shocked by such recklessness."
He didn't smile.
Her gaze softened. "Shen."
"I'm just asking," he muttered.
"And I'm just not collapsing on the floor," she said. "We're both doing amazing things today."
She turned back to the stove. He stood there a moment longer, then went to fetch kindling because it was that or stand and choke on his own questions.
Behind him, she coughed once into her sleeve.
A small sound. Controlled. He heard it anyway.
---
The coughs had begun as rare visitors.
Now they were tenants.
Not constant. Not yet. But regular enough that the house had started to learn their shape.
During the day, Li Mei swallowed them when she could, turning them into little throat clears, disguised bursts of air. At night, when she thought he was asleep, they came deeper. Longer. Dragging at the silence.
Some days, she moved like she always had. She laughed, she scolded, she gossiped with neighbors in the market strip. On those days, Li Shen's fear felt stupid, like someone expecting a storm because a leaf had twitched.
Other days, the mere act of kneading dough left a sheen of sweat on her skin.
Those days stuck in his memory.
---
The first time Li Heng mentioned a doctor, it was over porridge.
The bowl in front of him was the same cheap clay as always. The porridge was the same watery mix. The only difference was that Li Mei had not finished hers.
She pushed it away after a few slow bites. Her face was calm; her breathing was not.
"You need to eat," Li Heng said.
"So you can go fight the field with the strength of two people?" she said lightly. "No. One is enough. You'll scare the soil."
He didn't rise to it.
"There's a doctor in Han," he said instead. "Passing through. Staying at the inns by the market road."
"The bourgade?" she repeated. "That one charges people just to walk on its dust."
"He treated a merchant's son," Li Heng said. "Pulled him back from a fever that had already taken his mind. That's what they say, anyway."
"'That's what they say' also claims Old Wu was handsome once," Li Mei replied.
He stared at her, unamused.
"If he can help, he helps," he said. "If he can't, we know the truth and stop pretending Old He's roots will turn to miracles."
"We don't have the money," she shot back.
"I'll make it," he replied.
"How?" she asked. "Convince the field to grow coins? Marry Old Wu's beans?"
"I'll work for the next village more," he said. "Their terraces still need rebuilding after the last rain. Their sons are as useful as damp straw. And there's talk of hauling stone for a new shed near Han. They need backs."
"You already go there," she said quietly. "You already work our field, their field, and half of Wu's stones when he feels generous. How much back do you think you have?"
"Enough," he said.
His tone was flat, final, the same tone he used when he told a stubborn mule to move and it eventually moved.
Li Shen stared between them.
He'd heard of Han, of course. Traders spoke of it, the children used its name when they wanted to sound like they knew the world: When I go to Han, I'll buy… as if simply saying it made it possible.
He had never thought of it as a place where his mother's lungs might be weighed and priced.
"Are town doctors better than Old He?" he asked.
"In theory," Li Heng said.
Old He seemed to materialize in his head even when she wasn't physically in the room.
"In theory?" Li Mei repeated.
"In theory," Li Heng said. "They have books. Tools. They charge even when they fail, which means sometimes they don't or they'd be in a ditch by now."
She almost smiled at that.
"Listen to yourself," she said. "You're so angry you sound clever."
"Eat," he said again. "You can argue on the road if you must."
Her hand tightened around her spoon.
"I don't want to limp all the way to Han just to sit in front of some clean robe and hear what I already hear from Old He," she said. "That it's in my chest, that it's deep, that we'll see."
"If that's all he says, we wasted a day," he answered. "If he says more, we needed to hear it."
She looked at him for a long, unreadable moment.
"Finish your porridge," she said finally. "Both of you. My stomach is already tired of being the center of this conversation."
She didn't say no. She didn't say yes.
The decision settled between them like another log waiting to be chopped.
---
Old He started coming by even when no one had gone to fetch her.
Once, she arrived with a bundle of herbs under one arm and a small clay pot under the other.
"I hear you want to pay a stranger in Han to tell you you're mortal," she said without preamble, stepping into the house like she owned it. "You're richer than I thought."
"We haven't gone," Li Heng said.
"Good," she replied. "Walking that far just to hear your lungs have opinions is a waste of knees."
She set the pot on the table and unwrapped the herbs, her fingers moving with brisk precision.
"Sit," she told Li Mei. "Breathe."
"I've been doing that my whole life," Li Mei muttered, but she obeyed.
Old He pressed her ear to Li Mei's back, listening. Her hands found ribs, traced lines along bones. She tapped lightly at certain spots.
"You sound like reed pipes someone stepped on," the old woman said.
"That's poetic," Li Mei replied. "Do you practice these compliments or do they come naturally?"
"They fall out," Old He said. "Open your mouth."
She pushed a wooden spoon between Li Mei's lips and peered at her tongue.
"Tired blood," she grunted. "Damp in the chest. Cold deep in."
"That's three problems," Li Mei said. "Can I exchange them for one big one instead?"
"No," Old He said. "Now you get four. You talk too much."
Li Shen hovered near the doorway, hands fisted.
"Can you fix it?" he asked.
Old He's eyes cut to him.
"I can help," she said. "I can poke, boil, curse, and feed her things that will make her wish she were dead. I can push back. I can buy you days, maybe months, if Heaven is half-asleep."
"That's not a cure," he said.
"No," she agreed. "It isn't."
He felt anger prickle hot under his skin.
"What good is medicine if it can't fix things?" he demanded.
"What good is a bucket if it doesn't turn the river into a field?" she shot back. "It doesn't fix the world. It lets you carry what you can, while you can. That's all."
Li Mei's mouth quirked.
"Don't yell at him," she said. "He's right to be angry. If you could fix everything, I'd be taller and rich."
"You'd still be insolent," Old He said. "No medicine for that."
She began to measure herbs into the pot.
"Listen, boy," she went on without looking at him. "There are three kinds of sickness. The kind that leaves on its own if you feed and rest it. The kind that leaves if you grab it by the throat with medicine. And the kind that moves in and starts putting its bowls on your shelf no matter what you do."
"And my mother's?" Li Shen forced out.
Old He's jaw worked.
"In these parts we call it chest rot, sometimes," she said. "The doctors from the bigger towns have a fancier name. Pale Wind sickness. They say the wind here chews at the lungs year after year until something tears."
"'Pale Wind'?" he echoed.
"It's their way of saying it's the land's fault, not theirs," she snorted. "They write about it in books. Rare in people as young as her, but when it bites deep, it doesn't let go."
"Incurable?" he asked.
Her silence was answer enough.
"I can slow it," she said finally. "I can make the breath less sharp, the nights less long. I can't promise she lives to see you with a beard."
His throat closed up.
"But there's a doctor in Han," he said. "Father said. He saved someone. He—"
"He might have better tools to slow it," Old He cut in. "He might know tricks I don't. If he tells you he can wash Pale Wind out of lungs that have carried it this long, he's lying or he wants to see how many coins your father will bleed."
"That's—" he began.
"Enough," Li Mei said sharply.
He bit down on his tongue.
Old He poured water into the pot and set it over the fire.
"You'll drink this twice a day," she said. "You'll rest when you can. You won't stand in the wind pretending you're not cold because you like to win stupid arguments with the weather."
"Yes, elder," Li Mei said mockingly.
Old He slapped her lightly on the back of the head.
"And you," she told Li Heng, "will stop treating your body like it's spare rope. If you break, I'll have to listen to two idiots wheeze on my floor instead of one."
He grunted, which in his language could have meant "I understand" or "The field annoys me" or "Thank you."
When Old He left, she paused in the doorway and looked back at Li Shen.
"Medicine is not a promise," she said. "It's a chance. Don't confuse the two. It will hurt less later."
He didn't answer.
He didn't trust his voice not to crack.
---
The decoctions were foul.
They smelled like damp leaves that had decided to rot slowly out of spite. They tasted worse.
Li Mei drank them anyway.
"Why is your face doing that?" Li Shen asked the first time, watching her throat work.
"Because I'm still alive," she said hoarsely. "Dead people don't get to complain."
He tried a sip once, just to see.
The bitterness hit the back of his tongue and exploded like paint in his nose.
He gagged.
"How do you drink this every day?" he choked.
"By remembering I'd rather stay and annoy you a little longer," she said. "Now stop stealing my medicine. Old He will charge us twice if she hears."
The decoctions helped.
Some days.
The coughs eased. Her breath came a little easier. She moved through the house almost like before, humming tunelessly as she worked, slapping his hand away from the pot when he tried to sneak a taste.
On those days, hope grew in him like a weed, fast and stubborn.
See? he told himself. It's working. Old He knows what she's doing. Father will get extra work, we'll bring the doctor from Han if we have to, he'll have more herbs, better ones. This isn't forever. This is just a dip.
Then the other days came.
The days when the decoction didn't seem to reach far enough inside.
When she had to rest halfway between the stove and the table.
When a simple laugh turned into a cough that bent her double.
One night, the coughs wouldn't stop.
Li Shen woke to the sound—deep, scraping, tearing at the quiet.
He pushed himself up, heart thudding.
Through the thin wall, he heard his mother struggling for air, the coughs riding one another, piling up.
"Breathe," his father's voice said, low and steady. "In. Out. Slowly. Follow me."
It sounded like he was talking to a spooked horse.
"I… can't…" Li Mei rasped. The sound frightened him more than the coughs.
He swung his legs off his mat, ready to stumble into their room, wall be damned.
He stopped with his hand on the curtain.
Going in wouldn't add air to her lungs. It would just add his face to the problem.
He stood there, sweating cold in the dark, while the coughing fit ran its course.
Eventually, it eased. Her breaths lengthened, though each one sounded like it had to climb over something.
"I'm fine," she whispered.
"You're not," Li Heng said.
"I'm… better than a moment ago," she corrected.
There was a pause.
"If it keeps up like that, I'm going to Han," he said. "I'll drag that travelling doctor back by his belt if I have to."
"I don't want you trading your back for a chance to be told it's 'Pale Wind' and nothing to be done," she said, voice thin.
"If that's the trade, we'll make it," he answered.
Another pause.
"What if he can't do anything?" she asked, small now. Li Shen had never heard her sound like that before. Not even when Wu had tried to cheat them, not when a year's crop had almost washed away.
"Then I will have proof to hate him properly," Li Heng said. "And I'll bring you home, and Old He will tell us the same thing with better curses."
Silence again.
He heard cloth shift. He could picture it: his father sitting rigid, his mother propped up on the mat, both of them staring into the dark as if there was something there they could bargain with.
"I don't want him to see me like that," she said after a while. "Hooked up to strangers' hands. Listening to words he won't understand."
"Him?" Li Heng repeated.
"Shen," she said. "He already watches me like the house might fall if I sit down too long. If he sees… if they say…"
Her voice trailed off.
Li Shen pressed his forehead against the wall.
"I'm not made of glass," he whispered to it.
No one heard.
"You think he doesn't understand now?" Li Heng asked quietly. "He listens to every cough like it's a bell toll."
"I know," she said. "That's what scares me."
The bed creaked.
"If Heaven wants to take you," he said, "it will have to go through me, Old He, and this doctor from Han first."
"Poor Heaven," she murmured. "So much trouble just for one stubborn woman."
Her breathing slowly evened out. Not quite normal. But less desperate.
After a long time, Li Heng lay down again.
Li Shen stayed where he was until his legs went numb, then crawled back to his mat.
He didn't sleep right away.
In the dark, he stared at the ceiling and felt something hardening in his chest, grain by grain.
Old He's words replayed in his head: Medicine is a chance, not a promise. The doctor in Han might stretch that chance. He would not erase the word Pale from the name of the sickness chewing at his mother.
It wasn't enough.
He didn't know what would be enough. Only that whatever it was, he didn't have it.
Not yet.
He curled his hand into a fist against his chest.
One day, he told himself. One day, I won't have to listen like this and do nothing. One day, I'll have something in my hands that actually changes things. Not just buys time. Not just helps.
He didn't know that on that "one day" he'd be deep underground with needles in his flesh and Qi trying to tear him apart.
Right now, he only knew that the world had become a scale he couldn't stand:
On one side, a bucket, some herbs, his father's back, Old He's pot, a rumoured doctor in Han.
On the other, his mother's breath.
It didn't feel like a fair fight.
Outside, the Pale Wind scraped along the walls, carrying with it the smell of cold earth and distant fields.
Inside the little house, the weight of small things—buckets, bowls, spoons, coughs—pressed down on a boy who was starting to understand just how big the word powerless could be.