Days passed. Kell meditated beneath the cherry tree, breathed the mountain's sacred air, followed every technique Fuzi had ever described—and nothing came.
No flow. No spark. No change.
Just silence.
He screamed once—into the void of morning—then quickly apologized to no one.
Fuzi watched without comment.
Another day passed. Kell sat on a rock at the edge of the waterfall, hands trembling not from cold, but from frustration.
"I've cracked the wall," he muttered. "Why won't anything move?"
There was no arrogance in his voice. Only despair.
Fuzi sat across from him, folding his legs slowly. He poured tea into the snow, letting steam rise and vanish.
"Some walls," he said, "do not crumble when touched. They… listen first. They wait for the right word."
"I've spoken everything I know," Kell replied. "In every language I have."
Fuzi was quiet.
Then his eyes narrowed—not at Kell, but somewhere far beyond the cliffs. A wind shifted, though no storm stirred.
"...Strange," he murmured.
Kell looked up.
Fuzi didn't explain at first. He just stared at the horizon—through it, really—as if searching for something that was no longer part of the world.
"A long time ago," Fuzi whispered, "there was someone… a wanderer. He never used the methods taught to him. Never bowed to technique. But he cultivated as if the world itself bent to meet him."
Kell listened, still and breathless.
"I never understood what he did. I only saw the afterimages of his steps." Fuzi's voice became distant. "They left imprints. Not on the ground… but on the wind."
A shadow flickered across his face—not of fear, but memory. Painful. Familiar.
He stood abruptly.
"Rest," he said. "We'll try again tomorrow. But not the same way."
As he walked away, he muttered—perhaps to himself, perhaps to the ghost of that shadow:
"He breathed… through the world."
Kell didn't understand.
But the snow that fell that night felt different.
Not colder.
Quieter...