8.5 The Ripple of My Existence

I began to feel the heaviness on the second day.

It wasn't pain. It wasn't the threat of a beating, which I knew well enough to recognise. It was a pressure without a source, the kind that rises when the air in a room becomes too thick for the lungs to draw in.

It feels like the world is trying to swallow me, but finding I am too sharp to go down.

The Annex of Quiet Reflection, which was supposed to be a place of peace, began to feel like a boat rocking on choppy water.

People entering my chamber paused for half a heartbeat too long. Their eyes slid off me as if I were a shadow they couldn't quite focus on. Then, they would jerk back into motion, moving too fast, acting as if nothing had happened. They forgot to introduce themselves. Or worse, they introduced themselves twice, repeating the exact same greeting, with the exact same bow, unaware that they were walking in a circle.

The first crack in the world appeared with the tea.

It was mid-morning.

A young attendant entered. She placed a cup of jasmine tea on the low table, bowed with the practised grace of the palace-trained, and left.

I didn't drink it.

I sat as Mistress had taught me, breathing in the emptiness, letting the steam rise and vanish into the nothingness where my spirit should be.

Minutes later, the door opened again.

The maid entered again. She carried the same lacquer tray. She wore the same expression of polite servitude. She carried the exact same cup.

She walked to the table, her movements flowing like water, until her eyes landed on the tea that was already there.

She froze.

It wasn't the freeze of surprise. It was the freeze of a puppet whose strings had tangled. She looked at the cup in her hand, steam curling from the rim. Then she looked at the cup on the table, where the steam was curling in a pattern that looked identical.

Then she looked at me.

"I thought I’d already—" she began.

Then she stopped. Her brow furrowed, not in confusion, but in deep, aching pain. Her eyes glazed over.

The tea in her hand trembled, the fine china rattling against the wood of the tray.

I felt a spike of guilt.

I am doing this.

I don't know how, but I am breaking her.

"I’m still here," I said gently.

My voice seemed to cut the string.

"Yes," she replied, a strange, disjointed relief flooding her face. It was the relief of a sleepwalker being shaken awake. "Of course. I... the kitchen is slow today."

The excuse made no sense. It didn't have to. It just had to fill the silence.

She set the second cup down next to the first and left quickly, walking with the stiff, jerking gait of someone trying to hold a dream together with both hands.

I watched her go, something cold settling in my stomach. I looked at the two cups sitting side by side. They weren't just similar; they were the same.

The Heavens have stuttered.

"That keeps happening," I said later, as the shadows lengthened across the floor like dark fingers.

"Yes," Mistress replied from the shadows.

"They don’t remember me correctly."

"No," she corrected. "They remember you. But they cannot place you in the river of time. You are a stone that refuses to move with the current."

I absorbed that in silence.

The world is built on a story.

And I am a word that doesn't fit the sentence.

On the third day, the scholars came to measure the curse.

A team of watchers arrived, dressed in heavy robes. They didn't speak to me. They treated the room like a cave that might collapse at any moment.

They attempted a ritual of distance.

They marked the polished wooden floor with chalk. One pace. Two. Five. Ten. The white lines cut the serene beauty of the room into a grid, like a game board for giants.

Volunteers—junior disciples who looked hungry enough to do anything for extra rice—stepped forward one by one.

They stood at the chalk marks, whispering to a scribe who stood well back near the doorway. I couldn't hear what they said, but I saw the scribe's hand shaking as he wrote.

The first boy stood at ten paces. He looked at his hands, confused, rubbing his fingers together as if they were numb.

The second boy stood at five paces. He swayed, his eyes losing focus. He looked at me, then blinked rapidly, as if he had forgotten why he was standing there.

The third volunteer, a burly man who looked like he carried stone for a living, took one step too close.

He crossed the three-pace mark.

He didn't flinch. He didn't cry out. He simply stopped.

His breathing levelled out instantly. His posture lost its tension. He became a statue of flesh.

The scribe barked an order I couldn't catch.

The volunteer didn't answer. He stared at the space above my head.

"Speak!" the scribe shouted, his voice cracking.

The volunteer blinked slowly. It was a heavy, slow movement, like a lizard sunning itself on a rock. He moved his mouth, but the words were slow, dragging like heavy stones.

"It’s very quiet here," the volunteer whispered. "It’s so quiet that the noise of my blood is annoying."

I felt it then.

I flinched. I felt it not as an external force but as a sickness radiating outward from my own chest. It was subtle and uneven, a ripple in a pond. The closer people came to me, the harder it was for them to stay whole.

I pressed my hands together, hiding the tremor in my fingers.

"I don’t want to hurt them," I said quietly.

"You are not," Mistress replied.

"But something is."

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"The difference," she said. "The difference between what is real and what is you."

The guards rushed in, grabbing the volunteer by the arms and dragging him back. As soon as he crossed the chalk line, the volunteer gasped, shaking his head violently as if waking from a nightmare. He looked around wildly, saw me, and scrambled backward, crab-walking across the floor until his back hit the wall.

That was when fear entered the house.

I saw it in their eyes. Not panic. Panic is loud. This was something colder.

This is the look men give a bridge when they hear the wood crack beneath their feet.

The rules of my cage changed overnight.

I didn't need to read their reports to know what was happening.

Thick glass windows were added to the walls of the chamber. Workmen arrived and installed the reinforced panels in a single afternoon. They worked quickly, keeping their backs to me, refusing to look at the boy sitting in the centre of the room.

Now, the scholars stood behind the glass. They watched me like a fish in a bowl.

The guards changed, too. They stopped standing by the door. They stood further down the hall. And they rotated constantly. I would hear the shift change every hour—hurried whispers, the clinking of armour, men eager to leave.

They are afraid that if they stay too long, they will forget how to leave.

I am becoming a sinkhole.

By the fourth afternoon, the heavy silence of the room became too much. I walked into the garden attached to my chamber.

It was small, enclosed by high white walls that blocked the view of the city. It was meant to be a sanctuary. A perfect arrangement of rocks, moss, and stunted trees.

I walked to the centre near the koi pond. The water was still. Too still.

A sparrow fluttered down from the roof tiles. It was a small, brown thing, common and free. It landed on a stone lantern near my shoulder.

It looked at me. It tilted its head, a spark of simple life.

It opened its beak to chirp.

No sound came out.

The silence that followed was absolute. It wasn't just that the bird was quiet; it was that the song had been stolen before it could be born.

The bird remained there. Beak open. Wings half-spread.

It was frozen in a stutter of instinct.

It didn't fly away. It didn't finish the song. It just hovered on the edge of an action that could not complete itself in my presence.

The life in it has hit the wall of the void and simply ceased to be.

Life flows.

I am a dam.

I stood frozen, too. I stared at the bird, my chest heaving. I wanted to reach out, to touch it, to push it back into the flow of time.

But I knew that if I touched it, I might unmake it entirely.

I turned away, unable to look at the silent, broken thing. I walked back inside, closing the paper screens behind me, shutting out the garden that I had inadvertently paused.

"It feels like I’m standing still," I said to Mistress that evening.

I was sitting in the corner of the room, as far away from the door as possible. I was staring at the white wall, tracing the grain of the plaster with my eyes.

"And everything else is... adjusting," I whispered. "Like water moving around a stone. But the water is getting tired."

"That is containment," she said.

I turned to look at her. My face felt pale. The grime of the streets was gone, washed away by their baths, leaving me looking younger and more breakable than before.

"You said containment comes before violence," I said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because violence requires certainty," she replied. "You cannot strike what you cannot name. Containment is what the world does when it does not yet know what it is allowed to destroy."

I nodded slowly, letting the cold truth sink in.

"Are they going to name me?" I asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because the moment they do," she said, "they will believe they understand you."

"And then?"

"And then they will act. To name a weed is the first step in pulling it out."

I was quiet for a long time. The silence in the room deepened, heavy and thick. Outside, beyond the glass, I could sense the guards changing shift. They did it quickly, without speaking, swapping positions like men escaping a burning building.

Finally, I looked up. I felt the dark hunger beneath my skin.

"If this is containment..." I said softly. "Why does it feel like they are the ones being held still?"

Mistress did not answer.

Because that was the crack widening.

I had noticed the truth that the scholars were trying desperately to ignore.

Containment was supposed to lock me away from the world. Instead, it was showing how hard the world had to work just to keep making sense around me. The walls weren't keeping me in; they were barely keeping the reality out there from dissolving into me. The bolts, the wards, the glass—they were holding the Heavens together, not the boy.

The belief that this is solvable is thinning.

And once belief breaks, the knives come out.

That is always the order. First, they try to measure. Then, they try to cage. And when the cage starts to rattle not from the inside but from the outside, they realise there is only one option left.

The tea would stop coming. The tests would stop.

And the executioners would begin to sharpen their blades.