( His hands are dirt flecked in a way he recalls from the Burial Mounds, when he tried his hand at tilling (to little avail) or the planting of lotus seeds in a pond that shouldn't have made it (and did, despite young hands prying up bare sprouts, due to the love of the Wens who had transplanted older roots, who had gifted him a life for the hole that grew in his heart, larger than the hole of his empty dantian, his transplanted core). His neat pile of potatoes, each of them formed in organic whole, none of them uniform.

The cat he notes, but does nothing to mind: a predator he can appreciate, one who didn't leave him scrambling away in fear. There's the rambling conversation of the ghost of a scholar, and Xiao Xingchen, learning of his ways.

There is this, the small gestures of truce, between the span of two lives and greater depths of claimed deaths. )

I would have, too. Ah... I think this is all I'm gathering of the potatoes for the moment. You had questions. Did you want to ask them?