The routine settled over us like sediment over a riverbed: slowly, imperceptibly, until one morning I realized that the shape of my days had changed without anyone asking my permission.

  Mornings: herbs. Wei arrived with his basket and his questions and his stubborn refusal to be intimidated by a corrected mistake. He'd graduated from catastrophic to mediocre, which in the economy of forest pharmacology represented genuine progress. He found the right Mingwort three times out of five now. He could distinguish Silverthorn from False Silverthorn without touch, which saved time and, potentially, fingers. He had stopped bringing Blushing Caps entirely, which I chose to interpret as learning rather than coincidence.

  Afternoons: stillness. He sat. I sat nearby. He listened to the forest with the focused intensity of someone trying to hear a whisper in a crowd and occasionally he heard something — the faint resonance of a qi current, the subtle pressure shift that preceded a spirit beast's movement through the underbrush. He was developing the foundation of awareness that the second step required: no cultivation yet and a long shot from manipulation, but perception. The ability to sense the world as it actually was, rather than as the blunt instrument of mortal senses presented it.

  His father's cough stabilized. The real Mingwort, properly prepared, had reduced the inflammation enough that the bad days were less frequent. The good days were the same. The trajectory had not changed, only the speed at which it traveled.

  The evening arrived with the quality of light that autumn brings to valleys: warm at the top, cold at the bottom, as if the air itself couldn't decide what season it wanted to be. Wei had struggled through a difficult session — forty minutes of listening and hearing nothing but his own heartbeat, his own breathing, the relentless interior noise that made silence so hard for a mind that ran as constantly as his did.

  He'd left frustrated. Quiet. His footsteps on the path back to the village carried the rhythm of disappointment, which sounded like regular footsteps except slower.

  I sat at my usual place. The birch. The rock. The view of the village, where smoke rose from cooking fires and the dog barked at evening the same way it barked at morning: without cause, without purpose, with an enthusiasm that I envied more than I wanted to admit.

  An hour passed. Maybe two. The stars appeared, tentative at first, then committed, filling the gaps between the clouds with the cold light of distances that even I found impressive.

  Footsteps. Different from his usual ones — lighter, more deliberate, with a carefulness that suggested he was carrying something and didn't want to spill it.

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  He emerged from the tree line. In his hands: a bowl. Ceramic. Small. Steaming.

  He walked to where I sat. Set the bowl down beside me on the flat part of the rock. The motion was precise, gentle, performed with the concentration of someone placing an object on an altar. He did not look at me. Did not comment. Did not explain.

  He turned around and walked back toward the village.

  I looked at the bowl.

  Rice. Plain. White. A small portion — half of what a growing boy needed, possibly his entire evening share. The steam rose in thin curls that caught the starlight and dissolved into the cold air. The smell was simple: warm grain, the faint sweetness of starch, the ghost of the cooking water, the underlying mineral note of the clay bowl itself.

  I had not eaten in centuries.

  This was not an exaggeration. I had simply stopped at some point — the way I had stopped sleeping, stopped aging, stopped doing any of the things that beings did when their existence had a boundary. Eating was for organisms that required fuel. I was not an organism in any meaningful sense. I was a phenomenon. Phenomena did not eat rice.

  The steam rose. The rice cooled.

  I stared at the bowl for a long time. It sat on the rock with the patient inevitability of an offered hand, demanding nothing, assuming nothing, existing at the intersection of a boy's poverty and a boy's generosity and the specific mathematics that allowed both to be true at the same time.

  A thought crossed my mind that did not belong there.

  It arrived cold, analytical, from a layer of consciousness that I didn't recognize as my own. It was neither emotion nor memory. Something else — something observational, as if a part of me had stepped back and was studying the scene from a distance greater than any physical distance could produce.

  A pattern, repeating. Like a loop closing.

  I blinked. The thought was gone. Dissolved, the way the steam dissolved, leaving only the faint impression that something had passed through me — something alien, something that thought in structures rather than feelings and found the scene not moving but interesting.

  I shook my head. The night was cold. The stars were bright. The rice was cooling.

  I did not touch the bowl.

  Morning arrived. The fog. The birch. The dog.

  Wei came from the village with his basket. He walked to the rock. Saw the bowl, where he'd left it the night before.

  It was empty.

  He didn't smile. Smiling would have drawn attention to it and drawing attention to it would have required us to acknowledge what had happened and acknowledging what had happened would have collapsed the careful fiction we'd built: that I didn't care, that this was transactional, that a boy bringing rice to a woman who could unmake reality was an ordinary event in an ordinary forest in an ordinary world.

  He picked up the bowl. Put it in his basket. Sat down.

  "I found something with spotted leaves near the creek. Purple spots. Is that—"

  "Poisonous."

  "Right."

  The morning continued. The herbs were sorted. The river murmured. The forest did not comment on the empty bowl, or on the woman who had eaten rice for the first time in five hundred years because a child had thought of her.

  He reminded me of something I wanted to forget. Not someone — something. A weight I had set down so long ago that picking it up again should have been impossible.

  The bowl was empty. I would deny it if asked.

  Nobody asked.