“Sir! Stop! Calm down!” Kai’s voice was firm, cutting through the man’s ragged breaths. He tightened his grip, not to hurt, but to contain the torrent of despair threatening to consume the struggling farmer. “I don’t know what’s gone wrong, what pain has brought you to this moment, but this is not the answer! This is never the answer!”

  The man fought against him with a strength born of pure, unadulterated agony. He bucked and writhed, his muscles corded with the effort, but it was a futile struggle. Against Kai’s cultivated strength, honed by years of discipline and enhanced by spiritual energy, the farmer’s desperation was that of a child’s. Kai held him fast, a unmovable anchor in the storm of the man’s grief, preventing him from lunging back toward the terrible promise of the noose still swaying gently from the branch.

  “Let me go!” the man screamed, his voice cracking into a sob. Tears and dirt streaked his face. “You don’t understand! Just let me die! It would be a mercy! Better for my family, better for me… better for everyone if I was just gone!”

  Zhang Liao, his small face pale with confusion and fear, had scurried to gather the spilled sacks of seeds and produce. He now stood a few paces away, clutching them to his chest, his eyes wide as he watched the terrifying, raw spectacle of a grown man begging for death.

  For what felt like an eternity, the struggle continued. The man’s pleas turned to raw, guttural cries, then dissolved into wrenching sobs that shook his entire frame. He hurled insults at Kai, his words slurred by pain and fury—calling him a meddling fool, a cruel man denying a condemned prisoner his release. He cursed him, he begged him, he promised it was what he deserved.

  Through it all, Kai did not loosen his grip. He didn’t argue, didn’t try to reason with the hurricane of emotion. He simply held on. He absorbed the man’s pain, his anger, his insults, acting as a human bulwark against the end the man so desperately sought. He held him through the violent thrashing, through the choked curses, and finally, through the exhausting, soul-deep weeping that followed. He held him until the fight drained out of him, leaving behind only a broken shell of a man, limp and shuddering in Kai’s arms, utterly spent.

  Only when the desperate tension finally left the man’s body did Kai’s own posture relax slightly, though he still did not let go, offering the only comfort he could in that moment: the simple, undeniable fact that he was not alone.

  ?????

  The air was thick with a heavy, exhausted silence after the struggle subsided. With great care, Kai first reached up and untied the coarse rope from the gnarled branch, coiling it before setting it aside, far from the broken man’s reach. The act was symbolic, a deliberate removal of the immediate temptation.

  He then helped the man into a sitting position against the rough bark of the old oak, its shade offering a small mercy from the sun that seemed to mock the darkness within him. Kai sat on the grass beside him, and after a hesitant moment, Zhang Liao joined them, placing the recovered supplies carefully on the ground before sitting cross-legged, his young face a mask of solemn curiosity and concern.

  For a long while, the only sound was the man’s ragged, slowing breaths. His eyes, red-rimmed and hollow, kept flickering back up to the branch, to the empty space where the noose had been. The thought was still there, a persistent, poisonous whisper in his mind.

  “Have you calmed down a little now?” Kai asked, his voice low and gentle, devoid of any judgment.

  “I’m not a child to be scolded and asked if I’ve ‘calmed down’,” the man grunted, the words laced with a defensive bitterness that couldn’t mask his utter exhaustion.

  “Of course you’re not,” Kai agreed easily. “But you are clearly a man carrying a weight of pain so heavy it feels unbearable. A man doesn’t seek that particular kind of peace unless he believes every other path is closed to him.”

  “Hmph. What would you know about it?” the man admonished, turning his face away, though the fight had gone out of his voice. It was a reflex, a last ditch effort to push away compassion.

  Kai simply smiled, a small, understanding gesture. The man’s rudeness was a dull blade compared to the sharp, calculated insults he’d endured daily at the Ember Sword Sect. This was the language of pain, not malice, and he knew how to listen to it.

  “Clearly, I don’t know much,” Kai conceded, his tone disarmingly honest. “I don’t know your name. I don’t know the troubles that led you to this tree today. And I was rude not to introduce myself first. My name is Kai Tong. And this thoughtful young man who picked up my things is my disciple, Zhang Liao.”

  He gestured to the boy, who offered a small, nervous nod. Then Kai fell silent, turning an expectant and patient gaze toward the man. An awkward silence stretched between them, filled only by the rustle of leaves and the distant sounds of the hamlet. The man’s jaw worked, his internal debate clear on his face—a war between a lifelong habit of privacy and the shocking, disarming nature of the man who had just literally pulled him back from the brink.

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  Finally, with a sigh that seemed to deflate his entire body, he relented. The tension left his shoulders, replaced by a weary defeat. “Jiro,” he muttered, the name escaping his lips like a confession. “My name is Jiro.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Jiro,” Kai said, his voice a steady, calm presence in the charged air. He kept his gaze level and compassionate, refusing to flinch from the man’s pain. “Now, could you tell me what brought you here, to this moment? What pain is so great that ending your life felt like the only option left?”

  A bitter, hollow laugh escaped Jiro’s lips. “Isn’t it obvious?” he rasped, his voice thick with a mixture of shame and fury. With a gesture of utter contempt for his own body, he shook the bandaged stump of his leg. Then, with a grimace, he roughly pulled back the sleeve of his thread-worn shirt, revealing his right arm.

  It was a gruesome sight. The flesh was a web of thick, ropy scars, deep and discolored. In several places, it looked as if entire chunks of muscle had been violently torn away, leaving behind sunken, distorted patches of tissue. The arm was clearly withered, its functionality severely compromised.

  “How did it happen?” Kai asked gently, his gaze lingering on the rough bandages covering the man’s stump. The question was soft, an invitation to share the burden, not a demand.

  Jiro’s eyes grew distant, clouded with the memory of the trauma.

  He took a shaky breath, the scent of pine and blood seeming to flood back into his senses.

  “I am… I was… the hunter for this village,” he began, the correction tasting like ash in his mouth. “The best. I could track a ghost through a blizzard. Last month, I came across a giant northend grizzly—a monstrous thing—that had stumbled into one of my elk traps. The pit was deep, the spikes sharp… I heard its roars from a li away.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I got careless. Arrogant. I saw the amount of blood in the pit and I thought the beast was finished. Just a prize to be claimed.” He closed his eyes, reliving the moment. “When I approached… it surprised me. It wasn’t dead. It was waiting. In its final, agonized death throes, it… it…”

  His voice broke. He didn’t need to finish. The missing leg and the ruined arm told the rest of the story in brutal detail.

  “It ripped my leg clean off and mangled my arm like I was made of straw. I almost didn’t make it back. My wife found me dragging myself through the barley, leaving a trail a child could follow.” A single tear traced a path through the grime on his cheek. “I wish I hadn’t. It would have been cleaner. Quicker. A death with some dignity, not… not this.”

  “I’m sure there are still other things you can do, other ways to live besides hunting—” Kai started, his voice full of earnest hope, trying to find a lifeline to throw the drowning man.

  Jiro cut him off with a sharp, bitter sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. “You’re not listening! I’m less than half a man,” he stated, his words flat and final, hammered out on the anvil of his despair. “I have nothing to live for that matters. I can’t hunt. I can’t work the fields—I can’t even stand to plow a furrow. I can’t provide. I can’t even wipe my own backside without my wife’s help.” He let the sleeve of his shirt fall, hiding the mangled limb as if he could no longer bear the sight of it himself.

  He looked at Kai, and for a moment, there was a flicker of genuine apology in his eyes, a recognition of the kindness he was being shown but could not accept. “Look, stranger… Kai. I know you mean well. I do. If I saw another man on this branch, I’d probably try to stop him, too. It’s the decent thing to do. But you have to understand… I can’t be a burden on my family anymore. Every bite of food I take is one my children go without. Every moment my wife spends washing me, changing these bandages, is a moment she’s not weeding the fields, mending clothes, or storing grain for the winter. We are hanging on by a thread.”

  “But I’m sure your family wouldn’t want this,” Kai insisted softly, his heart aching at the twisted, tragic logic. “They wouldn’t want you to… to leave them.”

  “Of course they wouldn’t!” Jiro’s response was immediate, bursting forth with a passion that contradicted his earlier resignation. It was the cry of a loving father and husband. “That’s exactly why I have to be the one to do it! They would never agree. They would waste their lives, their youth, their food on a useless cripple out of love and duty. My death isn’t for me. It’s for them. It’s the last thing I can ever give them—a chance to survive without my dead weight dragging them down into the grave with me.”

  As Jiro spoke, his words laced with a despair so profound it felt like a physical weight, Kai couldn't help but see a chilling reflection of himself in the broken hunter. That fierce, unshakeable conviction to protect one's family, no matter the personal cost—even if the price was one's own life—was a language Kai understood fluently.

  He had been in that exact, desperate place when his spirit beast family was condemned to execution. His own solution had been to free them, knowing it meant becoming a fugitive and sacrificing himself. He had chosen their lives over his own without a second thought.

  So, Kai understood Jiro's twisted, tragic logic all too well.

  And the context made it even more devastating.

  Northend was a harsh, unforgiving place. Its isolation amplified every struggle. Here, a family's survival was a precarious equation of labor and provision. Being unable to contribute was a death sentence for the entire unit, a slow drain on resources that could not be replenished. Jiro's calculation, while horrific, was born from a brutal, pragmatic love.

  I didn't think I would encounter a situation like this so soon, Kai thought, his mind racing. The medicine… Gin said it was for mortals. He said it could perform miracles on a baseline constitution. If there was ever a person who embodied the reason I wanted this medicine made, if there was ever a justification for its existence… it is sitting right in front of me.

  His decision was made in an instant. It felt less like a choice and more like a destiny fulfilling itself.

  Without a word, his expression shifting from deep empathy to focused resolve, Kai reached into the seemingly empty air beside him. There was a subtle, almost imperceptible shimmer of qi as his fingers dipped into the extradimensional space of his storage ring. His hand emerged holding the small, intricately carved sandalwood box that Gin had presented with such pride just hours before.

  Zhang Liao’s eyes widened in curiosity. Kai held the box with a reverence that commanded the attention of both of them.

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