The Kunlun Files

Chapter 11: The Kid a Level-12 Wind Can't Move

That day I was driving out of the city center, stuck behind a slow freight truck on a single-lane road. Within minutes a line of cars had piled up behind me, but the truck never sped up and never yielded. I wasn't in a hurry; I followed along, unbothered — until at the next intersection the truck gave way. I was still wondering why when I spotted a traffic cop at the roadside, jabbing his finger at the driver, scolding him with his whole body.

The sight made me inexplicably happy. I laughed the rest of the way home. Human happiness is a simple thing.

That evening I came across a post online claiming there are barriers all over this world of ours — that certain mountains and rivers have their own, and that a barrier is a passage between our world and another dimension. Some cliffs, the poster said, only look like cliffs. They are projections, painted there to make people stop.

I thought of the people who jump off cliffs. Something about that idea sat badly with me. The soul is more fragile than we imagine — but it is also stronger.

I was still turning it over when my phone rang. Master Wu — calling, not texting, which meant he'd lost patience with typing.

"That kid from my text," he said, laughing before I could say hello. "He's sitting right next to me. Come over, you can talk face to face."

"No."

"He really wants to meet you."

"Meeting is out of the question. If he wants to talk, he can add me."

I set the phone down. A few minutes later, a friend request came in from someone named Lu Feng. I accepted, and he opened with a handshake emoji, then a rush of words: *Miss, Wu says you can see ghosts. Wu says you can see a person's past and present lives. Wu says you're amazing. Then can you see what bond the two of us had in our past lives?*

Right after the message came a selfie.

The photo made me pause. Then I felt it — something enormous looming behind the kid, following him.

I looked closer. The enormous thing was his soul. It *was* him.

A person with a soul that size is never ordinary.

Maybe it was curiosity. I couldn't help it — I reached for the thread of his past lives, the one that tied him to me.

The Stillness took me before I'd decided to go. His thread was warm — that was the first wrong thing; threads are never warm. It ran back through the years like a fuse, and where it ended there was a life I knew was mine, and in that life there was him. I did not let myself look at the details. I didn't need to. The shape of it alone — two souls, one ending, a debt of feeling neither had discharged — told me everything.

I came back to my own room with my heart pounding.

*So the trials come when they come,* I thought. *No warning at all.*

I typed back one line: *Who are you calling Miss?*

It wasn't the "Miss." It was everything I'd just seen. "Miss" was all I could type.

Then I deleted him.

I had barely finished before Wu's call came in. I didn't pick up. He called twice more, then texted: *Why did you delete Lu Feng? Did you see something bad in your past lives together?*

I wrote back: *Feng — it means wind in our tongue. A wind that passes through. The wind has already passed.*

Wu's reply: *Something is wrong with you.*

I didn't answer. Then a new friend request arrived, under a different name: *The kid a level-12 wind can't move.*

I knew exactly who that was. I didn't accept.

Here's what I believe. To be alive, you don't need to go demanding some meaning of life. Getting safely through each calamity — the ones that arrive without asking, on no schedule — that is the meaning, as much as anyone gets. Pain has no shape, yet it can make a person wish they were dead. And some people — you can't name a single thing that's good about them, but no one else can take their place.

The reason I refused Lu Feng was simple. Between us, in a past life, there was a love that never finished.

Love is that kind of thing — the one who falls first is the one who bleeds.

I knew the cause that came before. I could not guarantee the fruit that would come after. And I knew Lu Feng was no ordinary kid — a soul that large doesn't break quietly. If he ever came to care for me, the pain would be immense.

So I made up my mind to cut every karmic thread between us, cleanly, before any of it began.

I called his face to mind and let the threads rise into view — a whole net of them, strung between him and me. I gathered a wisp of my awareness, reached toward the first thread —

And the beast in my chest put out one claw and pinned the wisp down.

"Let go of me," I said.

Its eyes stayed shut. On its face was a smile — the smile of something settling in to watch a good show.

I strained against the claw. It didn't move. Then, out of the dark inside me, I heard a voice:

*Let the kid learn. Nothing worth swallowing goes down in one bite.*

"He thinks it's only a level-12 wind," I said. "But that wind may carry rain and sand. Hail and lightning. And if it turns, it won't stay weather."

*You can protect him.*

"Cutting the threads of this life *is* protecting him."

*Cut this life. And the next one?*

I had no answer. The beast must have felt me waver, because the claw lifted and let me go.

I looked at the threads between Lu Feng and me — strand after strand, and every one of them written over, line upon line, with longing that was never granted.

The outcome of this life was already plain to me. I had seen it the moment I looked. And still, in the end, I drew that wisp of awareness back and let the threads be.

Sever this life, and there is still the next. Sooner or later, in some lifetime, it has to be faced. What is owed must be settled. Debts are called on the first and the fifteenth — you can dodge the first; you cannot dodge the fifteenth.

At least in this life I am lucid, with the power to see past bonds for what they are. Reborn into the next, who knows what kind of me I would be.

The wind of a past life has blown into this one. Then I'll stand in the wind and watch, from outside the play, every joy and every parting within it.

I added Lu Feng back.

His message arrived almost immediately. *Miss, I was wrong. Let me buy you dinner to make it up to you.*

And then: *Miss — in our last life, did I drag you down to die with me? If there's really a feud between us, forgive me, okay?*