CHAPTER 147: CH-147: DREAM TREE

The rains came late that year, and with them, the wind that carried whispers of distant lands. The orchard had learned to listen. Tian Shen had taught it how.

He stood beneath the Dream Tree, now tall and resplendent with ribbons of blossoms that shed faint light in the dusk. Its hum was deeper, layered with voices now—Feng Yin’s laugh, the lullabies sung by mothers who had passed through, and the gentle tremors of growth.

The earth beneath it had become sacred, not because it demanded reverence, but because it had offered refuge.

That morning, Tian Shen had awakened with a strange stillness in his bones. Not pain, exactly. More like a whisper in his marrow, asking him to listen. The orchard rustled with the same quiet curiosity. Something approached.

He made his way down a path half-overgrown with wild mint and soft moss. A memory stirred with each step. Here, a fox spirit had left its feathered token. There, two lovers had buried a lock of hair, promising to return. Memory, in this place, was not a burden. It was song.

At the edge of the grove stood a woman. Her robe was worn, stained with travel and grief, but her bearing was proud. Her eyes held the fatigue of someone who had outrun too many shadows.

"Is this the orchard of peace?" she asked.

Tian Shen tilted his head. "Peace isn’t something one finds. It’s something that grows."

She hesitated. "Then I’d like to stay."

He gestured for her to follow. As they walked, she told him her story, haltingly at first. A sister lost to plague. A clan broken by betrayal. Years spent drifting, unable to put down roots.

When they reached the Hearttree, she stopped speaking. The tree’s vast canopy stretched over them like a shield made of memory. She knelt and wept, not because she was weak, but because she was finally safe enough to feel.

Tian Shen brought her water and bread, and said nothing.

She stayed.

...

That night, the wind shifted again.

It blew in from the east, where mountains cut the sky and old magic slept. The fireflies danced erratically. Birds rustled in their nests. Tian Shen watched the stars and wondered.

Change was coming.

...

A month passed. The new woman, Meiyu, had built herself a small hut near the edge of the orchard. She tended the roots with reverent care and began singing to the trees. Her voice was rough, but honest. The saplings listened.

Others came too. A boy who dreamed in color and painted murals on bark with berry juice. A monk who had once led an army, now silent except in prayer. A man with one hand, who carved wooden flutes that cried in the wind.

The orchard welcomed them all.

But Tian Shen felt the stirring grow louder.

He walked farther now, past the familiar paths, into parts of the forest that had not yet been claimed by peace. The wind spoke in tongues he barely remembered—languages of old battlefields, of oaths spoken in fury.

And one day, he found a stone.

It jutted from the ground like a blade, etched with symbols not from any sect he knew. It pulsed faintly, like the seed they had once planted.

He called the others. Together, they uncovered it. Roots had tried to claim it, but the stone resisted, its edges warm to the touch.

"It’s a marker," Meiyu said, brushing off soil. "Of something buried. Or something waking."

Tian Shen nodded slowly. "Then we must listen."

...

That night, the Dream Tree stopped humming.

The silence was not frightening, but expectant.

...

The stone was not the only one. Over the next few weeks, others revealed themselves, half-buried in forgotten glades or submerged in creeks. Each bore a single rune—not of power, but of passage.

Tian Shen spent long hours meditating near them. He spoke to them in the old tongue. He poured tea over their surfaces. He listened.

And finally, one spoke back.

Not in words, but in sensation.

The orchard had been a haven. But now, it was asked to become a bridge.

To something else. To somewhere else.

...

It was Meiyu who dreamed of the door.

A wooden archway covered in ivy, with wind chimes made of bone. It stood alone in a field of gold grass, where no path led in or out. Yet, when she walked through it, she was home.

Tian Shen carved it, guided by her memory. The others helped. They placed the archway at the center of the stone circle, beside the Dream Tree. No ceremony. No magic circle. Just trust.

When it was finished, the wind stopped.

Not a breeze stirred. The world held its breath.

And then—a shimmer.

The space within the arch rippled like disturbed water.

Feng Yin would have laughed with delight.

Tian Shen smiled through the ache.

...

They called it the Waygate.

But it was not a gate to another world.

It was a way to carry the orchard’s peace outward.

Those who stepped through returned with stories. Of barren lands now sprouting green. Of old rivalries dissolved over shared tea. Of wandering souls who wept at the touch of wind scented with mint and memory.

The orchard had become a seed itself.

Planted in hearts across the world.

...

Tian Shen grew older.

He laughed more now. His stories grew longer, winding like roots. He took apprentices, not to train them as warriors, but as stewards of peace. Their tools were hoes, journals, and songs.

Every year, on the day the Whispering Sapling had first hummed, they held a quiet festival. Lanterns shaped like leaves floated into the sky. Poems were shared. And somewhere, always, someone planted a tree.

Tian Shen sat beneath the Dream Tree on such a night, lantern light flickering over his face. He held a cup of plum wine and watched the youngest of the orchard children chase fireflies.

Meiyu joined him, now older too, her hair braided with silver strands.

"Do you regret never returning to the sword?" she asked.

He looked down at his hands. "I never left it. I just... changed the way I carried it."

She nodded. "You became its scabbard."

He chuckled. "Maybe. Or maybe I became its garden."

...

Seasons passed. Then years. Then the orchard grew so vast that no one person could walk its full edge in a day.

And then one day, Tian Shen did not rise.

His apprentices found him beneath the Dream Tree, seated with a journal on his lap, pen still in hand. He looked as if he had paused mid-thought, caught by a particularly beautiful line.

They buried him where he sat.

No monument. No tomb.

Just a ring of seeds planted around him, and the final journal entry etched into a stone beside it:

Let what we plant outlive our names.

...

The orchard did not mourn with tears. It mourned with blossoms.

For a full month, every tree bloomed, regardless of season. The Dream Tree’s hum became a song, and its silver leaves shimmered with a rhythm no one could transcribe.

People came. They touched the bark. They listened. And they remembered.

Feng Yin and Tian Shen.

...

Years turned into decades. The world changed, as it must. Wars came and went. Empires rose and fell.

But the orchard remained.

New stewards took root. New paths were carved. The Waygate glowed still, pulsing with gentle invitation.

And somewhere, beneath the earth, where dreams and roots entwined, two seeds pulsed in harmony.

Still growing.

Still singing.

Still beginning.

In a quiet glade near the Dream Tree, a child knelt by a stone half-covered in moss. The inscription had faded over time, but the child didn’t need to read it.

He could feel what lay beneath—peace, old and deep. His grandmother had told him stories of Tian Shen, of the warrior who had become a gardener, of the orchard that listened.

The child pressed his palm to the earth.

"I’ll take care of it," he whispered.

The trees heard him. The wind carried his promise.

In the years since Tian Shen’s passing, the orchard had evolved. New languages echoed through its groves. Shrines now stood not only beneath the Hearttree, but beside whispering brooks and stone circles. Travelers still came—some to mourn, others to learn, all to remember.

The Waygate shimmered each morning, and a new generation of stewards crossed through it—not to escape the world, but to heal it. They carried seeds wrapped in silk, in song, in stories. Where they walked, orchards bloomed.

One such steward returned one spring. She brought with her a flute carved long ago by a one-handed man. She placed it at the foot of the Dream Tree and played a melody that echoed the orchard’s hum.

All around her, blossoms fell like rain.

High in the branches, birds sang in a dozen tongues.

And beneath it all, the orchard listened still.

Because peace, once planted, does not end.

It roots. It grows.

And it begins again.