The courtyard was close enough to silent that I felt free to put voice to the doubt that had been welling up in my mind for some time now—

"Xia-jie, why don't they remember you?"

Bailian, and Professor Jibeidi, and even the sect elders now that I think about it— none of them remembered her. It could not be a coincidence. And now, now as I looked towards the future, ever more did I need to know the facts of the present.

Natsuki stepped out in front of me, and as she turned back to face me, her face fell in barely noticeable measure.

"Xue'er, I am the one who bears witness to samsara. It is, in the first place, a violation of the World-Law for me to take action. That I am here is itself only thanks to a loophole therein. Of course I do not wish to be forgotten, but if I, on some day lost long ago in the nights of time, had in fact severed the world from myself as did the Mahatma Buddh under the Bodhi Vrksh, then this is only the natural consequence. This is how it has always been for me as far as my memory carries, and how it always will be for at least as long as I am still able to hold onto the name you gave me."

I understood. I understood that much. She had explained as much to me twice before, in fact. Yet that was not what worried me most. What worried me most was not the prospect of others forgetting her. If she herself had come to terms with it, then it was not my place to complain, even if I found the prospect painful. But... but if the world were to forget about her, then... then, just as it had already happened... just as it had happened for that one day...

"Xia-jie, will I... will I forget you too?"

I asked this question with a sense of terror shuddering through me. It was my greatest fear! My greatest fear was that I would forget her— that I would forget her again, another time, once more than I already had! And I, in her absence, was nothing more than a pathetic, helpless bastard, lacking even the will to right myself among the world's wrongs! Natsuki, my sister, who held up my world as the sun holds up the sky— I loved her, yes, but more so I simply could not survive without her, not as a human being!

She was my power! She was my justice! She was my humanity!

And yet, to this deepest of my anxieties, she only responded with a tilt of the head and a dull smile.

"Not until you will it yourself."

And yet there was something unsatisfying in that answer, though what, I could not tell. I frowned, but could say no more, for but for my lingering sense of unease, there was no kinder answer she could have offered me.

Natsuki stepped away and turned her gaze to a small gazebo on the eastern end of the courtyard. There was a statue of the Amitabha Buddha there, though it could not be seen from here, here from outside the gazebo itself. Or rather— ten years ago, there had been a statue of the Amitabha Buddha there, and I could only assume that nothing had changed since.

"It is said that only when the name of Siddhaarth Gautam is no longer spoken on this transient plane will the Maitreya be permitted to descend, yet when this kalpa comes to an end, so too will all the Buddhas' ashes be scattered in the seas and their names erased from the world's memory. To be forgotten is no more than the last step on the path of enlightenment. Remembrance, too, is karma, and only by cleansing oneself of such karma may one attain nirvana, immortality of the will, annihilation of the self."

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For a moment I watched her standing there, unmoving, though a gentle wind buffeted at her robes and at her hair. The strands of her hair twisted and turned in the breeze, and as the wind's breath softened and strengthened, their arcs varied, sometimes becoming straighter, sometimes becoming more contorted, like the way a river's path shifts over time.

Yes, the passage of time is like flowing water. By erosion it reduces mountains to mere canyons, and by deposition it builds land out of sea. Only one thing holds constant: all its constructs, all the life and death it brings, are impermanent.

Thus is the first of the three marks of existence. Impermanence. One lives and one dies. One is remembered and one is forgotten. To seek immortality, be it through neverending life or through an undying memory, would be in denial of that very first law of Buddhism.

For Natsuki to be forgotten was tragic, but... inevitable.

My death, too, far off in the future though it was, was inevitable.

And knowing that—

"Xue'er, what do you wish to make of your fleeting existence?"

My vision refocused when her words grazed across my eyes, and I saw that Natsuki had turned back to me, her gaze boring deep into mine, scratching at the gate to my soul, my mortal soul.

I opened my mouth, and for perhaps the first time in my life the words flowed forth, with conviction, with ease, like froth leaping down from a waterfall's edge. Because I knew! I knew the path that I wished for my life to take! Like a salmon that swims upstream with instinct and will alone,

"I will go to the Imperial Capital. I will become a scholar. And I will make a world where the powerless have the right to hold their heads high. That is my dream. It is my dream."

It was my dream, my very own dream, a dream borne of my own experiences and my own suffering. And that was why I could live it, honestly, truthfully.

Natsuki smiled.

"If you yourself are inspired, then that is enough. Xue'er, do you know what it is you must do with your wish?"

"I know!" I cried out, and with a wide grin, I dashed back towards the main hall, there where I had left all the documents that the Magistrate had given to me. What would happen to the ashes of the Bai family? What would happen to me, standing among the wreckage? It was my decision to make! The decisions were all mine to make! What had I to fear from what turned within my own hands?

I threw open the sliding door of the main hall, and— before I stepped in, I turned back one last time to the courtyard. There I saw Natsuki yet standing there, unmoving, yet rooted in the middle of the courtyard, yet pointing her gaze at the statue of the Amitabha Buddha not visible from where she was standing.

"Xia-jie, what will... you do?"

"Me?" Her gaze slowly turned towards me, though it seemed to pass over and through me, alighting somewhere beyond me, the way that light does not cast shadow when it touches flame. "—I will collect all the truths of the world in my hands, and one day, in the distant future yet hidden far beyond the horizon, I will piece them together into something greater, a law that surpasses both the Mahatma Buddh and the Seigneur Newton, a supreme Dao, a theory of everything, my very own Prajnaparamita."

And though I did not really understand her words, there was something inspiring in her will— her will, that without doubt, would long outlive my own.

If the world I would create could become one of the truths that she would eventually puzzle together, then that, too, would be magnificent in its own right—