Page 51 of The Immortal’s Mark

Some problems can’t be outrun. But it never stops me from trying.

Dumpling has claimed my pillow.

Not the foot of the bed. Not the chair. My pillow. Specifically. He’s arranged himself in a perfect orange loaf, taking up exactly enough space that I cannot use it without negotiation.

“Move.”

He doesn’t move.

I try to lift him. He performs some arcane feline alchemy and becomes twice as heavy, flowing out of my hands like sunwarmed butter with an attitude problem. He makes a sound—not a meow, not a purr, something between a complaint and a legal objection.

“You’re impossible.”

He blinks slowly. Golden eyes full of absolutely nothing except the knowledge that he has won.

I’m still holding him—suspended mid-negotiation, hands full of smug orange cat—when it hits me.

I died yesterday.

The thought arrives without warning. Sharp. Real.

I died for someone. First time ever.

My hands tighten on the cat. He doesn’t complain. Just hangs there, boneless, watching me with eyes that hold exactly zero concern for my existential crisis.

And then—this is the part that breaks something in my chest—he yawns.

Directly in my face.

A full, shameless, pink-tongued yawn that communicates, with perfect clarity: I don’t care that you died. I care that you’re late.

I laugh.

It surprises me. A real laugh, cracked and strange, but real. Eight hundred years of survival instincts, and I’m being emotionally stabilized by a cat who doesn’t understand the concept of mortality.

He’s warm. He’s ridiculous. Empires rise and fall, dynasties crumble to dust, and Dumpling does not care. Dumpling cares about the pillow.

I put him down. He immediately reclaims the disputed territory, tucking his paws beneath him with the satisfaction of a conqueror.

Fine.

I work around him. Curl up on the other side of the bed. My body still aches with that post-regeneration wrongness, and my mind won’t stop circling back to jade combs and pillow impressions and the sound of my own voice saying Ren like a prayer.

The cat begins to purr.

It shouldn’t help.

It does.

Jing arrives at the hour of the Sheep, when the palace exhales between morning audiences and evening preparations.

She performs the three-tap greeting on the doorframe—once for respect, twice for permission, three times for news. Palace protocol. The kind of thing I learned three hundred years ago and forgot I knew.

“Come in.”

She’s carrying soup in a celadon bowl. The good kind, from the imperial kitchen, not the servants’ fare. Someone pulled strings. I don’t ask who.

“The whole palace is talking.” She perches on the edge of a chair like she’s ready to flee. Her hands are shaking slightly. They always shake around me. I pretend not to notice. “About how he carried you.”