He had no name when Shen Mu found him. Just a sleeping baby in a basket, left in front of the Elders' Pavilion on a misty morning. No one knew where he came from. Not even a note. Nothing.
Shen Mu had passed by by chance. He was out looking for bamboo roots for his soups. He was no longer at the age where anything could surprise him, so he simply bent down, picked the child up, and said:
— "You're just in time. I didn't have much left to do these days."
He brought him home, to a small wooden house near the stone garden. He'd lived alone for a long time. He hadn't been a disciple in years. He no longer cultivated. He grew plants.
The baby didn't cry much. He opened his eyes often, in silence. He observed. Not with curiosity, but more like he was listening to something. Shen Mu wasn't worried.
He didn't give him a name right away. He waited.
---
He started calling him Hei Tian when winter came. One evening, the child was looking at the overcast sky, saying nothing, standing still in the courtyard.
— "Hei Tian," Shen Mu said. "The sky is black tonight. You don't speak, but you watch. So that'll suit you."
It wasn't a solemn name. Just a word thrown out like that — but it stuck.
At one year old, Hei Tian barely spoke. He could hardly walk, but he kept watching. Always. He touched things without playing. As if he were paying attention to every detail.
He didn't cry, except when he was hungry or cold. And even then, only briefly.
Shen Mu watched him without trying to understand. He wasn't one to look for mysteries in everything. He dressed him, washed him, fed him. He raised him the way he might care for a strange plant — calmly.
---
Hei Tian grew up in this simple environment. The other children played together, but he often kept to himself. Not out of shyness. He just seemed… elsewhere.
Shen Mu would sometimes show him how to trim bonsai, how to make herbal soups, how to tell useful leaves from useless ones. Hei Tian listened, silently. He rarely asked why. But he remembered.
One evening, as they ate outside, Shen Mu said, almost absentmindedly:
— "You're not in any rush to grow up, are you?"
Hei Tian didn't answer. He just kept chewing slowly, his eyes fixed on the fire crackling gently.
He was a quiet child.
Too quiet, maybe.
---