Cultivation starts with picking up attributes-Chapter 133: Ch-: Bells

The sound of bells had always meant something in the orchard.

Morning bells summoned breath and focus. Noon bells marked the turning of thought to action.

Twilight bells, with their soft lilt, reminded everyone to return, reflect, and rest. But on the seventh day after the scouts returned, the bells fell silent.

Not broken. Not forgotten.

Simply... not rung.

The orchard noticed first. The wind, usually playful between branches, paused. Birds flitted less, chirped in shorter songs. The koi in the Reflecting Pool drifted, as if listening to something deeper.

Tian Shen noticed too. But he said nothing. Not yet.

...

Lan awoke from a dreamless sleep.

It was unsettling. For someone who lived by the undercurrents of dream, silence was not peace. It was absence. It was shadow. She rose, dressed with deliberate calm, and walked the length of the orchard paths until she found Feng Yin meditating atop the Arching Stone.

"The bells," Lan said.

Feng Yin didn’t open her eyes.

"They didn’t ring."

"Felt the pause? Yes. But not an absence. A breath held."

Lan exhaled slowly.

"Something’s approaching."

Feng Yin nodded.

...

At midday, Tian Shen convened a quiet council in the Listening Grove. No call was made; they came of their own accord.

Ji Luan cartwheeled in with two pots of tea and a stack of cards that may or may not have predicted breakfast. Elder Su arrived last, her expression unreadable.

"The bells," Tian Shen said.

Ji Luan tossed a card onto the moss. The picture showed an empty throne. "Vacancy. Or invitation."

Lan crouched by the roots. "Something has shifted."

"Or returned," said Su. "There are stories older than this orchard. Some say the orchard itself was planted atop the grave of a god who chose to sleep instead of fight."

Feng Yin raised an eyebrow. "And now it dreams again?"

"Worse," Su murmured. "It remembers."

...

That evening, a stranger arrived.

She came without sound, walking the path barefoot, eyes closed. Her hair was long and silver, not from age but from starlight. A flute was strapped to her back, and a lantern hung unlit at her side.

Drowsy barked once, not in warning, but recognition.

Lan met her at the gate. "You’ve walked a long time."

"Longer than you know."

"Why now?"

The woman opened her eyes.

"Because the forest is humming. And I carry its forgotten verses."

...

She introduced herself as Ashen Veil. Whether it was a name or a title, no one asked. She spoke with voice like falling dusk—soft, inevitable.

Around the campfires that night, she didn’t sit, but listened. Watched. Hummed to the flames.

Children gravitated to her. Drowsy curled around her boots. Birds settled on branches above her and did not move until dawn.

Ji Luan attempted three times to prank her. Each time, her illusions turned back upon him, transforming him briefly into a cloud of giggling butterflies, a songbird with a kazoo, and finally, a stack of pancakes.

He accepted defeat. Respectfully.

...

Ashen Veil spoke the next morning.

"You feel the pause. The orchard knows it too. That which was buried is not dead. It is listening. And its name is being whispered again."

She drew a symbol into the dirt: a spiral enclosed in three rings.

Tian Shen stared. "I’ve seen that before. In the dreams of the silent child."

Lan blinked. "In mine too."

Ashen Veil nodded. "It is called the Deep Pulse."

Elder Su inhaled sharply. "That name... was once forbidden."

"Because it was once a song so powerful, it unraveled the listening gods."

...

Over the following days, strange phenomena increased.

Time rippled.

One scout aged backwards for an hour, then resumed their usual form with no memory of the shift. Another lost their shadow for three days. Windchimes composed melodies no one had taught them. Trees leaned slightly inward as if trying to hear better.

The orchard was not just alive. It was awakening.

...

Ashen Veil guided them to a place no map had shown. Beyond the Reflecting Pool, where mist refused to lift, they uncovered an ancient door—round, overgrown, breathing.

"This," she said, "is the Rootvault."

It was sealed with silence. No key. No word. Only intent.

So they gathered. Scouts, elders, children. One by one, they laid palms to the door. Each offered a memory, a truth, a song.

When Little Mei stepped forward, cradling her stone from the courtyard, the door shuddered.

And opened.

...

Inside was not darkness, but memory.

Not a vault, but a cathedral of thought.

Roots twined like pillars. Moss shimmered with the echo of footsteps from long ago. The air tasted of memory and music.

At its heart stood a pedestal, and upon it, a crystal flute.

Ashen Veil did not touch it. She knelt.

"This was never mine to play."

She looked to Tian Shen.

He stepped forward, hesitated.

Lan whispered, "It’s not a weapon. It’s a voice."

Tian Shen picked up the flute.

...

The first note he played was imperfect.

The second wept.

The third opened something deeper than song.

The orchard, above and beyond, trembled.

And the bells, silent for days, began to chime—on their own.

Each tone was a name.

Each note a promise.

Each silence, a memory healed.

...

When Tian Shen finished, the flute dissolved into mist.

Ashen Veil vanished with it, her lantern still unlit.

But something had changed.

Not a threat. Not a storm.

A remembering.

...

From that day, the orchard pulsed with new rhythm.

Scouts began to dream in chorus. Children wrote down stories they’d never been told. The bells rang now not with routine, but in resonance. Responding to joy, sorrow, arrival, departure.

One morning, Ji Luan woke speaking fluent Moonwhistle—a language no one had heard in six hundred years.

Elder Su merely nodded. "Of course he would."

...

A week later, a tree sprouted in the courtyard overnight. It bore no fruit. Only leaves shaped like eyes, each blinking in time with the chimes.

Feng Yin taught it how to meditate.

...

Tian Shen no longer stood guard at the orchard’s edge.

He walked the paths now, with children in tow. Teaching not how to strike, but how to listen.

Lan wrote a new dream-map. It didn’t show borders or fractures.

It showed songs. In color.

Each scout began composing their own.

They called it The Harmony Record.

...

The world outside the orchard shifted too.

Cities began to slow their clocks once a day, listening to the wind.

A queen in the west decreed that one council seat be left empty in honor of unspoken voices.

And deep in the mountains, a chorus of monks who had not spoken in centuries broke their vow with a single word:

"Begin."

...

Under moonlight, Tian Shen returned to the Moonwatch Tree.

Drowsy at his side, now wearing a cloak made of fallen petals.

He whispered, "What now?"

From the tree came a whisper:

"Sing."

So he did.

Not alone.

Voices joined his—from branches, from stone, from wind, from heart.

And the forest grew.

Not louder.

But deeper.

And the bells never stopped again.

...

The winds carried petals across the orchard as dusk deepened. Lanterns swayed gently in the trees, their warm glow turning leaves into silhouettes—half shadow, half flame. The scouts had returned, but the orchard had changed in their absence. Or perhaps, they had changed, and now saw it more clearly.

Tian Shen stood beneath the Wind-Shell Tree, a place where listening became easier. The boy who had followed him—now named Lin—sat beside him, carving a whistle from branchwood. His hands were small, but precise. The whistle was crooked, but it sang.

From the south path, Ji Luan approached, balancing a basket on her head with the elegance of someone who had done far worse with far less. "I bring spoils," she declared. "Pickled roots from the valley, dried cherries, and... a single spoon made of bread. Don’t ask."

She dropped down next to them. "I missed this," she added, more softly.

Tian Shen glanced at Lin. The boy smiled—just slightly—and continued carving.

In the distance, Drowsy barked once, chasing after a leaf. Three hats fell off his back.

Lan walked the orchard’s edge in circles, stringing new dream chimes between trees. Each one was tuned differently—some caught the breath of passing birds, others whispered when the moon rose. Her presence was the same as always: subtle, but unmistakable.

Feng Yin was on the ridge, guiding a small group in meditation—not for strength, but for stillness. A new practice: learning how to un-clench the spirit, how to breathe without holding the world hostage in your lungs.

Little Mei sat beside the Reflecting Pool, her legs crossed, face tilted toward the stars. She wasn’t watching them. She was speaking to them.

A bell rang. Just one.

Then silence.

It was not the silence of absence. It was the silence of preparation. Of breath before story. Of space being made for what needed to arrive.

Tian Shen rose, eyes scanning the orchard, the distant path, and the fading sky.

"Soon," he said.

Ji Luan arched an eyebrow. "Soon what?"

He didn’t answer.

Because he didn’t know.

Only that something would come.

And when it did...

They would be ready—not as blades, but as roots.

And roots, when deep enough, could hold even mountains steady.