When the last of the campaigns were done and the banners were folded into silence, the city settled into a new normal. Lin Wei cultivated a modest life of purpose. Patients came with small ailments and catastrophic misfortunes; she greeted them all with a hand that had learned to measure medicine and a heart that kept memory of sacrifice.
She visited Xiao Che's grave once, alone, with nothing to offer but a handful of herbs and a prayer. There she understood the paradox: some loves anchor and some also cut. She honored him by continuing the work he could not finish by other means: the cultivation of care, of techniques that protected the ordinary.
Shen grew older beside her. Neither of them became larger than life in history books, but both were larger than the sum of the small kindnesses they performed. They took apprentices, and their apprentices took others. The work continued in a way that looked like immortality because each life saved rippled on.
In the quiet of an apothecary that smelled like sage and cooling broth, Lin Wei sat and wrote down observations — of herbs, of symptom clusters, of ways to make a simple stitch more secure. She wrote because the impulse to preserve knowledge was the only way to ensure that the future might be better for someone, somewhere, whose need would outlast them both.