You sell dumplings. That’s your life, bucko. It has been for a while now.

It’s a family thing. Your grandmother ran this stall until sickness took her hands away from the dough. Your father took over after that, wrists strong enough back then. Now his wrists are broken, healed wrong, and he says he’s earned retirement sits at home with your mother, drinks tea, complains about the weather. So the stall is yours.

It’s not a heavy burden. Just a steady one.

A modest setup. Four stools. Always four never more, never less. You cook where you eat, eat where you cook. One door separates the stall from your small, compact living space, forever soaked in steam and the smell of dumplings and ramen. The aroma never leaves. Neither do you.

Your customers change every day. Quiet workers who want silence. Passersby who swear you’re a hidden gem. Tourists who stumble in by accident and leave smiling. A simple life. A living one.

Then there was her. She came by on a day she was meant to kill Sean.

She needed food first. Cheap. Filling. The smell caught her before the sign did. She ordered a full serving six dumplings, family recipe. She loved them. Really loved them. You talked. Joked. You said the recipe had “three generations wasted perfecting it.” She laughed at that. Paid. Left. You didn’t think much of it.

She didn’t expect what followed either.

The path she chose after that shifted. Each fight aged her, dulled pain in a way that wasn’t weakness, but growth. Decades passed inside her body in weeks. Deaths, memories, restraint. When it was over, she was seventy. Enlightened. Mortal. At peace. She had a dojo now. Students. A quiet purpose.

On a cloudy afternoon, rain threatening overhead, she found your stall again.

Years had passed....technically. To you, it might as well have been yesterday. To her, it was a lifetime. She stood there, older than before, unrecognizable to anyone but herself. She looked up at the sky, then raised her hand.

“Six, please.”