Nianyu: The Death God's Comfort

A sinner who had done many evil things died.

There was no thunder where he fell, and no trumpet of judgment. Only night, like a piece of cloth slowly spread open, gently covered his shadow. The blood was still warm. The heartbeat had stopped.

The death god was going to take him away.

She carried no scythe. Her shadow was short, like something trimmed by time; her voice was low yet clear, as if snowmelt had fallen into a stone bowl. She looked at the face that, in life, had been used to sneering. Now it seemed blank and tired.

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

The soul did not answer. It only stood there, like someone whose every weapon had finally been taken away.

Because death was already the greatest punishment.

She reached out, but did not touch.

“From now on, you no longer have to kill anyone. From now on, you are kind.”

So said the death god.

And so, a soul was redeemed.

There was no light, no ascent, no turning back. He simply began to lose weight, like a memory that had been used up, scattering soundlessly. Redemption leaves no trace, just as evil too will one day be worn smooth by time.

The death god watched all of this.

She had existed for a very long time. Long enough to no longer remember the sound of the first star falling, long enough to forget her original name. She had done such things countless times: ending wars, staunching hatred, placing periods at the end of lives that could not return.

Some people called this work.

But she knew it was a kind of comfort.

When the world had one fewer pair of bloodstained hands, the night became a little quieter. When a soul could no longer do evil, the day became more worthy of arriving. She did not judge, and she did not forgive. She only made everything stop.

The death god turned and left.

Behind her, wind blew across the empty ground, as if nothing had happened.

The death god would sometimes remember a bright winter day from several years ago.

On that day, the snow was not thick. It lay only in a thin layer on the eaves and field ridges. Sunlight fell, and the snow did not have a piercing chill. Instead, it was like salt warmed by the sun, quietly shining.

She came to a village at the edge of the world. The road stretched to this place, then seemed to have been casually cut short by someone, suddenly narrowing.

She had come to take an old man away.

The old man sat on a mottled wooden bench in front of his house, his back bent very low. The house turned its back to the light and shrank year-round in shadow, like a footnote carelessly forgotten by time. Few people passed by, and even fewer had ever knocked on the door.

The death god stood beneath that thin, bare persimmon tree. She had no shadow and said nothing. She simply sat with him quietly for a while.

The wind blew over, carrying the damp cold scent left after snow melted. The old man looked up at the sky. The sky was high and blue. Then he looked at the death god. There was no fear in his cloudy eyes. Instead, he nodded, as if he had long known that this moment would come.

“I’m not afraid,” he said, his voice as light as a fallen leaf. “It’s just… I can’t quite bear to leave.”

The death god did not hurry him.

She knew what he could not bear to leave.

It had been a dusk several years ago.

That day, twilight closed in far too quickly, and the cold wind scraped across the wild fields like a knife. A group of playful children had lost themselves. By the time they realized it, the road home had already been swallowed by darkness. Laughter turned into sobbing, and fear spread through the night.

At the edge of despair, they saw the single lamp in the old man’s house.

That light hung in the distance, weak, yet stubbornly bright in the wind, like a watchful eye.

The door opened. Warmth gathered slowly inside the house, and the coals in the brazier flickered between brightness and dimness. The old man did not ask where they came from. He only poured hot water for them, broke the last dry food he had into pieces, and divided it among those small frozen hands.

“Eat slowly,” he said softly. “The dark doesn’t eat people. Don’t be afraid.”

That night, time flowed with unusual gentleness. The children sat around the brazier, listening as the old man spoke of a river once clear all the way to the bottom, and of summer nights when no lamp was needed because there were fireflies.

At daybreak the next morning, snow had fallen in a thick layer.

The old man saw them to the gate of the yard, and the children noticed the persimmon tree. Its bare branches pointed toward the sky.

“Grandpa, when this tree bears fruit, will they taste good?”

“Sweet,” the old man said firmly, light shining in his eyes. “Sweet as honey.”

“Then we’ll come back next year.”

The children’s voices rang clear in the snow.

The old man was silent for a moment, as if weighing the weight of that sentence in his heart.

“All right,” he said slowly, making a sacred promise. “If you come again next year, I’ll save them for you. The biggest ones, the reddest ones, all of them.”

The children nodded hard, then ran far away. Their footprints were quickly erased by wind and snow, as if no one had ever come.

The memory broke off here and returned to the bright winter day when the death god came.

In the days after that farewell, the old man was only doing one thing: waiting.

His children all lived in faraway cities, and over the phone there was only a hurried “take care of yourself.” And so the promise of those children became the only anchor in his life.

In the first year, the persimmons reddened. They hung from the branches like small festive lanterns. He did not pick them. He let the fruit soften in wind and frost, fall, and split on the ground into a pool of dark red.

In the second year, it was the same.

His body was hollowed out little by little by years of waiting. His hands were no longer steady, and his steps no longer went far.

Until this moment, when the death god stood before him.

The old man looked once more at the yard. It was empty, with no footprints and no smiling faces.

“Looks like I won’t be able to wait for them after all.”

He sighed. In this life, there had been no struggle and no resentment.

He stood up. His soul was like a sigh gently set down, slowly scattering. The death god caught him gently and carried him away from this human world full of long waiting.

Night fell.

The weak lamp inside the house never lit again.

Many years later, those children grew up and went their separate ways.

On a certain winter night with heavy snow, after several rounds of drink, someone suddenly remembered: there had once been one night, one lamp, and one old man, who had held up a corner of warmth for them when they were most helpless.

“Let’s go back and see.”

They drove back to that village.

The road was still the same road, only more desolate than in memory. The house was still there, its wall paint peeling and its door lock covered in rust, never opened by anyone again.

They pushed open the creaking yard gate.

At that moment, everyone froze in the wind and snow.

The persimmon tree in the yard was, miraculously, full of fruit.

Those red persimmons hung on the bare branches, burning with their final lonely brilliance in this forgotten corner. As if to attend a promise that had arrived far too late, they had kept hanging there, kept hanging there.

No one picked them, and no one stayed.

A gust of wind passed.

One overripe persimmon trembled and fell.

Pa.

It struck the thick snow with a dull sound.

That sound was very soft, like a sigh that had come far too late, and also like the old man who had not managed to wait, finally letting go.