The bell struck first. It slammed into the three elders like a meteor, Zhu Chanchan hammering its back to amplify the impact. But the elders were wounded, not helpless. They batted the bell aside and vanished into cloud and mist.
Yuan Qi lunged, his serpentine body coiling around Su Yan — but the yellow robe fell from the sky like a second sky, its sleeve opening into an infinite tunnel. Yuan Qi expanded to a hundred zhang. The sleeve expanded with him. He tumbled out, empty-handed, crashing toward the earth.
The bell caught him. Barely.
"They took him," Yuan Qi whispered, staring at the empty sky. "The world's too large. We'll never find him."
Zhu Chanchan smiled, sharp and small. "I marked the stone axe. I marked their treasures when I punched them." She tapped her nose. "They can't hide from me."
* * *
Seven years ago — or so the village remembered — a fisherman named Xu Jin pulled a boy from the Yuan River. The child had no family, no past, only a name: Xu Ying.
Now that boy hauled nets and mended boats on the banks of the swollen river, his skin darkened by sun, his shoulders broad despite his lean frame. He moved with the easy strength of someone who had spent his life on the water.
An old man pointed at him from across the square. "He wasn't here seven years ago! He appeared three months ago, and suddenly you all think you've known him forever! He's a demon! A memory-thief!"
The villagers shook their heads. "Old Xu has lost his mind."
Xu Ying ignored them. He had more pressing concerns — like the river god who'd kicked his father for refusing to build another temple.
"I'll chop that mud statue in half," Xu Ying muttered, gripping the stone axe by their door.
Xu Jin snatched it away. "You'll get us both killed. Fix the boat. Tomorrow we fish."
They set out at dawn with cold porridge and dried roots. The Yuan River had widened tenfold since the world's change, its currents fierce, its depths hiding things that had never existed before. Xu Jin cast his net where the water slowed.
Nothing but finger-sized fish.
Xu Ying tried. His net jerked hard — something massive surged beneath the boat, dragging them forward at terrifying speed. The banks blurred past. Peach trees lined the shore, pink petals falling like snow.
"Let go!" Xu Jin screamed.
Xu Ying held on. The boat shot toward a cliff face — and passed straight through a narrow crack in the stone.
Darkness. Then light.
They emerged in a hidden valley where the sun hung differently and the air smelled of spring eternal. The fish lay pinned in the crack, dead. Xu Ying's axe dripped with its blood, the blade drinking the corpse's qi until it glowed faintly red.
"Where are we?" Xu Jin whispered.
Xu Ying didn't answer. He was staring at the axe in his hands, wondering why its weight felt so *right*, why his muscles remembered movements he'd never learned.
* * *
Months later, in a village downstream, a serpent's head rose from the water. A girl sat on his crown, pretty as a porcelain doll, murder in her eyes. A bronze bell hovered behind her, dented and sullen.
Yuan Qi smiled at the terrified crowd — accidentally showing too many teeth. "We're looking for a young man. Tall. Thin. Dark skin."
No one spoke.
"His name," Zhu Chanchan said, "is Su Yan."
A child pointed upriver. "The Xu family... they lost their boy in the mountains. Three months ago."
Zhu Chanchan's eyes lit up. She punched the bell, and its ring echoed across the water like a hunting horn.
"Found you," she said.