Li Mutian woke at the hour of yin, eyes open in the dark, staring up at the broken roof of his own house. A sliver of pale light seeped through it.
A few days ago a small hole had opened in the roof, and Li Mutian had not had the time to patch it. He had not slept well for three nights running. Looking at the woman sleeping dead to the world beside him, he heaved a deep sigh.
"Womenfolk never know the half of it. These past days those high-flying immortals have gone clean mad, tearing back and forth over the Dali Mountains like they mean to dig the ground up three feet deep. Scared everyone stiff—every streak of flying light that goes over, folk drop to their knees and kowtow..."
Li Mutian's brows were knotted with worry. The handful of little villages at the foot of the Dali Mountains had always lived free of care, but these days every soul was jumping at shadows.
"The mountain roads run deep and narrow. The court can't reach us, and we've no wish to be reached. But when immortals fight, one immortal spell is enough to leave Lijing Village without so much as a dog alive."
Li Mutian turned over and could not get back to sleep. He got up and stood looking out the window at the thick press of the night.
"The boy grows bigger by the day, and eats more at every meal. Tomorrow I'll send him off to the Meichi River for some river fish and crabs."
"If an immortal spell kills us one of these days, that's fate. The Li family has broken this wild ground for over two hundred years—mother can't be moved, father can't be moved." Li Mutian lowered his head and shook it, put his hands behind his back, and went out.
Outside the door the big yellow dog was still snoring away. Li Mutian walked slowly through the thin morning mist, looking out at Lijing Village waking from its sleep: cocks crowing, dogs barking, cooking smoke curling lazily from the chimneys.
"Xiangping, hey—" Li Mutian bellowed at the house at the top of his lungs. Something clattered and clanged inside; the door banged open and a half-grown boy came rushing out, grumbling all the way.
"Dad!" Li Xiangping's features were passably neat, his eyes sly. He tilted his head back to look up at Li Mutian.
"What's the work today?"
"Go get some river fish and crabs from the Meichi River."
Li Mutian waved a hand.
"There's not much to do today. Go get your mother something fresh to eat."
"Yay!"
Li Xiangping nodded eagerly again and again, grabbed a rope basket and a long fork, and was off in a flash.
Li Mutian gave a couple of ha-has and headed for the fields.
The Meichi River was shallow and wide, its banks a stretch of broad mudflats and reeds. The village raised geese and ducks by the dozens and hundreds, and never had to feed them: let out at dawn, they all made their way to the river.
Come evening, one person would walk down to the bank and give a call, and the geese and ducks, long since tamed and used to that voice, would come trailing home in a straggling line.
By the time Li Xiangping arrived, the geese and ducks had not yet been let out, and the Meichi River lay empty, two little wooden rafts rocking at the bank. He rolled up his trouser legs and sleeves, knelt down into the mud, groped blindly in front of himself with both hands, then fixed his eyes on the water and caught a glimpse of blue-green.
"Nice fish."
Li Xiangping pressed down hard and dove, holding his breath. His right hand clamped shut—he had the blue tail by the gills and hauled it up.
"Heh heh."
Li Xiangping laughed out loud a few times and slung the fish into the basket. The fish in the Meichi River were certainly not that stupid; this blue tail was in all likelihood a wild fish that had darted down from upstream—the kid had landed himself quite a bargain.
Glancing down at his own feet, Li Xiangping looked puzzled: there seemed to be a spot on the riverbed that was too smooth, faintly giving off a silvery gleam.
Just as he was about to take another gulp of air and dive to see what it was, a ringing shout came from the bank:
"Brother Xiangping!"
Instinctively Li Xiangping hid the basket behind his back and looked toward the bank, where a boy in his early teens had popped out of the reeds.
"Ye-di'er, here to let out the ducks...?"
"Yep!"
His younger cousin Li Yesheng nodded obediently and said with a smile:
"First thing this morning I heard about something strange—a huge stag, bitten on the leg by a snake, dead at the village entrance. Its antlers were as big as a table. Scared the life out of me."
Li Xiangping listened to his idle chatter and let out a breath of relief, then pushed the basket forward.
"Take a look at this blue tail. Caught it bare-handed."
"Nice fish!" Li Yesheng looked down into the basket and smiled with envy.
Li Yesheng's father had been bedridden for years, and his elder brother was an idler who never did a lick of work, so the family often ate one meal with no notion where the next would come from. Most days he had to go beg a meal at the home of his uncle Li Mutian, his father's elder brother, and his cousin Li Xiangping had always treated him like his own little brother.
After a few more words, Li Yesheng shook his head and said, "That's enough, Brother. I'd better get back and watch the ducks—if I lose two of them, my brother really will beat me to death."
"Go on, go on."
Li Xiangping was in a hurry to look at whatever was down on the riverbed himself, and shooed him off.
"Right away!"
The moment he had left, Li Xiangping held his breath, dove, and sank to the riverbed. He groped his way back and forth across the whole stretch, and sure enough his hand closed on something round.
"Pff!"
Li Xiangping wiped his face and looked at the thing in his hand.
It was about the size of a palm: a small round disc of gray-green at the center, ringed about by a band of something like dark iron. Nothing remarkable about it.
Its face was cracked into seven or eight pieces, held together only by that rim. The back, though, bore a rather bizarre symbol, and Li Xiangping stared at it for a long while without being able to make out what it was supposed to look like.
"It does look a bit like Auntie's mirror." His aunt's household had the biggest fields, and she was the only one who could afford a mirror; ordinary village girls made do with a bucket of water. When his aunt first got that mirror, his mother had taken Li Xiangping along to see it—it really was handier than water.
But the mirror in his own hand was far too clouded, misty through and through, not a thing to be seen in it. Li Xiangping shook his head with regret, tossed the thing into his basket, and turned back to catching fish.
Lu Jiangxian had been in the water for a little over half a month. From the third day onward, the moon essence within him had stalled and stopped growing; he had wrestled with it another week, and the result was no progress whatsoever—beyond making himself glow, there was not a thing he could do.
That morning he was staring blankly at the big black carp beside him when a large hand pressed the fish straight down into the mud. The surroundings shook, and the hand seized the carp by the gills and hauled it away.
Lu Jiangxian was still tangled in the complicated feelings of laying eyes on a person for the first time when a big hand reached straight down and scooped up his true body.
A passably handsome big face loomed over him. Lu Jiangxian tensed for a moment; then the fellow chattered out a few sentences and flipped him into the basket, where he and the blue tail stared at each other, eyeball to eyeball.
In that instant Lu Jiangxian also realized a serious problem: he could hear, but that did not mean he could understand.
The speech of this land was a little like the dialects of Fujian and Zhejiang from his past life; he truly could not make out one word of it. That meant that if he could produce speech, the other person would not understand a word of his either—a thing that would greatly hinder him from fitting into this world.
Watching fish after little fish being tossed into the basket, Lu Jiangxian gathered his Qi and steadied his mind to probe his surroundings.
As the boy carefully raised his wooden fork, Lu Jiangxian felt a flicker of surprise: from this vantage point he could dimly sense the boy's mental activity—roughly where on the riverbed his attention was fixed, which particular fish it had settled on.
With the help of that sensing vantage, the boy muttered to himself every time he landed a fish, and before long Lu Jiangxian had grasped the exact pronunciation of the numbers three through six, and of the names of the different kinds of fish.
One step at a time, then.
Watching the boy stand and leave, Lu Jiangxian sighed. The child looked like a farmer's son; he would most likely hand this bronze-like object to his parents first.
He would have more contact with people, see whether he could slowly learn the local dialect, and, while keeping himself safe, find a way to strengthen his moon essence.