For weeks they sailed west beneath red skies and pale moons, but Niao’s ghost sailed with them. She had changed. No longer the quiet, sorrowful presence she once was, Niao now appeared with four arms, each one burdened—knives, saws, hooks, and strange tongs dangling from her spectral hands. The other ghosts were silent, at peace. Only Niao returned, and this confirmed the party’s fear: they had erred in burying her on Guibao.
As they neared Guibao, Salt, Bojing, and Bangqiu debated
their course. Sailing into Guibao’s harbor risked alerting the ruling
family—the same family suspected of necromantic rites and ties to Mouru Zhai.
But the magicians Salt and Bangqiu had grown more powerful, learning to
transform into birds, beasts, and things between. Rather than dock, they would drop
anchor some distance from Guibao; a small scouting party would make the final approach
from the sky.
Salt possessed a rare artifact: a magic cube, no larger than
a child’s toy, that could unfold into a modest house. She invited six of her
companions—Bangqiu, Bo-Jing, Qui-Gon, Nekhil, Ryu, and Fen— to enter the cube, the
extradimensional apartment. She stowed the cube in her belt and took to the air
in the form of a seagull.
Salt flew alone to the graveyard and landed there. She
called her companions out of the magic apartment and together they tried to remember
where they had buried Niao.
The earth had been disturbed. Several graves lay open. As
she watched, a pair of gravediggers arrived and, without apology or
explanation, silently exhumed another body in its burlap wrappings, loaded it
onto a cart, and wheeled it down the hill.
The party followed—quiet and invisible—past rice paddies and
through the forest until they arrived at the courtyard of Guibao Manor. There,
the family patriarch emerged and gave a single command. The cart was wheeled to
a barn and locked inside.
Ryu, ever seeking divine insight, asked to be shown one of
the strange tools Niao had carried in her ghostly hands. Nothing appeared. He
tried again, this time focusing on a jeweled item once worn by Niao. Again,
nothing.
They concluded: Niao’s body was not in the graveyard. Nor in
the barn. Somewhere else.
Salt, Bangqiu, and Bojing hatched a bizarre plan. Both Salt
and Bangqiu could become albatrosses. Bo-Jing could not fly, but his magical
boots made him weightless. If strapped securely to a flying ally, he could
drift like a lantern in the sky. With help, they crafted a sturdy harness from
horse tack in the stables—enchanting it for strength and comfort. Bo-Jing would
hold Ryu, whose magic could seek buried artifacts from above, while Salt and
Bangqiu towed them through the sky on ropes, their wide wings cutting over the
island like shadows of storm birds.
Their first target: the snow-covered mountains at the
island’s northern tip. There, nestled between windswept ridges, lay a
half-buried stone structure long forgotten.
They descended.
White marble mausoleums rose from the snow like
teeth—silent, gleaming, cold. Ryu closed his eyes, his breath shallow from the
thin air. When he opened them, he whispered:
“It’s here. Under the snow. Under the ground. The iron tongs
with the clawed hands.”
The wind howled. Snow blew in tight, sharp spirals.
Somewhere below, Niao’s body—and something worse—waited.
