"Innocence," Lord Yama declared, turning and climbing back up the steps, "might have been pardoned. A man may write a gentle story if he promises a gentle story. But you dangled the hook. You *baited*, sinner. And then you served an empty plate." He settled into his enormous chair, which groaned beneath him, and drew the file toward himself. "Your narrative was lacking. Your readers suffered. And this monarch suffered most of all."
He picked up a brush of black bone and dipped it in the steaming inkstone.
From under the stack of scrolls, one of the officials slid out a book. It was thick, bound in pale leather, its edges ragged with age—and the moment it appeared, Liu Mang felt it. A pull. A thread running out of his chest, out through the white robe, across the hall, up the nine steps, and into the pages of that book, as if part of him were written down in there.
The Book of Life and Death.
Lord Yama turned the pages until he found a line. He studied it.
"Liu Mang," he read. "Born in the north. Mediocre student. Mediocre son. Mediocre author. Destined to live to the age of ninety." He lifted the brush. "This monarch's dissatisfaction shall cost you two-thirds of that span."
The brush descended.
Liu Mang *felt* it. A cold stroke straight through the center of his being, as if someone had drawn a blade across a rope inside him and sixty years of rope had simply fallen away into darkness. All the mornings he would never see. All the meals. All the women he had never quite worked up the courage to talk to. Gone, with one wet line of ink.
"No—" He lunged forward. His body still would not rise; he only managed to drag himself a few inches across the jade on his elbows, his palms squeaking against the polished stone. "No, no, no, this can't happen. Your Majesty, please! I haven't even found a girlfriend yet! I've never been married! Show mercy—at least let me get married first! At least let me hold someone's hand!"
"Kneel!"
The red-hot iron rod came down across his shoulders.
The pain was enormous—bright, white, and searing, like hot oil poured directly onto the nerves of his soul. It burned through the white robe and left a smoking welt. Liu Mang screamed and flattened against the floor, and Ox-Head's hoof planted between his shoulder blades, pinning him there while Horse-Face lifted the rod again, snorting through enormous nostrils.
"His Majesty did not give you permission to crawl," Horse-Face neighed.
On the dais, Lord Yama's lip curled. A slow, cruel, satisfied sneer spread across his bearded face.
"Very well," the King of Hell said. "Since you plead for mercy, this monarch shall grant you a chance."
Liu Mang lifted his face off the jade, tears and snot streaking his cheeks. "R-really?"
"You will be returned to the world." Yama tapped the brush against the edge of the inkstone. "To *your* world—the world you wrote and then strangled in its cradle. Within ten years, you shall alter its conclusion. Give this monarch the ending he was promised." His eyes glittered. "Fail, and this monarch shall decree your death personally. And you will die an eternal bachelor—forbidden for the rest of your miserable days from so much as *touching a woman's hand*."
The words fell into the hall like stones into a well.
For a long moment, Liu Mang simply knelt there, the welt on his shoulders still smoking, his mouth opening and closing.
Then something snapped.
Maybe it was the iron rod. Maybe it was the sixty years drawn out of him with a single line of ink. Maybe it was the sheer, staggering *pettiness* of it. He had spent a year writing that novel. A year of sleepless nights and cold noodles and arguing with commenters. He had given his characters a happy ending because, after everything, he had *wanted* them to be happy.
And for that, the King of Hell was condemning him to death and celibacy.
Liu Mang pushed himself up as far as the floor would let him. He pointed a shaking finger at the dais.
"I," he declared, his voice cracking with outrage, "have never in my life witnessed conduct so shameless, so contemptible, so *depraved* as that of the Lord of the Underworld!"
The hall gasped. A thousand ghosts drew a thousand breaths they did not need.
The white tongue of White Impermanence curled up in shock. Black Impermanence covered his mouth with one hand, his tongue sticking out between his fingers.
Lord Yama's face turned the color of an old bruise.
"Abandoning his work!" he roared, rising so violently that his chair crashed backward. "Leaving it unfinished! Deceiving his readers! *To the eighteenth level of hell with him!* Seize him! *Seize him!*"
"Understood!"
Ox-Head and Horse-Face moved as one.
Iron chains whipped through the air, heavy and black and ice-cold, and wrapped around Liu Mang's body before he could draw a breath. One around his chest, crushing his ribs together. One around his waist. One looping his ankles and yanking them tight. The links bit into his soul-flesh like teeth. Horse-Face planted a hoof on his back and *pulled*, and the chains cinched until Liu Mang's spine bent backward and his arms twisted behind him into a shape no living body could have survived.
*It hurts—gods, it hurts, I'm already dead, how can it HURT—*
"This is unjust!" he howled. "Unjust! I'm innocent! I wrote a *happy ending!* Since when is that a crime?!"
No one answered him.
The ghosts in their rows did not look away. They leaned in. Their ruined faces pulled into grins—wide, ragged, delighted grins—and their chains swayed faster, *clink-clink-clink*, as if they were applauding.
"Serves him right," hissed a ghost with half a jaw. "An unfinished update deserves the crematorium!"
"The author who built a cliff and paved it over!"
"Wise is Your Majesty! Glorious is Your Majesty! Down with the unscrupulous author!"
"*Down with the author!*"
The chant spread down the rows, picked up by a thousand voices. *Down with the author! Down with the author!* Liu Mang was hauled along the floor between them, his bare heels squeaking across the jade, the chains grinding over his shoulders. Ghostly hands reached out as he passed—not to help, but to pinch, to poke, to flick his ears. One spat at him. The spittle was freezing.
The great doors at the end of the hall swung open on their own.
Beyond them was a gray world.
There was no sky. There was only a low, colorless ceiling of mist that pressed down so close it seemed he could reach up and touch it. The ground was ash: fine, pale, and soft as flour, rising in little puffs around Ox-Head's hooves. The air was dense with yin—Liu Mang could feel it now, with whatever senses a soul had, a thick, wet coldness that clung to the inside of his nose and settled into his lungs like river water. It weighed on him. It whispered.
Ahead, a line of souls shuffled along a path of gray stone. Old men, young women, children, a soldier still in his uniform. All of them in white. None of them looking up. They moved in silence toward a bridge.
The bridge was ancient stone, arched high over a gorge, its railings carved with grinning beasts worn smooth by ten thousand years of passing hands. At its head stood a stone tablet, black and weathered, carved with three large characters in blood-red paint.
*Naihe Bridge.*
The Bridge of Helplessness.
Liu Mang knew this name. He had used it once, in a side chapter—an old cultivator dying and remembering the legend. Every soul crossed it. Every soul drank from the bowl at its far end and forgot. And beneath it ran—
He heard the river before he saw it.
A low, endless, churning roar. And mixed into the roar, carried up by the mist, voices. Moaning. Gurgling. Calling names.
Ox-Head and Horse-Face did not drag him across the bridge.
They dragged him to the *middle* of it and stopped.
Liu Mang looked over the railing, and his whole soul turned to water.
The river below was black. Not dark—*black*, black as spilled ink, thick and slow and oily, its surface heaving in long, sluggish swells. The current ran in three directions at once, twisting over itself in knots that should not have been possible. The River of Three Ways. And it was not empty. Just under the surface, pale shapes drifted and rolled. Faces. Shoulders. Long hair fanned out like weeds. Every so often a hand broke the surface, white and wrinkled and grasping at nothing, then sank again.
The smell rose up to meet him: cold mud, rot, the sweet stink of drowned lotus.
"Brother Niu," Liu Mang said. His voice had gone very small. "Brother Ma." He tried to smile at them over his shoulder. It came out as a twitch. "What are we doing here? We're stopping for the view, right? Taking a little rest? Hell is very big. It's a long walk."
Ox-Head looked at Horse-Face.
Horse-Face looked at Ox-Head.
They nodded to each other with the calm, professional ease of men who had done this many times before.
"Let us proceed," said Ox-Head.
"No—wait—*wait*—"
They each seized a length of his chains and lifted him off the bridge like a sack of rice. For one dizzying second Liu Mang hung over the railing, wrapped in iron, his bare feet kicking above the black water.
"I can be reasonable! I'll rewrite it! I'll rewrite the whole thing! The senior brother can have a—a *redemption arc*—"
They threw him.
The fall was very short and lasted forever.
The mist tore around him. The roar of the river rose to a howl. The chains around his body, heavy as anchors, pulled him headfirst toward the water, and he had time to see the black surface rushing up and the pale faces below it turning, all at once, to look up at him—
He hit.
The cold was beyond cold. It slammed into him like a thousand needles of ice driven into every pore. The water closed over his head with a thick, heavy *glunk*, and the light of the gray world vanished.
Then the hands came.
They rose out of the black from every direction. Dozens. Hundreds. Pale, waterlogged hands with long, cracked nails, and they seized him—his ankles, his wrists, his hair, the chains across his chest—and *pulled*. Not with malice. With hunger. With the desperate, mindless hunger of the drowned for anything that was not yet drowned.
Liu Mang thrashed. His mind screamed for his arms to swim, his legs to kick, his body to *fight*—and his body, bound in iron, could do nothing but twitch.
His head broke the surface once.
"I can't swim!" he shrieked. Black water poured into his mouth. It tasted of silt and salt and tears. "I can't swim! I can't—*glurk*—I've had enough! I've had enough, I can't drink any more—!"
The hands pulled him under again.
The water filled his mouth, his nose, his throat. It was not like drowning in a living river—there was no burning, no bursting chest. Instead, the black water seeped *into* him. Into his thoughts. It was cold and heavy and full of voices, and as it soaked through him he felt the edges of himself begin to blur, like ink bleeding through wet paper.
*Who am I? Liu Mang. Twenty-eight. Writer. Writer of a bad novel. The cursor. The noodles. The peach blossoms, the cranes—*
The memories smeared. Ran together. The faces of the drowned pressed close, their mouths opening as if to kiss him, and their hands tightened, and the current turned three ways at once and spun him down, and down, and down, into a darkness so complete that even the cold went away.
The surface of the River of Three Ways smoothed over.
A single bubble rose and burst.
Then nothing.
On the bridge above, Ox-Head dusted off his enormous palms. Horse-Face leaned over the railing, watched the last ripples fade, and gave a satisfied snort.
"Job well done, Brother Ma."
"Job well done, Brother Niu."
They grinned at each other—a bull's grin and a horse's grin, all teeth and wet nostrils—and turned to go back to the palace.
A small, bent figure was waiting for them at the head of the bridge.
She was an old woman, no taller than Ox-Head's belt, her back curved like a shrimp, her white hair pulled into a tight bun skewered with a bone pin. Her face was a map of wrinkles so deep they seemed carved. She wore a faded blue apron. In her two wrinkled hands, she held an earthenware bowl, and from the bowl rose a thin wisp of steam that smelled of bitter herbs, old tea, and something faintly, sadly sweet—like the last day of a long summer.
She looked at the two guards. Then she looked at the smooth black water under the bridge. Then she looked at the full bowl in her hands.
"Did you," Meng Po asked mildly, "forget something?"
Ox-Head's grin froze.
Horse-Face's great yellow eyes slowly widened until the whites showed all around.
They turned their heads, in perfect unison, to stare down at the river where Liu Mang had vanished—a soul tossed into the currents of reincarnation with every one of his memories still intact.
"Oh no," said Ox-Head.
"Oh *no*," said Horse-Face.
"We forgot," Ox-Head whispered, "to give him the Meng Po soup."
The old woman sighed, a long, tired, ancient sigh, and poured the bowl out over the railing. The soup fell in a thin amber stream, vanished into the mist, and was gone.
In Nalan City, at the end of June, the sun hung over the rooftops like a white-hot coin.
It had not rained in twenty days. The heat pressed down on the city from a sky bleached nearly colorless, and the city lay beneath it and endured. Glazed roof tiles shimmered until their edges seemed to melt. The stone of the main avenues baked so hot that stray dogs ran across them on their toes and collapsed panting into whatever thin stripes of shade the eaves allowed. Cicadas screamed from every willow along the canals in one long, unbroken, maddening drone.
The canals themselves had shrunk, their green water sunk low between slimed stone banks, giving off a warm, sour reek. Banners hung limp from the shop fronts. Even the Qi in the air felt sluggish, thick and heavy as syrup, as though the heat had cooked the spiritual energy of heaven and earth and left it to cool in the streets.
It was the kind of heat that seemed to want something. As if the sun, peering down over Nalan City, had decided to wring every last drop of moisture from its walls, its wells, and its people—and would not stop until it had.