Seven years married, and my husband was cheating on me.

Heavy with child, I went to catch them in the act. I pushed the door open and found a litter of discarded clothes and two flayed human skins.

One was a woman’s.

One was my husband’s.

All I had wanted was to catch a cheater.

And now I was so frightened the baby was about to fly right out of me!

I was still crying when I burst through the door and ran.

It was too horrible—blood all over the floor.

Nothing but blood.

I wanted to call the police, but the place was so remote there was no signal at all.

Terrified, I jumped into my Porsche, slammed my foot down on the gas, and tore off.

Only after the car got off the highway did I calm down a little.

On the drive over, I simply could not understand it: if Jiang Tianqi was going to cheat, why choose the middle of nowhere?

You are the chief executive of Tiansheng Group, sneaking around behind my back—couldn’t you at least spring for a presidential suite?

Where is the class?

Little did I know the man was simply gone!

Gone!

I had gone straight from a cheated-on wife to a widow!

For a moment I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

My phone chimed and buzzed—there was signal again.

I hurriedly dialed 110. “Hello... sniff... my husband is dead... sniff...”

A traffic cop flagged me down. “Ma’am, you can’t use a phone while driving—why is it you again?”

I knew this cop. His surname was Ren; he had written me a ticket just a couple of days before.

The radiance of the people’s police warmed me, and I broke down sobbing like a tragedy heroine reciting her woes to every stranger. “Officer Ren, my husband is dead!”

“What?!”

“My husband is dead!” I wept. “Lately I suspected he was cheating, so I put a tracker in his car. Sure enough, this morning he headed out toward Jiulong Mountain beyond the city... When I got there, it was this incredibly run-down residential building, the staircase all rusted through. And the fourth-floor place where he was meeting her did not even have a door! Clothes were scattered on the floor—men’s and women’s—and further in, lying there peeled off, were two... two human skins!”

Officer Ren listened with great earnestness, then turned and waved. “Someone bring the breathalyzer over here and give Mrs. Jiang a test.”

“I have not been drinking! It is true, there was blood everywhere, and I do not think the murderer had even left! I heard these strange noises inside! It sounded, it sounded like... someone mixing dumpling filling, that sound of meat being churned together, you know what I mean?”

Perhaps I was crying too hard.

Officer Ren finally took my problem seriously.

He opened the car door and swapped places with me. “I’ll drive you to the station to report this.”

“Sniff... thank you.”

“But Mrs. Jiang, driving in high heels is a violation.”

“My husband is dead!!!”

“...”

Officer Ren saw me to the police station.

The moment I walked in, the police chief beamed. “Mrs. Jiang! We were just about to go looking for you! Thank goodness you are back safe and sound!”

Seeing my confusion, he explained, “Mr. Jiang came in to report just now that you had gone missing! You are carrying a child, after all, and we were deploying men to find you. Well, now—Mr. Jiang can rest easy.”

“You mean... my husband is still alive?”

I was stunned.

Could I have seen it wrong?

No—the Armani suit lying on that floor had definitely been his.

I had taken it out of the wardrobe with my own hands that very morning.

Even as he spoke, a crowd came through the door.

At their head walked a man in a tailored suit, a flock of secretaries trailing behind him.

“See? Here he is now.”

Jiang Tianqi walked in and spread his arms indulgently. “Jiaojiao, where did you run off to?”

I studied my husband carefully.

He...

He was perfectly fine.

Handsome and debonair, not a hair out of place.

—Had I had a nightmare in the car?

—Or had the fear of being cheated on driven me completely out of my mind?

As he always did, he gently cupped my face. “Look at you. I have been searching everywhere.”

My heart gave a violent lurch!

The smell of iron rust!

A faint rust smell came from his right hand!

That was the smell of that crumbling staircase!

He had absolutely been there...

I shoved him away.

“What is it?” Jiang Tianqi tilted his head.

“Husband... I think we should spend some time apart, calm down.”

“Why?”

Under his focused gaze I could barely breathe.

I needed an excuse, a reasonable way to get away from him...

“...I have been cheating on you.” I closed my eyes in agony.

The whole station went quiet.

The next second, Officer Ren climbed out of my Porsche.

“What is going on here?” he asked, holding my car keys.

Jiang Tianqi’s eyes narrowed.

I quickly grabbed Officer Ren’s arm and walked us out, whispering, “Just walk! Don’t look back!”

Half an hour later.

Officer Ren paced back and forth in front of me. “So you told Mr. Jiang that you are keeping me?”

“It is not ‘keeping,’ don’t make it sound so sordid... just an affair.”

“Just? An affair?”

Officer Ren turned on the television.

Every headline was reporting “Tiansheng Group chief executive cruelly cuckolded.”

On his personal Weibo, Jiang Tianqi responded: “Every married couple hits the seven-year itch. Jiaojiao only needs to know that I will always, always be right here, waiting for you to come home. I also hope that anyone who sees Jiaojiao will help talk sense into her. She is carrying our child; this is not a rational choice.”

Attached was a photo of me.

To be fair, the retouching was decent.

Officer Ren took my phone away. “Mrs. Jiang, stop scrolling Weibo. You realize that after this stunt of yours, I will never get promoted? You are going home right now, immediately, clarifying to Mr. Jiang that I am not the other man, and then taking care of your high-heel traffic ticket.”

“I cannot go back. There is really something wrong with my husband.” I told him about the rust smell.

Officer Ren sighed. “Then let us go take a look at the scene right now. If there really is blood and human skin like you say, we hand it to the major crimes unit. If there is not, you go home and let Mr. Jiang take you to a brain doctor. Deal?”

I nodded like a chicken pecking rice.

Officer Ren flatly refused to get back into my flashy Porsche.

I sat in the passenger seat of a Wuling and we returned to the scene of the crime.

In the dead of night, we climbed the abandoned stairs to the fourth floor. The ghastly glow of our phones showed a spotless floor.

“This is not possible!” I gasped, rushing in to search everywhere. “I definitely saw it, I saw...”

“I have been holding this in.” Officer Ren looked at me with contempt. “The clothes and the blood, fine. But human skin? You kept saying ‘my husband’s flayed skin’—could you really recognize someone’s nose and eyes off a real human pelt?”

“I have slept with him for seven years. You think I would not know his skin?”

As we argued, my phone rang. It was the private detective I had hired. “Mrs. Jiang, there are results on the matter you asked us to investigate.”

“I don’t even care anymore whether he is cheating.”

“...He has secretly dated nineteen girlfriends, one after another.”

“Damn it! Send me the photos! Now! Immediately!”

Sitting in the Wuling’s passenger seat, I swiped through dozens of gigabytes of photos.

In every shot Jiang Tianqi wore all black—black cap, black mask, covered head to toe—with a different beauty on his arm.

And handsome men too.

I felt I could skin Jiang Tianqi myself right now!

“How is he this capable... how does he manage his schedule?”

“Not only does Mr. Jiang manage his time beautifully, he distributes his money beautifully too. After each brief affair, these girls were sent abroad and never came back. That is why you never knew, ma’am.”

I let out a wail.

My life is so cruel.

“Wait.” I caught the blind spot. “Not a single one ever came back?”

“That is right. They were all arranged to go overseas.”

“Are you sure they actually went abroad?” I trembled. “Can you find any trace of even one of those lovers... a living person always leaves traces, right? Even abroad—check. Check now!”

The drive was forty minutes.

Over the phone he checked three of them.

No updates on social media.

No movement in their bank balances.

Not even exit-and-entry records.

Nothing at all.

“Damn it.”

Officer Ren’s face finally went as white as mine.

I threw myself onto his arm. “Officer Ren! You have to do something about this! Never mind the police station—my husband has bought the whole city government!”

“I’m a freaking traffic cop!”

“And I’m a pregnant woman!!!” I cried so hard tears and snot were flying. “Have some pity on me—the father of my child has killed nineteen people, he is a maniac!”

“And I’d be number twenty.” Officer Ren’s face was the color of ash.

“Don’t you have a dream of serving the people? Huh? Think of me, a widow and an orphan—ever since I married my husband I have stayed home and never even peeled a shrimp for myself!! What am I supposed to do now, fight him one-on-one?!”

“Oh, stop.”

Officer Ren clapped a hand over my mouth.

In the end, he took merciful pity and sheltered me.

The private detective also promised to hand over the whereabouts of the nineteen girls the next day.

But it would cost extra.

Once again I sat on a park bench beside Fuming Street.

Last time I had met the private detective right here.

Before the appointed time, someone sat down beside me.

“Look at the life you are living.” Long, slender fingers lifted a strand of my hair. “You didn’t even change handbags today.”

I slid violently away.

It was Jiang Tianqi!

He was dressed all in black, cap and black mask—the exact outfit from the photos!

I hugged my crocodile-leather handbag in terror. Am I about to die?!

“Where were you last night?”

He reached out and pinched the back of my neck, the way you would pinch a kitten.

“Tianqi, I... I feel our relationship has already broken down, so I didn’t check in.”

“Why? Is our love really this fragile, unable to withstand a single test?”

His voice was as gentle and magnetic as ever.

My tears streamed down like they cost nothing.

The tests I had imagined were things like forced abortions, mistresses, battles with the in-laws, rich-family intrigue...

It never occurred to me that I would catch a mistress and find your flayed skin lying on the floor!

All this blood and gore...

I am only four months pregnant. Why do I have to endure a test like this?!

I choked out, “I’m sorry.”

“Did someone say something to you?” Jiang Tianqi leaned in, coaxing me patiently. “Was it that Officer Ren?”

“Don’t ask. Either way, I don’t love you anymore.” I turned my head away. “And the baby in my belly isn’t yours either.”

Jiang Tianqi smiled gently. “That isn’t possible.”

In the sunlight, his irises were very pale—pale gold. “Even if you cheated, my sperm would kill a human man’s sperm.”

My mind went weng.

He had just used a very clinical word: human.

—Is that a word that comes up in divorce negotiations?

Across the road, someone was walking over—the private detective.

Jiang Tianqi lifted his hand and snapped his fingers, lightly.

A large truck came hurtling past in front of me.

Then came bang, scrape—

The crowd burst into an uproar.

A mess of flesh and blood lay scattered across the road.

I slowly slid to the ground.

“I won’t agree to a divorce easily, not unless you can produce evidence that our affections have broken down. Do you have any, Jiaojiao?” Jiang Tianqi held me, murmuring in my ear.

I shook my head.

“Then what other problem is there?”

There was one.

I felt like I was having a miscarriage.

Jiang Tianqi drove me home.

Doctors were already standing by in the house.

My family’s company was in biomedicine; ever since I got pregnant I had never once been to a hospital—a whole top-tier medical team monitored my body around the clock.

Jiang Tianqi carried me to bed, and the doctors wired me up to all kinds of instruments.

“Madam is unharmed. Mother and child are both well.”

Jiang Tianqi exhaled in relief and laid his hand on my belly, stroking it fondly.

“Don’t go running off again. You are carrying a child.”

His eyes were tender, as if nothing had happened.

As if half an hour earlier he had not killed a man with a snap of his fingers.

It made me feel split in two.

Jiang Tianqi and I had always had a good relationship, so after everything that happened, my first instinct was to suspect that “he” was not him.

That something else was wearing my husband’s shell.

But now, of my own accord, I ruled that possibility out.

Eyes do not lie.

“He” really was the partner I had loved for ten years.

But then how to explain the inexplicable affairs, the murders, the superpowers?

My head buzzing, I fell into a heavy sleep in his arms.

When I woke, even I despised myself.

Liu Jiaojiao, how could you sleep?!

Jiang Tianqi made lunch and brought it over.

He asked if I was moved.

I was too scared to twitch.

“Don’t you have to work today?” I asked, sweating cold.

“The baby needs a father.” Jiang Tianqi stroked my belly gently again.

My husband had always had one quirk: sometimes he spoke very strangely.

Take this sentence.

A baby who has not even been born yet—why would it need a father?

Even as pillow talk, wasn’t this the moment for “Wife, do you need me?”?

Because we had been married so long, I had always brushed off that strangeness.

Now, at this moment, the eeriness of it seeped out through my skin again.

—Could he be stating a fact?

—Is the child in my belly different from other babies, which is why he needs Jiang Tianqi to stay with me?

My heart went half cold.

What is my husband?!

What is my child?!

I lifted my eyes to the instruments by the bed.

I really, genuinely wanted to go to a hospital for a proper prenatal exam now!

The problem was, I could not even leave the room.

Luckily, my husband was still my husband, and I had no end of ways to manage him.

I sat up and pushed away the nutrition meal. “I don’t want this. I want roast squab from Lei Garden.”

“Roast squab takes forever to make.”

“I want it anyway. And after I eat, I am going by Hankyu—the shoes and bags I ordered have arrived.”

I had always been a drama queen.

Now I was pregnant too!

Jiang Tianqi could not out-stubborn me.

“Lie there. I’ll go get them for you.” He shot me a look and went out.

The moment his front foot crossed the threshold, I grabbed my shoes and slipped out of the house without a word, heading straight for the traffic police station.

Officer Ren was interrogating a driver. Seeing me, he came out with his thermos. “When you went to Fuming Street for the photos this morning, did you see the car accident there?”

“I was just about to tell you. My private detective is dead! Dead! Struck dead by a truck! He did it!”

Officer Ren’s face fell at once.

He knew who the “he” was.

This time he did not call me delusional. He led me straight outside the interrogation room to eavesdrop.

The driver had been sober, his speed well within the limit—the road there was capped at sixty, and he had been going far below it.

“And then suddenly the truck just flew! I wasn’t even on the gas! Really! I hit the brakes, and it was no use—the truck was completely out of control!”

Officer Ren said quietly, “We checked the skid marks and the speed monitors. Given the engine’s power output, there is no way it could have reached that speed. It was more like... like the whole truck got dragged through the air by some strange outside force.”

“My husband snapped his fingers right then.”

Officer Ren was silent for a long while, then glanced at me. “Your husband doesn’t think much of Newton, does he.”

“Officer Ren, I came to you today for something more important... can you take me to get a prenatal checkup?”

“Hah?”

After his shift, the two of us stood outside the obstetrics department of First Hospital.

I negotiated: “Can I use your insurance card?”

Officer Ren: “Do you hear yourself?”

“...My husband is in the medical business. The second I swipe my card he’ll know. Before I even get an ultrasound, he’ll drag me back home.”

Officer Ren rolled his eyes and dutifully went to the registration counter. “Obstetrics.”

The nurse gave him a strange look. “You? Obstetrics?”

He came up with a clumsy lie. “She doesn’t have insurance, my card covers it, faster please.”

The nurse asked me, “Are you sure you want to have a baby for a cheapskate like this?”

“No, no, no, the baby isn’t his, it’s my husband’s. My husband is better-looking than him and richer than him. We’re just having some marital problems, which is why I came to him.”

The nurse’s expression grew more and more contorted.

Officer Ren’s face turned to ice and he clapped a hand over my mouth.

After much persuasion the form was issued, and I lay on the ultrasound table.

The doctor had been chatting idly when she suddenly swore.

I asked nervously, “What is it? What’s wrong with my baby?”

“You... you’re not pregnant.” The doctor stammered, “What are all these dense things in your uterus... are they insect eggs?”

A thunderclap out of a clear sky. “What? Insect eggs?”

“...And your liver is gone.” Pale-faced, she kept moving the probe over my abdomen. “Your whole liver seems to have been... eaten away.”

After the full panel of tests, I collapsed onto a hospital bench and howled.

“He’s definitely using me for some biology experiment, sniff... after all these years together, he’s been treating me like a lab mouse... he’s so cruel! He doesn’t love me anymore, sniff...”

“At a time like this you’re still hung up on whether he loves you?” Officer Ren was stunned. “Even a love-sick brain ought to have a bottom line, lady. Your liver is gone.”

“If he doesn’t love me anymore, then let me die, let the bugs eat me clean!” I slumped on the bench bawling.

“Hey, pull yourself together, there’s always a way!”

Just then, a white-haired but vigorous professor swept up to me with a retinue. “You are Ren Tiantang?”

“What? Your name is Ren Tiantang?” I looked at Officer Ren.

“That’s right, what of it?” Officer Ren shook the professor’s hand with a cold face. “I’m Ren Tiantang, and this is...”

“...a patient who wishes to remain anonymous,” I said quickly.

“Your case is extremely unusual, extremely rare... I would like to become your attending physician.”

“Doctor, can I still be saved? Are my chances of living good?”

“Theoretically you should already be dead.” The professor pushed up his glasses solemnly. “There are numerous parasites in your uterus, robbing the mother’s body of nutrients, to the point that your organs are dissolving to supply them energy... and yet, strangely, your body shows no sign of failure. With every indicator haywire, you are simultaneously uncanny and perfectly healthy—a miracle.”

I raised a thread of hope. “Then can I get an abortion right now?”

“You must leave the live samples of those unknown parasites in your uterus to me.”

“Take them, please.”

At the thought that after ten years with Jiang Tianqi, all he had left me was a pile of bugs, I started whimpering and crying again.

The professor had his assistant bring the consent form. “The father signs here.”

“I’m not her husband.” Officer Ren stepped back. “I’m merely a people’s policeman passing by.”

I grabbed the pen and signed. “Do the surgery quickly. My husband won’t agree to an abortion. Once he finds out, it’ll be too late for anything.”

Because my body could earn the professor ten SCI papers.

In the end we violated every surgical regulation, and I was on the operating table that very night.

Under the shadowless lamp, I was given a partial anesthetic. The professor took up the scalpel and cut open my belly.

Suddenly the lights in the room buzzed and dimmed.

Then, among the white-coated doctors, a black figure appeared.

Long straight hair, big hoop earrings, a sexy leather outfit, watching me without much expression.

I screamed. “AAH!!! AAH!!!!”

The professor’s hand shook in fright. “What are you shrieking about?”

“Someone’s behind you!!!”

The professor turned and jumped. “How did you get in?!”

The words were barely out of his mouth when a shockwave exploded out of thin air, hurling the medical staff away as if by invisible hands.

The instruments popped and sparked.

In an instant the operating room was a shambles. Everyone was knocked out, leaving only me lying open-bellied on the table. “Don’t come any closer!”

I recognized her!

She was my husband’s latest mistress!

That day in the abandoned fourth floor, what I had seen was her human skin and my husband’s, peeled off together!

Ignoring my screams, she stepped forward with grace and, without the slightest hesitation, plunged her hand straight into my wound!

“AAAAAHHHHH!”

I felt an ice-cold hand churning around inside me, as if searching for something!

Just as I was about to pass out from the pain, fine little tentacles suddenly rolled out of my wound.

They grew and climbed at an impossible speed, thickening and reddening, and coiled around her arm.

She frowned and tried to pull her hand free, but the tentacles cinched tight and, with a snap, cut her right hand clean off!

Cut it clean off!

I don’t know where I found the strength, but I scrambled off the table, screamed the door open, and ran. “Help! Help!”

My friends, the scene at that moment was beyond terrifying.

There was not a single soul in the whole corridor; outside, a torrential rain poured, and not a crack of light leaked in.

And there I was, belly open, a severed hand still stuck in it, my husband’s mistress dragging her remaining left hand after me with a black face!

I left a trail of blood the whole way, and between that and the anesthetic I couldn’t run far.

I was soon cornered at the window at the end of the corridor.

“Give me his sperm,” the woman said calmly, closing in.

I erupted. “I am his wife!”

The next instant, the window above my head flew open, and the storm swept in.

I looked up.

Jiang Tianqi, in suit and tie, face dark as a storm, clung in a climbing crouch to the window frame of the thirteenth floor.

“Husband, she’s threatening me...” I cried on the spot.

“It’s all right.” He reached down and stroked my head, then suddenly threw a punch and knocked the woman’s head clean off her body!

The head rolled across the tiles with a gurgle.

Only then did I notice: neither her arm nor her neck was bleeding!

The headless corpse was completely unfazed and swiped at me. My husband grabbed her one-handed and hurled her out the window, then dove after her into the rain and vanished.

I could not take any more and fainted dead away.

In my dream I kept hearing an eerie flute melody.

The tune was familiar, but I could not for the life of me remember where I had heard it.

Later the flute turned into frantic screaming, and I was jolted awake.

The same corridor was before me, but this time it was ablaze with lights, staff pushing carts back and forth.

“Ma’am, are you all right? Ma’am?” a doctor called in my ear.

“Not really... the doctor cut my belly open and then something happened and it never got sewn up...” I whimpered, pulling open my surgical gown.

But I quickly found that, aside from a little blood, there was no wound on my belly.

Naturally there were no tentacles and no severed limb either...

Had I had some strange dream?

“Bring the old professor quickly, I have something to ask him... why is it so noisy here? Who keeps screaming?”

Screams rose and fell all along the corridor.

Like a mass hysterical fit.

Frantic, terrified, unbroken, they filled the entire thirteenth floor, to the point that no one could hold a normal conversation.

The staff moved me into a ward, looking at me with fear. “...The professor can’t come. He... they’ve all gone mad.”

I froze.

Gone mad?

“When we entered the operating room, everyone was on the floor, and the table was empty. We gave the surgical team emergency care, and when they woke up, they were like this. Do you know anything about it?”

“She knows nothing.” The door was pushed open.

Jiang Tianqi walked in.

He was the worse for wear—suit torn, covered in blood, clearly fresh from a fierce battle.

He took a large bath towel from a nurse, wrapped it around me, and gently wiped my face. “It’s over.”

The moment he soothed me like that,

my tears poured down again like they cost nothing.

“What even is all this...” I whimpered, hugging his shoulders.

Damn, he smelled awful.

A sour, rancid stench.

If I didn’t genuinely love him, I’d have thrown up.

Just as Jiang Tianqi was helping me up to go home, the homicide captain burst into the ward. “Mr. Jiang, please come with us. We suspect you’re connected to a murder case.”

My heart flew into my throat.

What now?!

At a juncture like this, the police had found my husband?

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Just half an hour ago, a fresh human skin was found in a trash can on Huaihai Road.” The captain showed a photo. “Surveillance captured you visiting the spot.”

“You’re saying I peeled it off and dumped it there?” Jiang Tianqi chuckled. “Have you ever skinned a human being?”

The captain: ?

“It is a craft. The Aztec priests flayed one human skin every spring equinox as an offering to the sun god—they were masters of human sacrifice, could cut out a heart every sixteen seconds, and even they needed two hours for one intact pelt. Two hours ago I was at Hankyu picking up my wife’s bags. I didn’t do it.”

I said quietly, “Husband, your knowledge is so vast... though, to be fair, you sound even more suspicious now.”

Jiang Tianqi smiled. “You say I flayed the skin—then where’s the meat?”

A young detective ran in. “The rest of the body has been found.”

“Where?”

The young detective darted glances.

“Out with it!”

“The body... is impaled on the lightning rod on the hospital roof,” he stammered.

The captain’s face went white at once.

“So you’re saying I skinned a person, tossed the skin in a trash can, and hung the meat on the lightning rod of the twenty-second floor? You amuse me.” Jiang Tianqi chuckled, picked up his jacket and brushed it off, then took my hand, meaning to go home.

The captain stopped him. “Then whose blood is that all over you?”

Jiang Tianqi’s footsteps halted. “My wife nearly miscarried just now.”

“...Enough to cover you head to toe?”

Jiang Tianqi put an arm around my shoulders. “What a thing to say. Don’t you have a wife? Don’t you know a pregnant woman can hemorrhage?”

The captain’s expression shifted subtly, and he asked a nurse beside him, “Is that so?”

“We don’t know the details ourselves. Mrs. Jiang is Professor Lin’s patient, but Professor Lin and his team have all gone mad.”

Baffling as it was,

our Jiang family looked guiltier than ever!

“Mr. Jiang, you appear at a murder scene, you claim you’re covered in your wife’s blood, and your wife’s doctors all conveniently lose their minds. Isn’t that all a little too neat?”

“Perhaps they simply saw something they shouldn’t have. Human cognition has its limits. Sometimes the unknown is a kind of protection.”

Click.

The captain snapped the handcuffs on him.

Clearly, unlike me, he didn’t buy my husband’s mystic routine.

Before being led away, Jiang Tianqi came over and held me.

“Keep my child alive.” He spoke softly in my ear. “As long as I exist, he will protect you.”

Saying so, he stroked my belly out of habit.

Maybe it was my imagination.

But my pregnant belly seemed bigger...

My husband was arrested.

The entire Tiansheng legal team mobilized, comforting me at the station as I fainted crying: it’s all right, he’ll be out soon, they can’t make the charges stick, there won’t be any evidence...

My feelings were complicated.

On the one hand, I certainly didn’t want Jiang Tianqi to face a firing squad.

On the other, I didn’t want him out this quickly either.

My husband was definitely hiding something from me.

And it wasn’t small.

The bastard had it locked down so tight the law couldn’t touch him, let alone a housewife like me.

I decided to investigate him from another angle.

I went to the police and reported that the victim had had an illicit relationship with my husband:

“Can’t you tell me who this woman really was, why did she destroy my family, sniff...”

The old detective was kind enough to tell me the victim was named Xu Tianyi, a photographer. “Two years ago she gave up a generous salary and quit National Geographic. After that her movements were erratic. Only last week she came to S City from Qi County—Mrs. Jiang, she and Mr. Jiang had no prior contact whatsoever. This doesn’t look like a crime of passion.”

“Then what did she come to S City for?”

“We’re investigating.”

Since Xu Tianyi didn’t even have a hotel record in S City and seemed to have no fixed lodging, the old detective planned to drive overnight to Qi County, the last place she had left a trail.

I quickly had Officer Ren chase after them.

“I must be sick, tailing police comrades in the middle of the night.”

“If I were you I’d do it. After all, the moment my husband gets out and learns you took me to that prenatal exam, the next one hung on a lightning rod will be you.”

Officer Ren swore and hit the gas.

S City to Qi County was a long drive, and somewhere along the way I fell asleep in the passenger seat.

Almost the moment my eyes closed, the eerie flute sounded in my ears again.

The melody grew louder and louder until I couldn’t stand it. “Ren Tiantang, what netherworld music are you playing!”

But the scene before me changed.

I was not in the car.

I was in a semi-subterranean earthen hut.

The sky was dim. Several women in ancient costume spoke beside my bed.

Their accent was strange, unfamiliar, not any language I knew, yet my body, as if stamped with a deep mark of its own, sat up from the bed and followed them out the door with perfect deference.

Only then did I realize I could not control my body.

—This has to be a dream.

Outside the door was a vast plaza.

Along both sides of the broad road, tall poles were planted every few paces, dark things hanging from them.

I walked a long time before I realized, before I realized...

Every one of those was a person!

Some had their limbs hacked off!

Some had been split down the middle into two halves, ribs splayed wide!

I remembered a book about the evolution of writing.

It said that in oracle bone script, words like yong and mao originally meant flesh offered to the gods.

They most directly depicted the shape of a human sacrifice, emptied of organs and hung up.

I nearly threw up—how long was this road?

How many people hung along it?

I walked to the high platform at the center of the plaza and, together with two other young women, received three golden basins from the hands of the high priest.

In the basins were, respectively, a human head.

A human heart.

And minced flesh.

I was going to be sick, but under the gaze of the sovereign on the heights, my dreaming body carried the basin toward an earthen mound nearby, as if long inured to it.

Our procession walked into the mound in the morning light, into that wide-gaping cave, where bonfires on the walls stretched our shadows into uncanny leaps.

There was a great boulder in the passage, its top hewn into a shrine niche, and we set the golden basins in the niche.

The girl beside me babbled a stream of words at me.

This time I seemed to understand.

What she said was: “Xi Wa, the Tai Sui is yours to attend from now on.”

Out of habit I snatched the bone flute from my waist and raised it to my lips.

An unearthly melody rose.

My companions all retreated in fear.

The firelight shuddered violently and bowed low toward the mouth of the cave.

A cold gust blew out from within.

Sha-sha... sha-sha...

I heard again that sound from the day I had gone to catch a cheater—the sound of flesh churning, rubbing.

A massive shadow loomed above my head, a terrible weight of dread pressing down, and I stood frozen, not daring to move.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a blurred shape hook itself over the boulder and slowly, slowly crawl out...

“Ah!” I screamed and jolted awake.

“One night of sleep and you’re still this full of grievances?” Officer Ren glanced at me, dark circles under his eyes, cheeks sunken. “Should’ve made you drive.”

“I had a nightmare!” I was still shaken.

“Why are you so much trouble—pregnant one minute, miscarrying the next, now nightmares. What’s your Mr. Jiang’s number? I’m handing you back to him.”

If my Tianqi weren’t in jail, I couldn’t have stopped myself from calling him either!

Not only did I have nightmares, strangers were nagging me out here, sniff!

A little past nine in the morning, we reached Qi County.

The old detective had already sealed Xu Tianyi’s room; we couldn’t get up.

The team’s driver, Old Zhang, smoked below, watching the two uninvited guests with a dark face.

As it happened, Xu Tianyi’s guesthouse was on the tourist street, and a guide sidled up to drum up business. “Where are you folks from? Care for the Qi County one-day tour? Private car.”

When we declined, he asked, “Then how about the Jiang Mansion? Just across the street, fifteen yuan admission.”

My mind clicked. “The Jiang Mansion? Is the master’s surname Jiang?”

“Yes, yes, the great landowning family, passed down since Ming and Qing, wealthy for generations—look at those horse-head walls, ho! What grandeur. The whole family moved to America at the end of the Qing, and I hear after the Reform and Opening they came back as overseas Chinese to invest, you know, that... that...”

“Tiansheng Group!”

No wonder the rags-to-riches story sounded so familiar—wasn’t this my husband’s ancestral home?!

Xu Tianyi was staying right beside the Jiang ancestral house—what a coincidence?

I absolutely had to see it.

“Fifteen yuan admission.”

“I am the young mistress of the Jiang family. This is my family’s house. Do I need a ticket to come home?”

The ticket seller rolled his eyes and pointed at the plaque: NATIONALLY PROTECTED ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE.

I was about to argue further when Officer Ren quickly paid and dragged me inside.

The Jiang ancestral house was enormous.

And very strange: every door was built extraordinarily tall—wastefully tall by the proportions of a human being.

I had never seen doorways like them in any other Chinese historic building.

“Liu Jiaojiao.” Officer Ren suddenly called me from the main hall.

“Why so serious, using my full name?”

Officer Ren stared fixedly at the opposite wall and pointed. “Look.”

Unlike an ordinary late-Qing household, the hall had no gods or spirits pasted up; instead there was a wall of photographs.

Most had peeled away.

But one was perfectly clear: the Jiang patriarch sitting side by side with a Qing-dynasty official.

He wore a long riding jacket, young and handsome, posture ramrod straight, and his face, his face...

“Would an ancestor from over a hundred years ago look this much like a descendant?” Officer Ren asked me.

“It’s not a resemblance.” I lifted the photo off the wall and gently wiped the dust away. “It’s identical to Tianqi.”

“What do you mean? You’re saying this is your husband? Let me see... photographed in 1898—wouldn’t that make him at least a hundred and fifty years old?”

“...He’s strange enough already. This doesn’t make the top ten.” I was rattled.

I recalled a detail: my husband never took pictures.

Apart from our wedding photos together and the occasional candid I was allowed to snap, he refused all cameras, gave almost no interviews.

Just then my phone rang. The old detective was calling us up. “Mrs. Jiang, we’ve found some strange things.”

At first I wondered why he would open Xu Tianyi’s room to us.

I understood once I got there.

The entire wall was blood—great sweeping sheets of it, splashed even across the ceiling, and the bathtub was full of meticulously cleaned human bones.

Local officers were busy preserving evidence. The old detective led us to a corkboard. “It looks like Xu Tianyi was investigating the Jiang family, investigating your husband. Did she ever mention it to you?”

I studied the corkboard, its web of clues, pins, sticky notes and photographs—

1130 BC, the Battle of Muye...

218 BC, Xu Fu’s eastward voyage...

AD 79, the fall of Pompeii...

630, Xuanzang’s westward journey...

794, the passing of the Eight-Hundred-Year Priestess in Heian-kyō...

...

Her handwriting was wild, almost nauseating to look at, and the linked words were completely unintelligible—just a series of seemingly unrelated historical events.

I rubbed my temples and focused on the only two photographs.

Beside the words “1900 Alaska,” a man who looked exactly like Jiang Tianqi, dressed in traditional Eskimo clothing, stood among a group of white whalers, staring coldly into the lens.

Behind them was an enormous whale, and beyond it the rolling icebergs of the Arctic Ocean.

The next was “1996, Return to China”: a candid shot of Jiang Tianqi in suit and tie stepping out of a car.

“Is this Mr. Jiang?” the old detective asked, puzzled, pointing at the last silhouette.

“...I don’t know.”

“It must be your father-in-law,” the old detective said reflexively, filling the gap.

In his understanding, a person couldn’t remain unchanged for over twenty years, so it had to be the son.

Cold sweat on my back, I clutched the photo in my pocket and stared at the corkboard, tracing every thread to the source of all history: 1130 BC, Zhaoge.

If—suppose if—every person observed in those photographs was Jiang Tianqi,

then what made us think he had only lived a hundred and fifty years?

Xu Tianyi had pinned all this history here.

Could all of it be connected to Jiang Tianqi?

The hypothesis chilled me to the spine in an instant:

the husband who slept beside me every night might have walked this earth for a full three thousand years.

The vast depth of time swallowed me whole.

I was still dazed when I got downstairs.

The guide latched on again. “Care for the Qi County one-day tour?”

“We’re here investigating a case.”

“You’ve come all this way, you can’t miss the Tomb of King Zhou!”

I caught the keyword and pulled Officer Ren away from the haggling guide. “What did you say? There’s a Tomb of King Zhou here?”

The guide sniffed. “Tell me about it—this place was called Zhaoge in ancient times!”

I jolted!

Xu Tianyi’s corkboard... the eerie dream...

I dimly remembered that the sovereign watching me from the high platform in the dream was King Zhou!

King Zhou of Shang moved the capital to Zhaoge, and then it fell to Western Zhou; the eight-hundred-year Shang reign ended there.

Could this have anything to do with Jiang Tianqi?

“I want to see the Tomb of King Zhou!”

Officer Ren was horrified. “Your husband is in jail, your mistress has eaten six living people, you’re pregnant with god-knows-what, and now you want to go sightseeing?!”

I dragged him into the car and told him my dream. Officer Ren frowned. “What, now there’s a past-life angle too? Your husband is King Zhou, you’re Daji, the two of you reincarnated to pick up where you left off, and your mission in life is to torment one traffic cop? Was I the chief eunuch in your court in a past life?”

“No! I was just a slave, very low status, lived in an earthen hut, miles from the king. My husband... he never even appeared. I didn’t dream any handsome men.”

Officer Ren: “Then tonight keep at it, dream better, aim for Daji.”

Me: ...

The Tomb of King Zhou was just a mound of weeds, nothing to see, and I felt no familiarity at all.

Seeing our lack of enthusiasm, the guide hurried on. “Up ahead there’s Emperor Mound and the Goddess Cave, incense is always thick there!”

“What kind of names are those? Is this even a legitimate tourist attraction?” Officer Ren got angry.

As the two of them bickered, I gazed at the earthen mound in the distance and felt a surge of familiarity.

Where I stood lined up with the scene in my dream.

The fields before me had once been the open plaza; a straight imperial road cut across the modern highway and led to the hill in the distance.

Along the road, human sacrifices still stood at intervals; we carried the golden basins toward that cave, and the sovereign on the platform watched coldly...

“Let’s go!” I pulled the car door open and got in.

A quarter hour later we reached the Goddess Cave.

The closer we got, the more excited I became.

That’s it! This is the place!

After three thousand years of weathering, the mouth of the cave had eroded, exposing more rock.

The shrine niche inside was unrecognizable, now fitted with a Buddha statue and heaped with layer upon layer of red candles.

But I knew this was the cave from my dream.

People preparing the ritual sang and danced.

“What are they doing?” Officer Ren asked.

“You’re in luck—you’ve caught the god sacrifice.”

My body trembled violently. “A god sacrifice? Why in a cave?”

“The gods didn’t come from the sky. They live underground, right in the caves. Everyone around here knows that,” the guide said proudly.

I grabbed him by the collar. “You mean that thing living in the cave... is a god?”

“Yes! It’s our local earth god!” He said it as a matter of course. “There’s a secret here, too, that out-of-towners never know. Do you know why King Zhou moved the capital? The Shang capital wasn’t originally here, it was over in Shangqiu; the Shang people called it Tianyi Shang, the Heavenly City of Shang. But one day, the god that Tianyi Shang worshipped died! Defeated by the god of Zhaoge! So King Zhou brought Daji and came here to build his capital.”

“There’s more than one god...”

I felt I had grasped a crucial thread.

My husband’s powers had long since exceeded the bounds of humanity.

In his own understanding, he and humans were two entirely different species.

But until now those powers had been shapeless; I had no concept for them at all.

Until the word “god” popped out of the Qi County guide’s mouth.

—Could my husband be an ancient deity?!

As if bewitched, I reached out and touched the great boulder that stood in the middle of the path.

A flash of memory struck my heart.

The surroundings darkened, torches flickered and shook, and I returned to where the dream had broken off. In the vast shadow, something went sha-sha, sha-sha over the rock.

I saw it.

I saw a mass of chaotic, shapeless flesh and blood carefully edge into view.

Then, with great effort, it shaped five fingers from itself.

Gently, so gently, it touched my fingertips.

“Lord Tai Sui, did you see the five-colored birds flying past outside today? You really ought to come out and get some sun.”

Along with my clear, bright voice, the cave answered ka, ka, like a thousand-year wind echoing.

And in my mind a familiar voice sounded: “I hear you...”

I stood there, stunned.

Tears poured out of their own accord.

—That was my husband’s voice.

After I came out I gave the guide a big tip. “Thank you for answering so many of my questions.”

The guide beamed. “Then let me give you one earth-shattering secret, free of charge! I don’t tell ordinary folk this one!”

“Go on.”

“The Shang wasn’t destroyed by King Wu. There never was a Battle of Muye. At least, that’s what my grandpa’s grandpa always passed down.”

“Oh? Then who destroyed Shang?”

The guide leaned in and pointed reverently at the ground beneath our feet. “It was divine punishment.”

My mind clicked. “Why?”

“They say King Zhou of Shang sacrificed to the wrong thing, enraged the gods, and everyone in Zhaoge died in a single night. The blood flowed all the way to Muye. Do you know the idiom ‘blood deep enough to float the pestles’? It was first used to describe the horror at Muye, and my great-great-great-great-grandpa said it was no exaggeration. When Ji Fa entered the city, he had a canal dug to the Qi River just to drain the blood out of Zhaoge.”

Sacrificed to the wrong thing...

I suddenly felt a headache, which quickly spread through my whole body, pain so bad I could not stand.

My belly took the chance to growl and rumble.

The skin of my abdomen poked sharply outward, as if some uncanny creature were trying to tear through it.

Someone helped me into the car to rest.

I patted my belly. “Careful, or your daddy will sort you out!”

The thing behaved, and my belly went flat again.

I recovered and looked up to find the old detective arriving with Old Zhang to pick me up. “Mrs. Jiang, are you all right?”

I shook my head to clear it.

“This case is certainly bizarre, but luckily none of your family was hurt. Xu Tianyi was a serial killer; your husband isn’t. He’s already been released on bail.”

“That fast?”

“Yes. The blood on him tested negative for human blood. We wronged him.”

Not human blood—of course it wasn’t human blood.

My husband was the Tai Sui that had dwelled in Zhaoge three thousand years ago.

And Xu Tianyi clearly was not human either.

The so-called tryst I had stumbled on, and the later scene at the hospital—strictly speaking, those were wars between gods.

—Which god could she be?

—What footprints had my husband left across history?

Heavy-hearted, I got into the police car with them.

The three of them chatted about the strange local customs.

“Actually, many peoples in history believed the gods came from underground and had traditions of cave sacrifice—it’s quite widespread,” the old detective, a secret history buff, lit a cigarette and smiled. “The sacrifices in South America even offered the gods a human skin every year.”

My ears pricked up. “Human skin?”

“That way, the god could take human form and walk among the living.”

His phone rang.

I heard the captain’s panicked voice on the other end. “There’s a problem with Xu Tianyi’s body!”

“What?”

“The human skin is definitely Xu Tianyi’s, but the chunks of flesh inside aren’t hers!”

“Whose are they?”

“The DNA results say... they’re our driver Old Zhang’s.” The other man swallowed. “Old Zhang has been flayed and left on a bed. And that earlier corpse put on Old Zhang’s skin and went out of town with you...”

The phone clattered to the floor.

The car went dead silent.

The three of us looked at Old Zhang in terror.

Old Zhang stubbed out his cigarette, slammed the gas, and drove straight into a tree!

At the critical instant, six claws burst from my belly and braced hard against the seat back, which was the only reason I wasn’t crushed on the spot.

I stumbled out of the car. Behind me came the sound of a door being torn apart.

Old Zhang ripped the steel panel off with his bare hands, tossed it ten meters away, and stepped out of the flattened cab without a scratch.

“Growing fast.” He glanced at my belly—his eyes were Xu Tianyi’s. “Give me his offspring.”

“No... no...”

“A human cannot carry the offspring of an ancient god. Before they ever break through the body, they’d have drained you dry. You’d become a dried corpse.”

“Tianqi would never do that to me!”

“Spare the love-addled brain at a time like this...”

Along with the feeble quip came two bangs of gunfire.

Officer Ren tumbled out of the car, the old detective’s gun in his hands, and put two rounds straight into Old Zhang.

Old Zhang’s right arm and right leg were detached on the spot; unable to keep his balance, he toppled in an uncanny posture.

Officer Ren rushed up, grabbed me, and ran.

We ran into a warehouse, but before the door could close, Old Zhang flashed directly in front of me.

I dove behind a shelf and hurled everything within reach. “If you touch me, my husband won’t let you live!”

“He’s dying.”

“You’re lying!”

“Guess why humans reproduce.” He walked unhurriedly, hands in his pockets, watching me struggle through the shelves. “Because you die. Only humans, with your hundred-year lifespans, need to leave offspring. Immortal ancient gods have no use for descendants at all. For us, reproduction is a last-ditch gamble when the end is already in sight.”

My heart was wrenched.

Tianqi—Tianqi was dying?

Was that why he had gotten me pregnant? Hoping the child could protect me?

“His nest-building has been such a nuisance... ever since you conceived, he’s expanded his territory more than twentyfold—the whole of East and Central China is cupped in his palm, and every god that sets foot in his territory is devoured without exception. Disgusting...”

Officer Ren fired two more shots at him from the shadows.

This time Old Zhang flicked a hand, and Officer Ren was flung into the opposite wall, knocked senseless.

“Throughout three thousand years his infamy has been known to every god, and even at death’s door he’s this deranged. Then let the repayment begin with his offspring...”

Old Zhang’s voice sank lower and lower, blurrier, as if rising from hell.

His whole head split open, and a nauseating tentacle rose out of it, rose and rose as if it had no end at all, until it pressed against the ceiling.

Countless dense eyes along the tentacle looked all around; it beat against the walls with thuds, and viscous drool dripped at my feet.

Sha-sha, sha-sha...

The gods are ancient, terrible things.

They hold neither mercy nor morality.

Only a pack of powerful monsters.

I closed my eyes: Jiang Tianqi, if you don’t come now I will never, ever forgive you!

The thought had barely passed when a section of the ceiling caved in with a crash.

Jiang Tianqi dropped from above, clamped his legs around the tentacle and twisted his whole body; the thick limb snapped in two and smashed to the floor.

“Could you be a little polite to a pregnant woman, Zhu Jiuyin? My wife is with child. Have you no decency?” my husband demanded.

“Tai Sui...” More tentacles burrowed out of Old Zhang’s skin and coiled around my husband. “If you keep hiding inside a human skin, you’ll die quickly enough... heh. You don’t dare let your little woman see your true form, do you?”

My husband gave me a deep, deep look, then in an instant became something else entirely and, moving at impossible speed, rolled Zhu Jiuyin out of the warehouse with him.

The two of them smashed a kaleidoscopic, indescribable hole through the wall.

The daylight outside went black at once, lightning and thunder—very much like that day at the hospital.

I remembered the legend: Zhu Jiuyin was the god who governed space; he seemed to have the power to create parallel spaces.

I crawled to Officer Ren. “Officer Ren! Officer Ren!... Ren Tiantang!”

He woke instantly.

“My husband is fighting someone... he might die, sniff...”

He glanced outside. “They’re fighting an apocalyptic god-war out there, and all I have is one pistol, which is broken. I couldn’t beat wet tissue, ma’am—a people’s policeman has his limits.”

“I’m not asking you to go.” I whimpered, pulling out his baton. “Lend me this.”

“A housewife has limits too!”

“Tianqi’s in bad shape—that’s why he left me a child. I can’t let him die out there alone.”

“Hey, you...”

Officer Ren tried to catch me, but I slipped through the hole in the wall fast; with his fractures he couldn’t grab me.

Outside stretched ranges of mountains.

On the nearest mound, lightning lit up two indescribable behemoths, hissing shrilly as they tore at each other, two terrifying silhouettes in the black night.

I clambered onto the little electric three-wheeler parked by the warehouse and drove up the mountain into the torrential rain.

My lower belly burned faintly, and the child inside let out the same furious shriek as its father, ringing through my skull, through my body.

After what felt like an eternity, I broke into the battlefield.

“I will not let my husband die here!”

With that thought, I wrenched the handlebar and, at a hundred and eighty kilometers an hour, rammed straight into Zhu Jiuyin’s eye-covered flesh!

Everything stopped.

The three-wheeler ground over the ancient god’s flesh, leaving filthy tire tracks.

The colossal body collapsed across the broad mountaintop, and a foul acid rain fell for ten miles around.

The tentacles that had pierced its body began to surge and feed.

The scraps of flesh left on the ground were quickly absorbed clean.

After clearing the battlefield, the tentacles crept in from behind as well, climbing over my clothes, brushing my skin, leaving trails of transparent slime.

The shapeless flesh writhed and enclosed me.

“Tianqi, I want to ask you something.”

Sha-sha, sha-sha.

“Three thousand years ago—did King Zhou... sacrifice me to you?”

Sha-sha, sha-sha.

The tentacles shaped five fingers without a human skin and touched my fingertips again.

Skin and nerves connected.

His memories flooded in.

A dark cave, burning torches, golden basins laid out.

The girl’s serene head, the beating heart, fresh flesh and blood.

...

King Wu swore his oath; the Shang king raged.

Zhaoge held a grand sacrifice, offering the Tai Sui its finest offering.

—The only human the Tai Sui had ever been willing to accept.

—A lowly slave girl, raised by exception into a precious triple sacrifice.

The moment the offering was presented,

a sharp shriek rang through the cave, like a weeping that tore the throat.

Zhaoge was immediately struck by a terrible earthquake; the Qi River burst its banks.

Then came plague, and mass hysteria.

The prosperous capital collapsed into a city of madmen and clotted blood.

The ancient god wandered the shadows of the mountains, endlessly emitting a shriek no human could bear.

The maddened King Zhou climbed the Deer Tower and burned eight hundred years of dynasty to ash in a single fire.

In that final fire, a vast shadow climbed the burning Deer Tower and slipped into the mad king’s body.

When King Wu, Ji Fa, entered Zhaoge, he found only King Zhou’s flayed corpse.

And from that day on, a youth walked the earth carrying a great chest on his back.

His chest held a mass of flesh and blood.

A heart.

And the serene head of a young girl.

...

“Tianqi, was I still alive then?”

“You’d been chopped to pieces, Jiaojiao.”

“...Then can a human really come back from the dead?”

“On the surface, everything in the world moves from clean to corrupt, from order to chaos. After death, cells apoptose and rot, flesh turns to white bone. But don’t forget: particles make the cells, and particles are neither created nor destroyed—they have been conserved since the moment the universe began. Life and death are merely different arrangements of the same countless billions of particles... if every particle that makes up you could be pushed back to its original position... yes, everything could be turned back. Only, reversing entropy itself requires a great deal of energy... a very great deal...”

218 BC — The Sea of Japan

An old Daoist priest stood at the prow gazing at the distant horizon, a smile on his face.

“Your sea route is correct. You truly guided us to the immortal mountain of Penglai... His Majesty’s elixir of immortality is within reach at last.”

The youth wore the clothes of Chu and carried a vast chest on his back, staring silently at the silhouette of a conical volcano on the horizon.

“Qi, you know so many marvels. When we return, would you serve at His Majesty’s court? He wishes to find Peng Zu, and I recall you said you’d met him.”

“I will stay here. There are many active volcanoes here, and many gods. As for Peng Zu... you may tell Zhao Zheng to search no longer.” The youth turned to look at the old priest, the indifference of a god in his eyes. “He died thirty-seven years ago.”

AD 79 — The Mediterranean

The dockhands encountered a strange traveler.

He had black hair and black eyes, but he was neither the common Phoenician nor Peloponnesian type; his hair was too straight, his features too soft, and he put the sailors in mind of legends from the distant East.

When he jumped down from the sampan, a sailor tried to steady the enormous chest he carried.

The chest stood half a man’s height; helping unload it would earn four small copper coins.

In an instant a sharp sense of danger struck, and the dockhand snatched his hand back, but blood appeared on it all the same.

A wound out of nowhere...

The youth hadn’t even moved.

The youth shielded the chest with one hand and walked past him coldly, saying in flawless Latin, “Tell your people to leave this place. Vesuvius is about to erupt.”

The warning vanished into the bustle of the dock like a pebble dropped in water.

That day many saw the youth walk alone toward the volcano where the god dwelled.

Three days later, Vesuvius erupted.

Roman scrolls record: “Jupiter sent divine punishment down upon the place...”

AD 630 — Tokhara

A shaven-headed monk rested in a hut; outside, far off, the standing Buddhas of Bamiyan were visible.

“Qi, what’s in that chest you always carry?”

“Don’t ask, and don’t look.”

“Is it your little pet? It doesn’t seem to like it in there—it keeps knocking against the box, trying to get out.”

“It’s all right. It’s only a hand.”

The monk’s face froze, then he changed the subject. “Qi, I’m going to the Western Heaven to fetch the scriptures. What takes you to the Western Heaven?”

His companion seemed no great devotee of the Buddha’s teachings; likely he’d dressed as a monk only to move freely along the Silk Road.

Sure enough, the companion said another baffling thing: “In the Western Heaven there are the eight legions of divine dragons.”

The monk didn’t understand.

But he was used to his companion’s taciturn ways.

He would never know that later ages mis-copied “the barbarian monk who accompanied Xuanzang west” as “the macaque who accompanied Xuanzang west.”

That tiny clerical error would later grow into another story.

AD 794 — The Woods outside Heian-kyō

“You’ve come back.” The Eight-Hundred-Year Priestess looked at the youth before her, her eyes turning desolate with dread.

The eight hundred myriads of Shinto kami had suffered terrible casualties ever since that Daoist from Xu Fu’s fleet came ashore.

He devoured them ceaselessly, stripped their authorities, took their power, forever unsated.

For a thousand years they had scraped by in terror on these islands.

The Priestess had never expected him to appear again.

That chest-carrying ancient god...

The youth calmly set down the chest and lifted out a heart in both hands.

The heart had no vessels and no blood, pale as an egg, yet it beat strongly in his palms.

“The heart is repaired. But the heart differs from other organs. She will soon discover she has no body, and she will die again.” His indifferent eyes turned to her. “Mermaid who seals time—I need your ribs, to forge a cosmetics case that can seal the heart.”

When Abe no Seimei arrived in pursuit,

the Priestess, said to have gained immortality from mermaid flesh, had already vanished.

Scattered in the forest was only the carcass of a colossal white squid.

From within the squid peered an exquisite woman’s face...

Her ribs had been taken.

• • •

The long river of time flowed slowly by.

The girl’s body never decayed.

On the contrary, thanks to the ancient god’s meticulous care,

the dead cells, the chopped limbs, began to sprout and grow again.

The brain grew eyeballs.

Hands and legs bumped and played together.

The internal organs soaked in the god’s blood and slowly writhed.

The ancient god lifted his head in agony, holding the chest.

Energy—he needed more, much more energy...

• • •

In the blink of history, the steam engine strode onto the stage.

An Oriental gentleman in a top hat walked the vast plains of the American West.

Suddenly a drifting flute melody reached him.

The gentleman started and turned to look at the tin canister on his wagon.

The flute wasn’t coming from inside it.

It took him a day to find the flute player at a nearby mining camp.

He was a Chinese laborer who’d crossed the ocean to the American West.

Now he was dying, like so many other abused slave-laborers in this country.

“Who taught you that tune?” the gentleman asked.

“I’ve known it since I was born...”

An ancient homeland accent washed over him.

This was the voice of Zhaoge.

This was Xi Wa’s voice.

The gentleman’s heart moved, and his eyes warmed. “You come from my wife’s homeland. I can smell her in your blood. For that, I will grant you one wish. What wish would you have?”

“I want the white devils to pay...”

The Chinese laborer breathed his last.

The gentleman doffed his top hat and swore an ancient god’s oath: “Your wish shall be granted.”

Eighteen months later, the American Civil War broke out.

One point two million Americans were killed or wounded in the war.

Civilization moved forward a little faster.

• • •

In 1883, an Oriental gentleman knocked on the door of the Tesla Electric Company.

A special contract was placed before the great scientist.

“Design a sealed, electrified vat... what do you intend to do with it?”

“That is not yours to know.”

“If I cannot know its purpose, I cannot design the device you require.”

The gentleman drummed his fingertips, then rose as if making up his mind. “Come with me.”

The sealed vessel was opened.

In blood thick with the essence of gods knew how many ancient beings,

human limbs floated.

A white arm rose to the surface.

It was the girl’s slender hand...

Tesla spoke privately with the mysterious Eastern visitor for three days, and finally agreed to power the vessel with alternating current.

Six months later, the great inventor watched the point inside the transparent vat where the arm joined the torso. “This is the raising of the dead.”

“Yes,” the mysterious visitor said softly. “This is the raising of the dead.”

• • •

Another half century passed.

The atomic bomb appeared.

The Soviet military had once lost two warheads in Ukraine.

Three days later, a strange great explosion occurred at Tunguska.

Every tree at the epicenter was destroyed; the snow held an impact crater.

But eerily, there was no sound, no light, no fire.

Apart from the felled trees, no energy leaked out at all.

Satellites captured the unusual blast; the US and USSR both went on war footing, but no evidence pointed to the American military, and the Tunguska event was ultimately filed in the KGB’s top-secret archives.

...

He looked at the body in the vat, its limbs now joined to the torso, and laid his palm gently on the transparent glass.

Can you hear me?

Xi Wa.

This morning a beautiful magpie flew across the lawn.

The sleeping brain gave a dream-murmur.

Only sunflower-like tentacles worked patiently to close the wounds.

At this point, fifty-three full years remained before she would open her eyes again.

• • •

“So I wasn’t reincarnated.”

“I was simply brought back from the dead.”

“Because it was my complete body from three thousand years ago, I have no memories of growing up—isn’t that right? I didn’t grow up in the modern age. I grew up in the Shang dynasty, as the slave girl Xi Wa.”

“Yes... three thousand years is too long. You had forgotten everything.”

2003 — An Orphanage in S City

A fourteen-year-old girl sat hugging her knees in a corner, trembling.

Even forgotten, the terror of her body’s destruction was branded deep in her subconscious.

The staff told her patiently, “Your parents had a car accident. You survived, but it’s all right—we’ll take care of you... an anonymous donor has given a great deal of money for you. You’ll grow up safe and sound, go to school, don’t be afraid.”

Outside the rainy-night window,

a tall, slender young man watched quietly.

Perhaps time really was relative.

He had never found three thousand years long.

But the distance of this one window was beyond his reach.

Six Years Later — F University

Jiang Tianqi, back in China as an outstanding young entrepreneur, was invited by his alma mater to give a lecture.

At the end of the lecture, a clear voice stopped him. “Mr. Jiang, you dropped your pen.”

They fell in love almost at once.

The girl preened, convinced she was a deep and cunning schemer.

She never knew that he had dropped the pen on purpose.

Just as she no longer remembered many things.

Three years later, they married.

Like so many Cinderella stories.

The girl tried on wedding gowns in the changing room while her fiancé sat by the window watching the rain.

There had been many people in his memory, but now all was as quiet as a rainy night.

Ding-dong.

She pushed the door open and walked before him in her jewels. “How do I look?”

“Beautiful.”

The girl secretly rejoiced to watch him sign the check, genuinely delighted with her string of beautiful jewels.

What she did not know was that,

in the three millennia she had forgotten,

he had set all of human civilization into the crown upon her head.

...

“Will you marry me?”

The beautiful scenes of the wedding faded.

The refined, gentle groom I held turned into a slick tentacle in my hand.

I was back in the dark rain.

From the depths of my mind, I heard the wedding vow again.

I slowly turned my head and, for the first time, saw my husband’s true face.

In the intermittent lightning, his outline was like a small mountain.

The colossal, shapeless mass of flesh writhed eternally like a brain.

Buds of flesh endlessly dropped and regrew; the slime gave off a horrifying aura.

Mad, hideous, rupturing, nauseating, terrifying...

...and lonely.

A loneliness stretching beyond all horizon.

I walked over, picked up the human skin from the ground, and, the way I straightened his suit for him every morning, slowly, carefully, dressed him in it.

“Husband, let’s go home.”

After getting home I went on being a lie-flat pregnant wife.

For a while I had been terribly afraid my husband was about to die—after all, Zhu Jiuyin said they didn’t have children unless things were desperate.

When my husband noticed how worried I was, he stroked my head. “I’m fine. I had the child mainly for your sake.”

“For me?”

“If you stayed human forever, I’d soon have to do this a second time.”

I caught the implication. “You modified me?”

He nodded. “You can’t really be classified as human anymore. You’re half a deity.”

So he’d planned this all along, meaning to grant me immortality.

But genetic fusion was extremely difficult.

He’d thought of pregnancy.

“Sperm is a kind of virus. An embryo is a kind of parasite,” he said. “For the mother’s body, offspring are the finest invaders nature ever evolved—they can even build the placental barrier to resist the mother’s immune system, and they naturally alter your body throughout gestation, leaving genetic contamination even after birth. Through reproduction, I mixed my genes into your body.”

A question suddenly occurred to me. “Did the First Emperor of Qin ever ask you for immortality?”

“...I wouldn’t have had a child with him.” My husband turned his face away with a proud little huff.

Two months later, I gave birth prematurely.

My husband delivered the children.

The process was easy.

Mainly because the damn things hatched from eggs...

Not hard-shelled eggs like a chicken’s, either, but the frog kind, slimy blobs one after another, utterly disgusting.

Then my husband tore off two sheets of plastic wrap in the kitchen, bundled the baby up, and put it in the rice cooker.

The baby was unbelievably ugly.

The moment I lifted the lid I threw up.

So. Damn. Ugly.

I genuinely couldn’t summon a single drop of maternal love. Too revolting.

And it stank.

The child took after its father; not a single feature came from me.

“You have only twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. I have over forty thousand pairs. Of course it doesn’t take after you.”

Since I was genuinely physically revolted, he gave the children a perfunctory incubation and then put them out to sea.

I asked him, “Weren’t there a whole litter? How did only three come out?”

“They ate all their other siblings,” my husband said calmly. “That’s also why I had you give birth early. Keep the pregnancy going, and only one would remain in the end. In that case, he would inherit all of my authority.”

I didn’t really follow, only felt my vanished maternal love float back up. “Is it really all right for something that small to go in the sea? There’s even nuclear radiation out there.”

My husband’s eyes lit up. “Back when I was in the sea, why didn’t I ever run into such good stuff.”

He even licked his lips as he said it.

I warned him. “Jiang Tianqi, nuclear wastewater is not allowed on our dinner table.”

He was silent.

“Did you hear me?!”

“...Mm. I’ll eat it on the sly outside.”

We had a huge fight over this dietary issue.

But later I reasoned that his eating nuclear waste was, after all, good for the environment.

After that I never stopped him again.

There was just one rule: after eating nuclear waste, no kissing me on the mouth.

That was the bottom line.

Half a year later we chartered a yacht to the open sea to see our sons.

I figured giving birth and then ignoring them wasn’t quite right.

My husband emitted a high-frequency, uncanny sound that stirred up a tsunami.

My three sons rose from the sea in a race.

Every single one was unspeakably, catastrophically ugly—whether from eating nuclear waste or what—each already two stories tall.

My maternal love vanished on the spot.

“They really won’t get caught by humans as monsters?”

My husband shook his head. “No. They live in my palace at R’lyeh.”

I grunted.

After a while: “Wait? What did you just say? R’lyeh? R’lyeh is our family property?”

“Mm. Since the Cretaceous, whenever there’s an El Niño I stay there to cool off.” My husband nodded calmly. “Lovecraft had a special psychic link with me. Pity—I gave him a tour of the house and he went mad.”

Me: ...

Well now. So the old gentleman is the original inspiration for the famous Cthulhu.

Weirdly... kind of thrilling.

After we got back, we went to visit Officer Ren.

With fractures all over his body, he was wrapped like a mummy in his hospital bed.

He opened with a sneer. “Well, well, well. King Zhou and Daji, in the flesh.”

My husband sat down by his bed. “Ren Tiantang, thank you for taking care of my wife and child. In return, I can grant you and your descendants three wishes. Any wishes at all.”

Officer Ren knew what he was.

So he fell silent.

After a while he asked tentatively, “Could you get me an apartment in S City? Nothing too big, just... for getting married?”

This time it was my husband’s turn to fall silent.

“King Zhou had to kill a thousand slaves to earn one nod from me—and all you want is an apartment?”

“That’s right!” Officer Ren said stoutly. “My salary is what it is. What’s wrong with wanting an apartment?”

My husband sighed at the hopeless material and finally got him a two-story townhouse on the Huangpu River.

With a swimming pool.

Later I went to the traffic administration to pay my ticket.

Officer Ren: “What ticket?! There is no ticket! Ma’am, you have no violations! You and your husband and children will never have a violation in this life! I swear it!”

Me: ...

My husband had a particular fondness for dinosaurs—he visited every kind of museum to see dinosaur fossils, and the company even ran a department trying to genetically replicate dinosaurs.

I asked why.

He said they tasted good.

He told me about an Allosaurus fossil specimen unearthed in Europe,

marked with a strange bite mark that scientists couldn’t for the life of them explain—what could possibly take a bite out of an Allosaurus?

That was the apex of the food chain.

“Really stumped them,” my husband smiled, rattled his newspaper, and went back to reading.

I’d probed obliquely for my husband’s real age.

He wouldn’t say directly.

But he did tell me his childhood had been miserable:

the earth was very hot, molten rock everywhere, and he ate sulfur for many years, feeling quite wronged.

So he cured his childhood trauma by eating everything.

Damn—that put him at over four billion years old...

After giving birth, I was no different from any other wealthy wife.

Except I often visited the morgue with my husband.

To see whether any poor child had recently died young.

I picked out three.

My husband bought their remains and carefully tanned them into human skins.

Then our three little brats were brought home to raise.

The sentence my children said most often after arriving was, “Mom, can I take my skin off?”

“No!”

Our family rules are strict.

Every week I hold a family meeting, repeating it over and over: “No eating people. No eating people. No eating people.”

My husband backs me up. “Mom is a person. Would you eat Mom?”

The children collectively shake their heads.

“And you may not eat other people either.”

After my husband put the children to sleep, I was heavy-hearted. “Does this really work on them? What does eating a person even count as for you?”

My husband thought it over. “It counts as eating spicy strips.”

Me: ?????

“I’m actually not that fond of spicy strips.” My husband lay back on the bed with me in his arms. “The Shang tradition of human sacrifice didn’t originate with us ancient gods. Why, even to build a front gate, they’d first kill nine hundred slaves and bury them in the foundation.”

“So they fed you, and you just ate whatever you were given?”

My husband chuckled deeply, and the whole room trembled.

“Jiang Tianqi.”

“Mm?”

“Don’t casually kill people anymore, either.”

“All right.”

“How can you promise that so easily? Are you not taking it seriously?”

“It’s not like it’s some big thing... my wife tells me not to knock over the spicy strips on the table—what am I supposed to say?”

“Stop saying ‘spicy strips’!”

Our romance was quite absurd.

Like a seagull falling in love with the french fries on the dock.

When the eldest was eleven, he vanished for three days and came back with a mouth full of blood.

“I met a god.” The eldest huddled pale-faced in his father’s arms. “I ate him.”

“Well done.” His father praised him.

This time when I tried to intervene, my husband refused.

“There is no peace among gods. If he doesn’t devour the other, the other will devour him. Unlike human society, this is our nature as an immortal species.”

I suddenly realized that,

for over four billion years, he had lived in a jungle of kill-or-be-killed.

“What?!”

“They said I smelled too bad...” He wept, gouts of mucus welling out of his eye sockets.

“It’s all right, baby...” Wearing a gas mask, I gently wiped his face. “You just can’t control your body yet. Look at your daddy—over four billion years old, and even he sprouts tentacles from his mouth now and then. It’s all right. You’ll grow out of it.”

I told his kindergarten teacher about him being isolated.

A few days later, the teacher told me a little girl was willing to play with him.

Children’s moods come and go fast; the second son was soon his usual silly, happy self every day.

He even brought the little girl home to show me.

“Hello, Auntie.” The little girl was soft and sweet, pretty and polite.

My son took her hand. “I have something beautiful. Come quick.”

The two children pattered into the room.

Through the crack in the door, I saw my son open his palm and release a sea.

It was a real sea.

Fish of every color drifted through black, curtain-like water; an enormous whale let out a long call.

“Wow—” The little girl was stunned, sea breeze in her face.

“For you.”

My son pressed the conch shell into her hand.

It was a young god bestowing a sealed-away beach upon a kind child.

I watched the children.

As if seeing ourselves at the origin of civilization.

“You’ve met so many people, and you have endless amounts of time. Why didn’t you ever build deeper bonds with them, Tianqi?”

“Because none of them was you...”

“...None of them was ever you, Jiaojiao.”

（The End）