Prologue · A Death in the Present

2026 · Hong Kong

His name was Ye Chenyu, and he lived around Tsim Sha Tsui in West Kowloon.

It was a tower by the water. Push open the floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room and the whole lit expanse of Victoria Harbour came pouring in; off to the right the outline of the West Kowloon Cultural District floated in the dark, and the one building that caught the eye most was the Hong Kong Palace Museum. He looked at it every day, the way one looks at a dream not yet finished.

He was a modern man, and he was a born *qiongqi* — brought forth by an ancient curse, rare in all the world; and for that very reason, at the end he would be given a choice no one else had: rebirth, or extinction. He could not remember when he had become the latter. What he remembered was that for a very long time, being alive had been a sentence served in full awareness. He did not go into the sun. He did not go near people. Through the long years he kept himself alive by a set of rules: one draught of red bloom to pass a day, one person drained to pass three, and a heart taken only when there was no other way; as for reading memories by the secret art, that was a measure he used very rarely. But nearer to the present he developed the blood-regeneration factor himself, and after 2020 he no longer needed red bloom for sustenance. He never let anyone discover that he did not die.

Before this, he had already lived through too many "presents." Wealth was no problem for him — gathered over several lives, enough to live quietly and cleanly in any era; the problem was solitude. Because he did not age, he could not keep one face and walk the whole of a life beside anyone, and so he was always moving on, always saying farewell, always putting into the ground, one by one, the people he had come to know. He had learned not to let anyone close, and went around the crowd like a beast that knows what it is.

Yet there was one thing that knew him before hunger did.

A scent.

In 2022 the Hong Kong Palace Museum opened in West Kowloon. That day he took the high-speed rail south from Shenzhen for no other reason than to be part of the crowd — like a man walking into a dream he had been dreaming for nearly three thousand years. In the bronze gallery a gui, a bronze grain vessel, from the Western Zhou lay still, and standing before it he suddenly felt that he had been standing there a very long time. The cold light of the case fell on the taotie mask, and the pattern was so like a certain night he ought long ago to have forgotten — the wind at Muye, the scent drifting from deep inside a tent. He stood stupefied, and did not even hear the bell that closed the museum.

"You've been standing in front of this piece for forty-five minutes."

He turned. The woman was about thirty, her black hair tied back, a staff pass hanging at her chest: Lin Zhi, curator of the Bronze Age at the Hong Kong Palace Museum. She had grey-blue eyes steeped in cold light, like a winter river moving slowly through dusk. Between them it should have been nothing more than an ordinary passing in a crowd — neither of them could have known that this one glance would knot itself into the years that followed. He did not yet understand what it meant to seek a person by scent; he was only a man who happened to be there, and she happened to look up. They talked, starting from that gui of the Western Zhou, from the taotie mask on the bronze to the bell that shut the doors, and went on talking from the closing of the museum out into the wind of West Kowloon. In those days she was busy preparing a special exhibition of Sanxingdui bronzes — the protruding-eye masks, the sacred trees reaching to heaven; she said these were the ancient Shu people's imagining of "gods and monsters." He listened, and something in him sank without reason, as if he had touched something extremely old that he ought not to have remembered.

After that day he became, improbably, a regular at the museum. On weekends he would take the high-speed rail south from Shenzhen, walk through the bronze gallery mixed in with the crowd, all to stand for a while before that case of cold light. Sometimes she was on duty and they nodded from a distance; sometimes it was her day off and he looked at the gui alone, and looking, he would feel that scent rise once more from the depths of the case and wind about his wrist, as though someone had silently gripped him. He did not know what it was. He knew only that he could not walk away — as if, through three thousand years, something had been waiting here for him, and he had simply arrived very late.

They fell in love, and it took years. In those years he lived in Shenzhen and took the high-speed rail south each week to meet her in West Kowloon — in his first life he was only a traveler coming and going between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and never imagined that this city would be the center of both his lives.

Those years were light. In the mornings she hurried to the museum to open it; in his flat in Shenzhen he brewed a pot of tea no one would drink, and waited for the weekend and the train south. Every time they met she brought back some new find from the museum, excited as a child, and he would listen and, without thinking, tuck the loose strands of her hair behind her ear. On weekends they sometimes went hiking in Sai Kung; she always laughed at him for being unable to bear the sun, and he carried an umbrella and said he was "a Hong Kong man afraid of the dark." She did not know what he was. He never said. Some truths, once spoken, push people away — and he had been pushed away too many times.

The flat in Shenzhen was small, one bedroom and a living room, and out the window was another city's skyline. Often on Saturday mornings he brewed a pot of pu'er; the tea caught the morning light, and he would stare at that amber and lose himself in it — wondering what the wind in West Kowloon would smell like when he arrived that afternoon. The train took fourteen minutes. He always chose a window seat and watched the field ridges outside draw back into lines and the city surge up. He would make that journey more than a hundred times, and each time it was like stitching back together two halves of himself that had been cut apart: one the undying beast that circled around people, the other an ordinary man who brewed tea for someone and carried an umbrella against the sun.

He had thought, once, that he might go on like this. But fate never allowed him to settle.

Then, early in 2026, there was a fire.

The West Kowloon Cultural District was holding a night gala — lights, crowds, music — and several hundred people were pressed into the plaza by the water. The fire started in the wiring of the stage and within moments had swallowed half the scaffolding. By the time he arrived it was too late — too late past any mending. This time the price of being slow was her. Lin Zhi did not get out of that fire. A number of senior officials were also replaced in its wake.

The smoke of the fire burned his eyes shut. He pushed aside steel frames still hot to the touch, and did not feel the row of blisters rising on his hands; he only called, again and again, the name he had already begun to fear forgetting: Lin Zhi. Lin Zhi. Lin Zhi. As if to carve it into bones not yet reborn.

He kept watch beside the ruins and drank nothing for three days. For him it was nearly a kind of prayer.

He did not want to go on living alone. In this first life — from the Western Zhou to 2026, close to three thousand years — the only thing he had learned was that one person is too long. So he went to find Wen Xingyuan — but met someone else first.

Zhuo Sheng came on the night of the third day.

He was another born qiongqi, older than Chenyu, soaked through with a brooding scent like aged sandalwood mixed with rust — a smell that only the born had, and that they knew in each other the moment they met. Through this first life they had crossed paths in countless dynasties; Chenyu's memory was poor, and he would often forget what era he was in and what had happened to him, and every reunion was Zhuo Sheng tying back together, for him, the threads that had come nearly undone.

"You came." Chenyu sat on the stone steps by the ruins without looking up. "I knew you would."

"I can smell death on you," Zhuo Sheng said, sitting down beside him, his voice like sandpaper drawn over old wood, "and I can smell that you've finally let go."

"She's gone."

"I know." Zhuo Sheng was quiet for a moment. "But do you remember what you are?"

Chenyu raised his eyes to him. And Zhuo Sheng said again the thing he had said many times, though to Chenyu it was new every time he heard it: "You are a born one. At the end, the born are given a choice — one, true extinction, and nothing left at all; two, rebirth, back to the time and place of your own birth, to live it over again. Most choose the first. Living is suffering, and you know it better than anyone."

"I choose rebirth," Chenyu said, almost without thinking.

Zhuo Sheng was not surprised. He only fixed his eyes on him. "Be clear about this. Rebirth is not a mercy; it is another sentence. And — " he paused, as if reciting a law cut into bone — "if you go back, only two or three parts in ten of your memory will remain. You will forget her name, forget how the two of you met, and remember only that you must find a scent. And one thing more important than all the rest: the injunction against altering the great currents of history. The rise and fall of dynasties, the outcome of wars, the lives and deaths of generals and ministers — those cannot be moved. Move them and you lose immortality. How many times have I told you this? You turn your head and forget."

"I'll remember," Chenyu said — though in truth he would not remember well. But at this moment, listening, his fingertips dug unconsciously into his palm. To lose immortality was to lose the very means of remembering: afterward he would forget not only her name but himself in this life, forget that he had once stood in the wind of the Western Zhou, whom he had shielded, for whom he had begged death. Rebirth was a clean eraser, wiping away in one stroke the bitterness and sweetness of six thousand years, leaving only the trace of a scent. And still he did not hesitate. Better to go to a reunion carrying forgetfulness than to carry memory into an immortality of solitude — even if, at that reunion, she no longer knew him.

"I'll remember," Chenyu said — though in truth he would not remember well. But at this moment he only wanted to see her, even if it were only a her of a former life.

Zhuo Sheng did not answer. He looked into the firelight deep in the ruins, as if weighing something extremely old.

"There are some things," he said at last, his voice thinned by the wind, "from years earlier than the Western Zhou, in that land of ancient Shu ..."

But Chenyu was not listening. He stared at the blisters the steel had raised on his palm, and felt a heart so empty it hurt — Lin Zhi was gone, and he did not even want to live; what mood had he for ancient matters? "Don't," he said hoarsely. "I don't want to hear anything now. Just tell me this: after the rebirth, will I see her again?"

Zhuo Sheng glanced at him and swallowed the words at his lips. He knew that at this moment the man's heart had room for nothing but the fixation of someone about to die, and so the old matter of Shu would keep. He said only, "You can. So long as you go back and walk as far as that day."

That was the first and last time, on the night he sought death, that Chenyu missed the story Zhuo Sheng had wanted to tell. Through the three thousand years to come that extremely old matter was never told to its end — Zhuo Sheng broke it into fragments and scattered them across the dynasties: a half sentence he would catch by some frontier garrison's fire, a corner he would run across in some scroll of a magician's marvels, and one piece he would not see with his own eyes until much later, in a museum in another city. But that is a story for later.

"Go," Zhuo Sheng said, rising, the hem of his coat sweeping over broken glass. "Go and find Wen Xingyuan. He owes me this once, and he will end it cleanly for you. Go back and see what it is you've been keeping, after all."

So he went to find Wen Xingyuan.

Wen Xingyuan was his mortal enemy, and the oldest qiongqi hunter in the world. They had been entangled for who knew how many lives, sickeningly familiar with each other. When Wen Xingyuan saw him come he asked nothing; he only laid the silver blade across his knee.

"You've come to ask for death."

"I'm asking you."

Chenyu smiled a little. "Zhuo Sheng has already told you. I choose rebirth — back into the wind of the Western Zhou, three thousand years ago." He paused. "She's gone. I have to walk it again from the Western Zhou, back to the day this museum opened — this trip is the three thousand and some years I must wait. Six thousand is the whole of the years I will have lived, from the first time I came into the world through both lives to the moment I see her again; what I must wait out alone is only the latter half of it. But if I can see her once more — six thousand, three thousand, what does it matter." Wen Xingyuan was still for a moment. "Why? For that one person? She is already — "

"Just to see her once more," Chenyu said. "Even if it's only a her of a former life. Even if, in this life, she doesn't know me at all."

Wen Xingyuan was silent a long while, then nodded. Before the silver blade fell, he heard the hunter say, very softly: "Good, then. Go back. Go back and see what it is you've been keeping, after all."

The silver blade lay across his knee, holding the last embers of the ruins. Chenyu suddenly thought of the first time he had crossed paths with Wen Xingyuan — which dynasty was it? He could not recall; he remembered only the hunter's eyes, from youth to age never changing from that calm of someone who had always known you would come. He closed his eyes, and what rose last was not fear but the wind of West Kowloon, and the professional sharpness in Lin Zhi's eyes when she said, "You've been standing in front of this gui a long time again." So what he had to keep was never immortality. It was that one glance.

A cold flash of the blade.

He died in Hong Kong in 2026. Then he opened his eyes, and it was the wind of the Western Zhou.

The three thousand and more years of his first life were like a long dream not quite woken from: he remembered the pot of tea gone cold in the Shenzhen flat, the field ridges outside the train window, the sharpness in her eyes as she said in the West Kowloon wind, "You've been standing in front of this gui a long time again." All of it, later, was erased by rebirth, leaving only the trace of a scent to lead him through the Western Zhou once more. But he did not yet know that this journey would be lonelier than the first life had been, and slower to grow warm.

— And only later did he discover how badly his memory failed him: he forgot the month in which that first meeting had happened, forgot the number on Lin Zhi's staff pass, even slowly forgot the self that had stood at the moment of asking for death. He remembered only one thing, as if it were carved into bone:

Go to the Palace Museum. Wait for her.

This thought knew no dynasty, asked nothing of life or death; like an invisible thread drawn out of the wind of the Western Zhou, it ran all the way to West Kowloon in 2026.

But that was far in the future. Now he was Jiang Ziya's foster son, standing in the wind at Muye, and he smelled a familiar scent drift from deep inside the tents.