wang

He has finally done it.

A thousand years of planning and sacrificing has paid off.

But it came too late. So late he feels no joy from it.

After a hundred years of whittling away, his shattered mind has been reduced to a single fragment.

Deep in the bowels of the earth, the unending corrosion and fraying of the ascended consciousness by the Originium buried within the Feranmut's body has just begun.

Now that everything has been settled, that singular stone in reserve awakes from dreamless sleep.

He is still It, but It is no longer tied to the remaining proxies, and thus It is merely him now.

A stone left over after the mending of the Heavens. A lonely stone, with nobody to accompany it in this land.

Cut down some sandalwood, sent it down the stream, the water's clear and ripple-y...

Don't need to sow, don't need to reap, why bother getting three hundred—Whoa.

Didn't think I'd run into anyone out here in the woods. Stand a little further back, mister, or my axe'll end up hitting you in the head.

That ditty you were singing just now, sir, where did you learn it? Who composed it?

Heard it from the folks about my granddad's age when I was a kid. My little boy can sing it now himself.

But if you're asking who wrote it... Afraid I don't know. If you can wait for me to head back to the village, I can ask the village teacher—

Who is this teacher?

You looking for him? Afraid he's become a bit of a recluse after his wife passed a few years back.

...Not him, then. I am looking for a woman.

What's her name, then? What's she look like? I know all the people in the eight villages around here, so maybe I can help.

The man stoops down to pick up a branch, writing out a character on the leaf-strewn ground.

The characters 'Ji' and 'Ye', 'luck' and 'page', come together to form 'Jie'.

Hmm... That's not a word at all.

Not even disappointment remains in the man's exhausted eyes. He knew this would be futile, but he cannot stop himself from trying wherever he goes.

The woodcutter pauses his work, as if he has been infected by the sorrow emanating from the dispirited man.

Sorry, said something I shouldn't have, don't mind me... Not like anyone in this land can avoid having to say goodbye, right?

Seven years ago, my mom's Oripathy was real bad, and she decided to just up and leave, no idea where... Then three years back, a Catastrophe hit the village, and I never saw my eldest daughter ever since.

I've thought about looking for them, and I'm always wondering if there's a way I can see them again, but not like that can happen—

Strange, how'd a grown man just disappear like that?

The woodcutter wrests himself free from the sad memories, but he finds the stranger gone without a trace.

At the same time, a black stone suffused with a cold light has at some point made its way into his basket, not that he noticed.

Here to pawn things again, old Liu?

Yes.

I'll just say it to you right now, Yumen's got plenty of old clothes now that the season's changed. I'm not going to accept any of your tatty old jackets.

You wouldn't know tatty if it poked you in the eye. Anyway, I found something while I was chopping wood up in the mountains two days ago, think it's an antique. Help me see what it's worth.

Antique? I bet it's just another rusty arrowhead left behind by training soldiers, the type that would be nice and shiny when it was made last month.

The pawnbroker doubtfully takes the object the woodcutter had wrapped in a white cloth.

What the?!

So, what is it?

This... *cough* is just a coin from a few decades ago. Not worth much.

You sure about that?

Huh?

Look at the words on it carefully, it's clearly from five <i>hundred</i> years ago.

Five hundred years ago? Are you mad? How could that be?

With the sudden change in his temperament, the woodcutter snatches the coin back from the pawnbroker's hands.

The rust's gone deep into the coin, made it real light.

Look at how they wrote the characters, it's completely different compared to coins from a hundred years ago.

The hole, the overall shape, it's all five centuries ago. You seriously thought you could get away with saying a few decades?

The pawnbroker's imposing facade is completely overwhelmed. He has no choice but to pay what he feels is an exhorbitant price.

The woodcutter pockets what to him is a princely sum, and leaves the store. However, the moment he steps outside, everything he just said and did becomes impossible to remember clearly.

Nobody had noticed that when he took the money, a black weiqi stone fell out of his pocket, surreptitiously rolling into the shop's storeroom.

Business has not been good at the pawnshop today. The sun is falling down, but the pawnbroker had long since closed up shop and left.

Is such meager profit worth cheating your fellow man?

Those who truly know how to bring a great windfall to the land, he has no means to meet, nor does he wish to.

At this point, the only thing on his mind is how he is drowing under the exhaustion emanating from his feet.

The realm of man... is still so, so dull.

The weiqi stone does not know what sort of torments his self within the Tomb is undergoing.

Between lonely torture and endlessly wandering the realm alone, even one as skilled at weighing benefits such as he cannot decide which is the lesser evil.

Her affairs are not yet over.

I shall rest here a little and plan how to get to Baizao from Yumen.

Yumen has only just left Baizao, and it is highly unlikely to turn back. The easiest means of entering the capital is on someone...

He spots an ancient weiqi set in the corner of the room.

Since ancient times, there have never been many who were eloquent in the art of weiqi in Yumen, and fewer still were the boards and stones they played with. With but a glance, he recognizes it as his own simple set.

He once played upon it with his sibling.

This thing is still here.

Something else she left behind in the mortal realm...

He wishes he could place the entirety of the set into his bag and take it with him, but it would be too cumbersome.

And so, Wang's body fades once more, and the battered, splintered weiqi case gains another black stone.

Surrounded by fellow stones, he absent-mindedly returns to the days when everything still felt new to him.

Surround three sides to corner it; take the last breath to capture it. At first, he saw these states as no more than differences in position of the stones on the board.

But as Jie explained things to him, he began to see a form of struggle within that stone, clinging onto its single liberty.

From the simple capture and escape comes the jump, the knight's move, the diagonal, the extension...

...A few days later, Jie, with her basic knowledge of the game, was no longer his opponent.

Weiqi began as an amusement he found some interest in, but it gradually became the way he thought, and then it became the sand table upon which he plotted the excise of Sui...

Welcome, welcome! This is the first month we're back to doing regular business again, so we're offering discounts—

Ohoho, if it isn't old Zhou!

...Mr. Pang.

I didn't think you'd rush back to Yumen from Baizao, what with the fighting only just over. Feel like a trip down memory lane? And this is your... daughter? What a lovely young lady!

Dad, look, there's a round stone here!

Oh my, that's a weiqi stone! How did that drop over here... Thank you for helping me find it, thank you! You've got a clever little girl there, Zhou. I can tell she's suited for the game!

Hmm? You lost a stone?

Mhm, I took the set to school to play with my friends yesterday, and when school was over, there was one black stone missing.

...But there's still a hundred and eighty one here?

There was an extra one, and it wasn't like the others. It was all shiny, and now I can't find it...

At that moment, the stone is in the pocket of some court mandarin's scion, deriding himself for his own conduct.

Flattering the rich while sneering at the poor. Climbing the social ladder through bowing and scraping. People often say how much they despise such behavior, but they hate the fact that they have no opportunity to pull themselves up this way.

It is not like he has not done it himself. He was simply more precise, more ruthless.

He did so not for fame and fortune, but for his family to be able to survive, somewhere above the ever-shifting tides of the imperial court, somewhere below the shadow of the great threat known as Sui.

But... is that not all over now?

Using such ploys over and over did not make him hate himself. No weiqi player feels guilt over winning through guile, after all.

But when those calculations and trades a hundred moves deep lose their meaning in the eyes of the player, when a fierce battle in the corner becomes a simple mess of black and white stones...

He becomes more and more bored with it all. He is no machine. He cannot perform meaningless repetition forever.

As he wanders back to this place where he and Jie had their fateful meeting, he finds himself less and less able to make a decision.

Should he do as he planned before Sui's elimination, and use a single stone to search for some trace of her, whether it take decades, centuries, or millennia, and see her return for himself...

Or should he abandon this worn-out, exhausted, lonely stone once he is sure everything is on the right track, then withdraw from the land and say farewell to all things past and present?

Once more, it is night.

He has taken on a more nocturnal lifestyle lately.

In the day, he is an ignorant, unknowing stone, avoiding the eyes of anyone who might threaten him and his family.

When the sun has set and the moons have risen, he steps through the door to the Sky Mirror Pavilion with great difficulty, gathering all things to do with his family, especially Jie.

The photograph on this newspaper clipping...

'Mysterious woman with her striking looks to her advantage smeared ink on an art dealer's cheeks before disappearing into thin air.'

'Criminal who falsely used the Grandmaster's name to open an abusive kung fu school has been arrested, found to have deserted the Yumen army.'