Chapter 10: Chapter 10

Blood dotted the dust like rusted coins.

Hai Ping's throat burned as though he'd swallowed a coal. Each attempt at the Call to the Deep came out as a broken thing—a wheeze, a crack, a pathetic mimicry of the low, earth-shaking note Bi Fang had sounded. The vibration of the true note still hummed in his teeth, a ghost of power he couldn't grasp.

The firebird watched him with unreadable flames. "Your voice is gone. Even if I taught you the rest of the song, you could not sing it tonight. You will damage yourself permanently."

"Then I'll sing through the damage."

"You cannot sing a note you cannot produce." Bi Fang's voice was ancient and patient, a stone wearing down a river. "The Call to the Deep is not a sound you force. It is a sound you *become*. You are trying to shout like a man when you should be resonating like a mountain."

Hai Ping sagged onto a stone shelf, clutching his throat. The cavern walls flickered with Bi Fang's thousand-feather fire. Somewhere beyond this hidden chamber, his father was being dragged across the ocean floor by creatures who wore human skin, bound for a celestial war that had nothing to do with fishermen and everything to do with whether the world survived its own gods.

"I don't have time to become a mountain," he rasped. "I have twenty-nine days."

"Then you must find a faster way." Bi Fang's head tilted, and the flames around its beak dimmed. "There is another method. But it is dangerous."

Hai Ping pushed himself upright. "I'll take it."

"You have not heard what it is yet."

"I don't care what it is." His voice cracked, a dry splinter of sound. "Tell me."

The firebird considered him for a long moment, and Hai Ping could feel something shifting in the air—a weight, like the moment before a storm turns. "You already carry the mark of the Keeper. The creature below has accepted you. That bond may be enough to bypass the voice entirely."

"What do you mean?"

"The Song of Awakening is a bridge between the mortal who sings it and the creature who hears it. But you are not merely a singer. You are the Keeper. The Kun Peng has already touched your mind, your blood, your dreams. If you can find its heart in the dark, you may not need to sing it awake through your voice." Bi Fang paused. "You might sing it awake through your *presence*. By descending to the bottom of the Northern Ocean and placing your hand upon its sleeping soul."

Hai Ping stared. "You're telling me I don't need to learn the song at all?"

"I am telling you that thousands of years ago, the Predecessor—the Keeper who sang the Kun Peng to sleep during the last celestial war—had a voice that could move tides. He trained for forty years before he was ready. You have twenty-nine days." Bi Fang's flames flickered low, casting long shadows across the cavern's carved walls. "The song is the safe path. But you are not in a position to walk the safe path. The other way is to descend early, touch the creature's heart, and hope the bond between you is strong enough to hold it in its dreaming until the moment of waking passes."

"How do I touch its heart?"

"There is a place called the Wound." Bi Fang's voice dropped, and the cavern seemed to grow colder. "Ten thousand years ago, when the Kun Peng was first struck by a spear from the celestial realm, the wound never healed. It is a fissure in the creature's side, wide as a city, deep as the sea's own secrets. Through that fissure, you can reach the inner chambers of its being. But you will not be alone down there."

"What's down there?"

"The parasites." The word hung in the air like poison. "Creatures that feed on the Kun Peng's dreaming flesh. Things that were once divine servants, twisted by ten thousand years of darkness into something that no longer remembers light. They will sense you the moment you enter. And they are very, very hungry."

Hai Ping's mouth was dry. His father's face swam before his eyes—the weathered grin, the calloused hands, the way he'd always laughed when the nets came up empty, saying *the sea keeps her secrets, boy, but she always pays her debts eventually.*

"Is there a way past them?"

"You are asking if there is a way to survive them." Bi Fang's flames rose slightly. "Yes. But it will cost you something that cannot be regained."

"What?"

"Your mortality."

The words fell like stones into still water. Hai Ping felt them ripple through him, cold and final. "What do you mean?"

"The Wound is a passage between worlds. The creatures that dwell there exist in a state between spirit and flesh. To pass them unseen, you must become like them—neither fully alive nor fully dead. You would enter the Wound as a mortal man and emerge as something else. Something that walks between." Bi Fang's voice softened, almost gentle. "You would still be alive. You would still be yourself. But you would no longer age as men age. No longer bleed as men bleed. No longer be entirely human."

Hai Ping sat in silence. The firelight crackled. Somewhere above, the distant boom of celestial warfare rumbled through the stone, muffled by leagues of water and rock.

"How do I become that?"

"There is a ritual. An ancient thing, older than the fire I carry." Bi Fang's flames guttered. "It requires a sacrifice of something precious. The thing you love most in the world."

For a long moment, Hai Ping couldn't breathe.

"My father—"

"Your father is the thing you fear losing most. But the thing you *love* most—" Bi Fang's eyes met his. "Is the sea."

The words struck him like a physical blow. He opened his mouth to deny it, but the denial died on his lips. Because it was true. It had always been true. He'd grown up hating the ocean that took his mother, that nearly took his father a dozen times, that demanded blood and sweat and tears from every family in the village. But beneath the hatred was something deeper. A love so vast and so quiet he'd never allowed himself to name it. The salt air in his lungs when he woke. The rhythm of waves that had lulled him to sleep since he was an infant. The knowledge that no matter what happened on land, the sea would always be there—endless, patient, waiting.

"The ritual requires you to give up the sea," Bi Fang continued. "To sever the bond between you and the water. You would never feel its pull again. Never find comfort in its presence. The sea would become to you what it is to a creature of the desert—a foreign thing, vast and unknowable."

"What happens to the bond?" Hai Ping's voice was barely a whisper.

"It passes to the Kun Peng. That is the purpose of the ritual. Your love of the sea becomes your love of the creature. It is what allows the Keeper to find the heart in the dark—because you will be drawn to it the way you were once drawn to the tide."

Hai Ping stared at his hands. They were a fisherman's hands—calloused, scarred, stained with salt and rope burn. The hands of a boy who'd spent his entire life on the water, who knew every current and every shoal within ten miles of his village.

"Will I still be able to walk on a boat?" he asked quietly.

"You will be able to do anything you could do before. You will simply no longer feel the sea as you once did. It will become a tool, not a companion."

Hai Ping thought of the way his father talked about the ocean—like it was a living thing, a partner in the long dance of survival. He thought of the way the old men of the village would spit into the wind before casting nets, a small offering to the tides. He thought of the day his mother had been taken, and how his father had stood on the shore for three days without moving, staring at the water that had swallowed her, and how even then—even in his grief—he'd spoken of the sea with a kind of reverence. *She takes what she needs,* his father had said. *But she gives back more if you're patient.*

"Will I remember what it felt like?"

"Yes. That is the cruelest part." Bi Fang's flames dipped low. "You will remember the feeling of the sea. You will simply never feel it again. The memory will become a hollow thing, a shell you can look at but never hold."

Hai Ping closed his eyes. The sound of waves was everywhere in his memory—in his blood, in his bones, in the way he breathed. He'd taken it for granted his whole life. And now—

"Will it hurt?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then let's begin."

Bi Fang studied him for a long moment. "You are certain? Once the ritual is complete, there is no return. The sea will be lost to you forever."

Hai Ping opened his eyes. "My father is out there, drowning in a place that isn't his. Every village on the coast will be washed away in a month if I fail. The world will drown, Bi Fang. And I have a chance to stop it." He met the firebird's gaze. "The sea is already lost to me. I just haven't accepted it yet."

The firebird said nothing for a long moment. Then, slowly, its flames began to shift—from brilliant orange to deep, ancient blue, the color of the deepest ocean trenches.

"Then sit," Bi Fang said, "and listen. For I will only speak these words once."

Hai Ping sat.

The ritual took three days.

Three days of sitting in the dark while Bi Fang chanted in a language that predated human speech—words that sounded like water moving over stone, like the grinding of tectonic plates, like the distant song of whales calling across impossible distances. Three days of feeling something inside him shift and crack and reform, like ice melting in a spring thaw.

And through it all, the sensation of the sea draining out of him.

It was worse than he'd imagined. Worse than pain. It was like losing a sense he hadn't known he had. The constant, background hum of the ocean—the thing he'd never noticed until it was gone—faded to silence. His skin stopped prickling when the wind carried salt. His ears stopped straining for the sound of waves. His heart, which had always beat in time with the tide, began to beat to a different rhythm entirely.

On the third day, he opened his eyes and found himself changed.

He stood. His body felt lighter, as though something heavy had been lifted from his shoulders. He looked at his hands and saw the same calluses, the same scars. But something was different. Something beneath the skin.

"Look," Bi Fang said, and gestured toward a pool of dark water in the corner of the chamber—rainwater that had seeped through the mountain.

Hai Ping walked to the pool and looked down at his reflection.

The face that stared back was his own. Same dark hair. Same sun-worn skin. Same stubborn set to his jaw. But the eyes were different. They were deeper somehow, darker, as though they'd seen things that didn't exist yet.

"The change is internal," Bi Fang said. "You are still a man. But you are no longer entirely a mortal one. You will not age. You will not sicken. You will not drown." The firebird paused. "And you will be able to find the Kun Peng's heart, because you are now bound to it as you were once bound to the sea."

Hai Ping stared at his reflection.

He didn't feel different. He felt empty. Hollowed out. Like a bell that had been rung so hard it had forgotten how to ring.

"When do I leave?"

"Now." Bi Fang's flames rose. "The next full moon is in twenty-six days. But if you descend now, you will have time to reach the heart before the creature begins to stir. The Wound is deep, and the way is dangerous. You will