Chapter 64 · for subscribers
The fourth legend off her spine: the Yunzhou water-gate, taken in the autumn of a year nobody in that valley could name, off a cultivator who had held a river against a village for eleven days. A butcher had paid three years of himself for it and used it once, to lift a drowned child out of a sluice, and a barefoot man on a charcoal hill had held it for nine days and had it taken back out of his chest in front of a thousand people. It had come home to the hand that stole it, and it had nine hundred years of practice in it, and it was about to be used the way its first owner used it.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.