They say someone once saw Lady Meng weeping over a shattered bowl beside the Bridge of Helplessness. Names on the Three-Lives Stone bled. The flowers on the far shore of the River of Forgetfulness vanished. The dead along its banks all looked back, shedding black tears.
There are countless rumors on the road to the Yellow Springs, and no one knows which are true. I climbed out of a tomb and followed that road in search of the truth.
By the North Sea, a pair of faint footprints stretched down to the seafloor, with no beginning or end in sight. In Antarctica, a sculpture of a human body wept bloody tears as it gazed up at the sky. In an ancient town, a massive stone shaped like a coffin held someone’s soul. Some said the footprints had been left by a god fleeing for its life; others said the ice sculpture was an angel fallen from heaven. As for the coffin-shaped stone, it was said to hold the gods and buddhas of the heavens.
I began in a tomb, then walked over the corpses of gods and buddhas, all the way toward becoming a demon.
