The bruise-like birthmark on the back of Jiang Si's neck split open into bronze scales the moment he stepped into Sifang Town. As a drop of blood fell onto the bronze ring at the end of the alley, the blood-red crescent marks all along the street suddenly came alive, slithering toward his ankles like countless snakes.
“You must be the warding object in the ninth coffin.” The mayor's grotesquely mutated body blocked the alley, twelve locust-wood spikes weaving through him like living snakes. Only then did Jiang Si realize that the hidden pattern of the “Dark Lock” on his underclothes was identical, down to the finest detail, to the gold thread in the lining of the young woman's red dress at the altar. The cinnabar mole on Lu Yifan's left shoulder, from which silver liquid seeped, matched the mark of the “Moon God's Bride” in the sacrificial rules. And the tortoiseshell pattern on Hu Jiu's silver knife resonated with the ley-line map reflected in Jiang Si's artificial eye.
The smell of disinfectant in the ICU could not wash away the stench of bronze rust. The psychiatrist said it was all an illusion, but twenty photos of Qinglong Temple, all taken at three in the morning, had appeared out of nowhere on Jiang Si's phone. The silver-liquid crescent on Lu Yifan's tile matched the alley marking from three years ago exactly. And the bronze artifact Hu Jiu found at the provincial museum bore a tortoise-and-snake totem identical to the image in the mayor's compound eyes.
Time began to warp. On July 16 every year for the past three years, Hu Jiu had the same fried eggs for breakfast; Jiang Si always woke with a start at three in the morning; and Lu Yifan's shoulder pain matched the tolling of the bells in Sifang Town with uncanny precision.
When the nine coffins in the inverted-pyramid altar opened, Jiang Si finally understood what “soul dwelling” meant: the bronze chains his mother had hidden in their bloodline, the silver-liquid memories in Lu Yifan's cinnabar mole, the souls of Hu Jiu's ancestors deep inside his artificial eye. These “foreign things” buried in their flesh were never a curse. They were the baton passed down through three generations of resistance.
The tenth layer of the mirror array
