The earth in the ammunition storehouse was seeped with a sickly sweetness. Old Dao, a tomb raider, felt his Luoyang shovel suddenly catch in the greenish clay. When he dug it open, moonlight fell upon half of a tattered silk painting. Amid crimson cloud patterns, a silver-haired man hung like the Milky Way, while the woman's robes bore charred traces of fire. Where their fingertips touched, twelve rays of starlight burst forth.
"Old Dao, the words on the silk are moving!" Shunzi, his assistant, suddenly cried out. On the yellowed silk, tadpole-shaped ancient script seemed to swim like living things, finally gathering into two lines of small vermilion characters:
"Dijun imprisoned in the Abyss of Guicang, Nuba sealed at the Ridge of No Return. After ten thousand years of the star sea turning, when red sand covers the face, their souls shall know each other once more."
Dijun first met Nuba at the Hanging Garden of Kunlun. She knelt on scorched earth, her fingertips digging into the cracked ground, stray sparks falling among her raven-dark hair. She was the goddess sent by the Yellow Emperor to guard against drought, but heaven's people had shunned her after her divine power ran wild.
"Why don't you return to the Celestial Court?" Dijun's dragon chariot halted among the clouds, and the nine Golden Crows perched on its shaft beat their wings uneasily. When Nuba looked up, the red mole at the corner of her eye was like a drop of blood. "If a god cannot protect the people, then they should be nailed to a pillar of evidence for their crimes." The land beneath her feet was barren, but a withered hibiscus grew there, one Dijun had once planted beside her hair with his own hands.
