The copper spoon that rolled across the bluestone slabs carried the weight of two worlds.
When Shen Yan clutched the copper spoon, shattered into several pieces, and ran out of the rain-soaked alley, the syrup still glimmered between his fingers. In its faint light, it reflected a man in a moon-white robe. Threads of blood on the jade pendant were crawling along the man's fingertips, while the reflection of an official's robe in a willow-leaf raindrop showed a mole between his brows, dripping the same red as the mark on the back of Shen Yan's neck.
The beeswax beads in the convenience store, the braid swaying past on the subway, the eyeless candy bird on an office document... All the fragments came together in the broken pieces of the copper spoon: the rainy night of every month's fifteenth had never been a coincidence, the opera house's singing concealed an untold past, and the candy tiger he had crushed was the very shape of his own fate.
At the instant the copper spoon shattered on the asphalt, the stone lion at the alley entrance was already counting down to the next full moon. Shen Yan knew that as long as even a little syrup clung to his palm, no matter which street he fled to, the fate engraved in the copper spoon would follow his shadow and grow moss in the rain.
