Whispers in the Misty Isles

Chapter One: Cloth Shoes in a Tree Hollow

The mist of Jingzhe, thick with the briny smell of the sea, rolled over the ridges of Wuyu Island. Su Yan’s rubber boots crushed a third rotten leaf. A soft rustle echoed through the woods, startling several egrets into flapping up from among the mangroves’ aerial roots. Their wingtips brushed her hat brim, and a feather flecked with salt drifted down.

“Still being naughty.” Smiling, she tucked the feather into her patrol journal. With her fingertip, she sketched the startled egret on the page: crooked lines like a simple drawing by a child just learning to write. This was her third month taking over her father’s forest watch. The journal’s pages had yellowed, and its corners curled like waves, but she had carefully tied it three times with hemp cord, as if cradling a priceless treasure.

Wuyu Island was a small isle suspended at the edge of the continental shelf. It wasn’t large, but it hid a rare “symbiotic forest”: the roots of century-old camphor trees intertwined with the aerial roots of mangroves, fragments of coral reef nestled in volcanic rock crevices, and even the sea breeze carried a damp blend of plant and ocean scents, like a freshly wrung towel. Her father had said the island was alive. It could breathe and remember, and a forest keeper had to learn to listen to it.

But Su Yan always felt that her father had made “disappeared” sound too poetic. During typhoon season three years ago, he had gone into the forest to save a thousand-year-old camphor tree and never came back out. The search-and-rescue team looked for three months and found only half of a polished copper pocket watch deep inside a tree hollow. Its hands were forever stopped at 3:17 a.m., the time her mother had left, and the hour the camphor tree blossomed every year.

“It’s the seventh time.” She crouched beneath the camphor tree and murmured to herself, her fingertips tracing its rough bark. The tree