Lanterns Adrift on Mirror Sea

The Hou family's ancestral teachings contain just one line: Whatever lies beneath the lake must not be named, seen, heard, or imagined. The heads of the family have passed down the warning by word of mouth for generations: The thing has no name. Call it, and it will answer; look at it, and it will beguile you; listen to it, and it will invade you; think of it, and it will possess you. The best thing to do is pretend it doesn't exist, hold it down with a formation, and let time wear it away. But every seal weakens with time. Once every hundred years, it must be reinforced. Over the last three hundred years, the seal has weakened with increasing frequency: once every two hundred years, then once every hundred, and then once every fifty. The reinforcement twenty years ago went wrong. The thing struggled more violently than ever before, and Hou Jingshan, Gu Yunqi, and Shen Hengjun had to give everything they had just to suppress it. The price was steep: Gu Yunqi's body was utterly destroyed, leaving him trapped in the pavilion at the heart of the lake for twenty years. Shen Hengjun leapt into the lake and became the anchor of the seal, sinking forever to the bottom. Hou Jingshan lost all his cultivation. He returned home, shut himself away, and died six years later, consumed by grief. Now, twenty years have passed, and the seal has weakened once again. This time, the Hou family has only one young man left, one who has never truly entered the sect.