Chronicles of the Hollow Bones

After pulling a corpse from a well on a rainy night, I pried a scale from beneath its fingernail. Then scales began to grow on my own fingertips. My wounds healed at an absurd rate, but the dead had started talking, and they were a little noisy. There were scales in the medicine my wife brewed, and the roots of her nails had turned black, but she smiled and told me not to worry. My father’s nails were black when he died, too. He left behind a wooden box containing a map of nine wells. Something called corpse marrow was buried in them. Swallow it, and you could go from human to god, but the price was shedding your skin, losing your memories, splitting off a shadow-self that wanted to kill you, and becoming so emotionally numb you nearly forgot how to love someone. The emperor was the shadow-self of my sworn enemy. The borderland saintess had my wife’s face. The dynasty’s dragon vein had been built from the bodies of the living. And the Daoist who had lured me into this mess had spent sixty years doing it all just so he could be eaten, a slave to his obsession. Fine, then: become a god, or remain human? Becoming a god meant losing myself and becoming a rule of the world. Remaining human meant that in every lifetime, my instinct for immortality would strangle my wife to death. The cycle would continue until the end of time. In the end, I chose a third path. I became a god, but held on to the last tiny scrap of my humanity. At the bottom of the well, I catch the obsessions of everyone who falls in and tell them a story about a constable and his wife, who puts scales in the medicine she brews. Then one day, a baby girl thrown into the well mumbled that her name was Liu Niang. Never mind. I’d better hide the scales in my hand first.