When Cheng Mingyi was seventeen, there was one thing he had never told anyone. From the age of four, he had a woman talking in his head.
He took medication for it for two years.
On the afternoon after the last subject of the college entrance examination, the sky was getting dark little by little, and thousands of people in the whole street raised their heads at the same time. That evening, a letter was delivered to his home. That's not an invitation, it's a receipt.
Three months later he stood on the edge of a fjord in Norway, facing a university that was not on any map.
There, the Classic of Mountains and Seas is not a myth, but a history book. And those things that were written into books and erased one by one are waking up one by one.
In this school, reading scraps is more important than holding a knife. The class schedule includes editing, calendaring, tempering, and fieldwork. An old man who learned Chinese from a dictionary was fishing by the lake, a poor Norwegian boy who was full of witticisms always had a bag of dirt in his pocket, and a Japanese girl whose family only weaved one piece of cloth for 1,200 years came here to find out what her family was weaving.
The whole school knew that there was a student from China who was recruited by mistake. There was something in everyone else's eyes, but his was empty.
And the woman's voice suddenly sounded as clear as if it was close to his ears.
He thought he was seriously ill.
That fall, something crawled out of the soil. It was once a god and was executed once four thousand years ago. It walked all the way west, towards the mountain behind his house. Wherever it passed, the rivers stopped flowing and the vegetation died.
There is only one way to kill a god. Say its real name.
And for four thousand years, no one knew the name of any god.
Except for the woman in his head.
