For forty-seven days, not a single bucket of water had reached Baishui Village. They bound Shui Yanzhou to the blue-stone platform at the mouth of the town and left him to the sun for seven days as punishment by exposure. Pei Wujiu, chief inspector of the Water Resources Office, read out the verdict: secretly digging into an underground river and stealing water from an official channel. Under the Water Code, Article 37, Clause 9, the sentence was exposure. The body was forbidden from entering a well, and the name from being entered in the register. Kneeling below the platform, Shui Wuyou took apart the judgment word by word and committed it to memory. She also memorized the water register's number, 3172, and the faces of the four office clerks. Her father's lips moved twice without a sound. She recognized the words "Deep Spring," bit her lip, and nodded in assent. As the sun dipped westward, her father's final sound rose from his throat like wind passing through a broken clay jar. She didn't go home. She went to the old well at the eastern end of town, the one her father had spent eleven years repairing. She put her hand into it and heard water shifting through the deep cracks in the stone. The Third-Drop Realm's resonance couldn't hold for long. A sharp ache pulsed at the back of her head. Returning to the exposure platform, she felt along the underside of its edge and found an engraved Listening-Water mark, a semicircle with a short tail. The center of the mark was wet, sticky with sand and cold, heavy to the touch. Its temperature was that of living water. She pressed her ear to the stone and heard that, on the right side of the old underground river, a small opening had appeared. The water was turning north. A chill ran down her back.
