Borrow a Blade, Leave a Message

A knife peddler came to Chengzhou. He didn’t sell knives for money; he offered them on credit. When he left a knife, he would also leave a sentence, then return to collect when the words came true. He told Old Lu that within three days, a boatload of unwanted rice would drift to his wharf. Old Lu chased him away. On the third morning, the rice really did arrive. That same afternoon, another peddler with no connection to Old Lu capsized in town. This trade took no money, only debts. When one person gained, someone else lost. And he could see whose head the bill would land on. His name was Shen Rang. The scales he carried on his shoulder had never had a weight. His master left him a ledger, whose final page held only half a line: Due to be fulfilled, this year’s Frost’s Descent. The column for the creditor was blank. The debt for a knife lent out forty years ago had festered until now. There were nine knives in his pack. Eight had words carved into their handles. The ninth was blank. He had spent years searching for the person the empty knife was meant for. He traveled upstream, collecting debts. Eleven people lay drowned beneath Chengzhou’s waters, and farther upriver stood an old scale no one had ever managed to balance. The farther he went, the clearer it became: sooner or later, his own name would be written down as the creditor on this rotten account.