Chronicles of Spirit Artifacts

A bow mended with seven copper rivets can mend a bowl, or mend a life.

Shen Zhuo is the lowliest mender in Xiangzhou City. His hands earn three coins for each rivet, and everyone looks down on him. He can hear the sound an object makes just before it breaks. This is the gift of first awakening to "Listening to Objects," and its price is that he has not dreamed once since the age of seven. Each advance in object-sense takes something from the body as payment, and it is never returned: the first awakening takes dreams, the second takes taste, the third takes pain, the fourth takes one's name, and the final awakening takes one's shadow.

Then, one night, the Yong'an Bell, which had guarded the Huan River for three hundred years, rang on its own. From inside the bell, he dug out the bones of seven children and half a rivet engraved with his own name. His master had been dead for three years before he learned that his master had been nailed inside the bell, serving as a rivet in his place for twelve years. He learned that there was a rivet nailed into his own crown as well: the eighth rivet. And he learned that the eighth child who escaped from the bell three hundred years ago was none other than himself.

He will use the life he has left to mend his master out of copper. But the deeper he digs, the more he realizes that it is not his master he must mend. It is the three hundred people forced into objects over the past three centuries, people whose names were pried away, leaving not even proof that they had ever existed. And it is the eighth clause of the "Laws of Objects," buried for three hundred years: Spirits can be redeemed. Accomplish a deed, fulfill a wish, repay a debt. When the duty is fulfilled, the spirit finds peace; when the spirit finds peace, the object endures.

He has no answer for Cui Jiushou. He gives Cui Jiushou a promise: I acknowledge all eighty-seven of you.