The cursor blinked.
It was the last thing Liu Mang saw clearly: a thin black line pulsing at the end of a sentence he had rewritten eleven times, on a document titled FINAL_FINAL_v3_ending.docx, under a desk lamp that buzzed like a dying wasp. Two in the morning. A cold cup of instant noodles congealed beside the keyboard, the oil on its surface gone white and waxy. In another browser tab, the comment section of his novel scrolled on without him.
Trash ending.
A year of buildup for THIS?
Author, I hope you step on a Lego every day for the rest of your life.
He had laughed at that one. He remembered laughing.
Then the pain arrived.
It did not knock. It came in through the left side of his chest like a fist pushed through wet paper, closed around his heart, and squeezed. His breath stopped halfway up his throat. His fingers spasmed on the keys, and a line of gibberish ran across the screen—jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj—as his hand slid down and his forehead dropped toward the desk.
Get up. Call someone. Phone. Where's the phone?
His mind gave the order. His body did not take it.
His arm lay on the desk like a dead fish. His legs had gone heavy and distant, as if they belonged to someone in another room. The pain squeezed again, and a great, gray weariness rolled up behind it—the weariness of a thousand nights of deadlines, of energy drinks and cheap cigarettes and arguing with readers at three in the morning. It poured over him, warm and patient.
No. Not like this. Not with the noodles.
The cursor blinked.
Blinked.
And the lamp went out.
Cold.
That was the first thing. Not winter cold—Liu Mang had grown up in the north and knew winter—but a cold with intention. It soaked up through his knees and palms from the floor beneath him, a deep, slick chill that went past skin and muscle and settled straight into the marrow, as if the floor were drinking the warmth out of him one sip at a time.
The second thing was the smell.
Sulfur, thick and yellow. Under it, old incense burned down to bitter ash. Under that, something sweet and rotten, like lotus flowers left to drown in a stagnant pond. Every breath dragged the stench across the back of his tongue until he could taste it.
The third thing was the sound.
Wailing. Far off and close at once, rising and falling in long, ragged waves—hundreds of voices, maybe thousands, none of them forming words. It came from below, from above, from inside the walls. Woven through it was another sound, sharp and metallic and much nearer.
Clink.
Clink. Clink.
Chains.
Liu Mang opened his eyes.
He was kneeling on a floor of black jade so polished it reflected his own face back at him—pale, slack-jawed, hair stuck to his forehead with cold sweat. He wore a plain white robe he had never owned, loose at the collar and tied with a hemp cord. His feet were bare. The jade under his palms was faintly translucent, and deep within it, very slowly, shapes moved: faces, pressed up from the inside, mouths opening without sound.
He snatched his hands back.
The hall around him was vast enough to swallow a city block. Pillars thicker than ancient trees rose into darkness, each one wrapped in carved serpents of black iron whose eyes burned with ghost-fire—cold blue flames that gave light without heat. More of the same fire hung in bronze braziers along the walls, guttering in a wind he couldn't feel. Red lacquer and gold leaf peeled from the beams overhead. Banners of black silk hung motionless, embroidered with characters in a script so old his eyes slid off it.
And on either side of him stood the ghosts.
They lined the hall in two long rows, shoulder to shoulder. Some had faces. Some had too much face—jaws split wide, eyes running like wax down their cheeks. Some were translucent enough that he could see the pillars through their chests. Every one of them held a chain, and every chain hung loose and ready, the iron links swaying and clinking together in that unhurried, patient rhythm.
Clink. Clink.
They were all looking at him.
Liu Mang's teeth began to chatter. He clamped his jaw shut. They chattered anyway.
This is a dream. A heart attack and a dream. Hospital. I'm in a hospital, they've given me something, this is the morphine talking.
He tried to stand. His thighs tensed, his feet pressed against the jade—and nothing happened. His body was impossibly heavy, as if someone had poured lead into a mold shaped like him and called it Liu Mang. His knees stayed fused to the floor. Only his eyes moved, darting from ghost to ghost, from chain to chain, from one blue flame to the next.
Move. Stand up. Run!
His body answered his mind the way it had at the desk: politely, completely, not at all.
Then he understood. He was not in a body. Not really. He was in something lighter and stranger, a shape of breath and memory, and the floor of this place had been built to hold that shape down the way a paperweight holds a page.
The ghosts' chains swayed.
Clink.
At the far end of the hall, on a dais of nine black steps, sat a desk.
It was the size of a small boat, carved from a single slab of dark wood that oozed a faint red resin, like sap or old blood. Scrolls and ledgers were heaped across it in towers. A brush rest of white bone. An inkstone that steamed.
Behind the desk sat a king.
He was huge—not merely tall but broad, the kind of broad that made the enormous chair beneath him look like children's furniture. A thick black beard spilled down his chest, combed and oiled into a sheen like raven feathers. His eyebrows were heavy as brush strokes, slashing up toward his temples. Beneath them, his eyes were large, round, and piercing, the whites so clear they almost glowed, the irises deep as wells.
He wore a robe of black python brocade, the golden serpents embroidered across it seeming to slide over one another whenever the ghost-fire flickered. Atop his head sat a crown of purple-gold, its beaded fringe hanging motionless before his brow.
His aura filled the hall.
Liu Mang had read about auras. He had written about auras—had typed phrases like oppressive pressure and his Qi crushed the air a thousand times without thinking about them. Now he felt one. It came off the man behind the desk like heat from a furnace, except it wasn't heat; it was weight. It pressed down on the top of his skull, pressed his shoulders toward the floor, pressed the breath back into his lungs. It was the weight of judgment itself—of every soul that had ever knelt on this jade and been measured.
Five officials stood around the desk in robes of deep crimson, holding jade tablets before their chests. Each of them had eyebrows like sharpened knives, and each gave off a fainter echo of that same crushing majesty, threaded with a casual, bored dominance that said they had seen ten million men like Liu Mang and would see ten million more.
On either side of the dais stood two more figures.
One was all black: black robe, black tall hat, a face like soot. The other was all white: white robe, white hat, a face like paper soaked in milk. Both were thin as bamboo poles. And from each of their mouths hung a tongue—a long, glistening, purple-red tongue that drooped past the chin, past the throat, past the chest, and dangled all the way down to the waist, swaying gently as they breathed.
The Black and White Impermanence.
The white one noticed him staring. Slowly, it curled the tip of its tongue up and waved.
Liu Mang nearly fainted.
The king was not looking at him. The king had one massive hand propped against his cheek, his head resting on it like a bored student in an afternoon lecture, and with the other hand he was turning the pages of a thin file. The paper rustled, loud in the silence.
"Hm," said the king.
Every ghost in the hall flinched.
Heavy hoofbeats rang out behind him.
Two shadows fell across Liu Mang. He twisted his head—the only thing he could twist—and looked up.
And up.
The figure on his left had the body of a giant warrior, bare-chested and slabbed with muscle, wrapped in a leather kilt studded with iron. From the neck up, it was a bull: broad black muzzle, wet nostrils flaring, horns sweeping out wide and sharp as spears. A gold ring hung through its nose. It held a trident in one fist.
The figure on his right was built the same, but the head was a horse's—long and bony, with a ragged mane and huge, bulging, yellowed eyes. Its lips peeled back over enormous square teeth. It held an iron rod whose tip glowed a dull, ugly red.
Ox-Head and Horse-Face. The guards of the underworld.
I'm going to die, Liu Mang thought, and then, with a hysterical lurch: I'm already dead.
Ox-Head slammed the butt of his trident against the jade. The crack echoed off every pillar.
"Sinner Liu Mang!" he bellowed, his voice a bovine roar that shook the ghost-fire in its braziers. "Kneel and behold Lord Yama!"
"I am kneeling," Liu Mang whispered.
"Kneel harder!"
Horse-Face's red-hot rod tapped the back of his neck—lightly, almost affectionately. The heat bit straight through the soul-flesh with a sizzle, and Liu Mang collapsed forward with a yelp until his forehead hit the jade. The faces inside the floor pressed up eagerly beneath his, mouths gaping.
He lay there, shaking.
"Am I—" His voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. "Am I really dead? Why? I'm twenty-eight. I was just—I was writing, I was only writing—why is this happening—"
"Silence."
The voice came from the dais. It was not loud. It did not need to be. It rolled down the nine steps and through the hall like distant thunder rolling through a mountain range, and the wailing everywhere stopped at once.
Lord Yama had lifted his head from his hand.
"Sinner," the King of Hell said. "Do you comprehend the gravity of your crimes?"
Liu Mang's mind went blank.
Then it went into overdrive, flipping through twenty-eight years like a frantic clerk searching a filing cabinet. Crimes. Crimes. He had never stolen anything—well, a pack of gum when he was seven, but he'd confessed and his mother had made him pay it back. He had never robbed anyone. He had never hit anyone, not since middle school. He had never killed so much as a—no, mosquitoes, he'd killed a great many mosquitoes, but surely the Buddhist accounting didn't stretch that far—
"Eh?" The sound escaped him before he could stop it. He lifted his head from the jade, just slightly. "Your Majesty, I—I don't steal. I don't rob. I don't kill. I pay my taxes. Mostly. How can I be guilty of anything?"
One of the crimson officials stepped forward and laid an open dossier on the desk. Lord Yama glanced down at it, then up at Liu Mang. His great eyes narrowed.
"Have you," the king said slowly, "recently finished a certain essay?"
The word essay came out of him the way a man might say corpse.
Liu Mang blinked. "An essay? I—I suppose. If you mean my novel. I finished it last month. But—" He laughed weakly, hoping someone else would. No one did. "But that's over, isn't it? The last chapter's already posted. The arc's closed. That episode is finished, Your Majesty."
SLAM!
Lord Yama's palm came down on the desk.
The sound was a thunderclap. The towers of scrolls jumped. The steaming inkstone spat black droplets. A shockwave of pressure rolled down the dais and hit Liu Mang in the face like a wall of hot wind, flattening his hair, slamming him back down onto his palms. Along the rows, the ghosts shrank into themselves. Their chains rattled with their trembling. Even Ox-Head took a half-step back.
The king rose.
He kept rising. Standing, he was even larger than he had seemed—a mountain in python brocade—and when he came around the desk and descended the nine steps one at a time, each footfall sent a ripple through the jade that Liu Mang felt in his teeth.
He stopped directly in front of him and looked down.
"Finished," Lord Yama repeated softly. "Finished, he says."
"Your Majesty, I—"
"For one year," the King of Hell said, "this monarch read your novel."
Liu Mang's mouth fell open.
"One year. Every night, after the last judgment of the day. After ten thousand souls weighed and sorted and sent to their punishments. This monarch would return to his chambers, remove his crown, and open your little R-18 novel on the jade mirror." His voice was rising now, the thunder building behind it. "Do you know why?"
"Because… it was good?" Liu Mang offered faintly.
"Because of the first volume!"
The officials nodded in solemn unison.
"Your opening chapters," Lord Yama said, his eyes burning, "were provocative. A peerless fairy. Her devoted young master. A senior brother who kept looking at her. A trip into a secret realm! A sealed cave abode! A misunderstanding at the spirit spring! This monarch has judged souls for ten thousand years, sinner. This monarch knows foreshadowing when he sees it."
He leaned down. His beard swung inches from Liu Mang's nose. It smelled of sandalwood and smoke.
"Every chapter, this monarch waited. Waited for the betrayal. Waited for the scandal. Waited for the night the fairy walked into the senior brother's cave abode and did not walk back out." His voice dropped to a low, shaking growl. "And what did you give this monarch?"
Liu Mang said nothing. He had a terrible feeling he knew.
"Romance." The word was spat like poison. "The young master broke seclusion early. The senior brother was expelled from the sect. The fairy wept and swore she had never even been tempted. And they bound themselves as Dao companions beneath the peach blossoms! Peach blossoms! With cranes circling overhead!" The King of Hell straightened, and his aura flared, and every ghost-fire in the hall leapt a foot high. "Do you understand the anguish of shattered expectations? Do you comprehend what it is to wait one year for a cliff, and be handed a flower garden?"
Liu Mang stared up at him.
The cold of the floor, the weight on his soul, the chains, the tongues, the bull-headed giant with the trident—for one strange moment, all of it receded, and only a single thought remained, crisp and incredulous:
"You…" Liu Mang breathed. "You're an NTR fan?"
The hall went silent.
Lord Yama did not deny it. He lifted his chin, and the beaded fringe of his crown clicked together.
"Indeed."