Old Immortal Wu lived at the eastern edge of the village, in an old house of gray brick and black tile, with two white paper lanterns hanging by the door—lanterns that were never lit. He was the only person within thirty li of Chenjia'ao who knew how to "read incense." Whenever a child suffered a fright, an elder had a troubling dream, or livestock died without cause, people came to him to light a stick of incense and see.
Chen Wangtian burst in with Nian'an in his arms to find Old Wu sitting in the main hall, fingering a string of black prayer beads. Each bead was the size of a thumb pad, their surfaces pitted and uneven, gleaming with a dark, oily sheen under the candlelight. Old Wu's left pinky bore a nail longer and thicker than the others, a waxy yellow in color, like aged horn.
"Old Immortal Wu, something's happened to my son."
Old Wu lifted his eyelids and glanced at Nian'an, then at Chen Wangtian. He didn't ask what had happened. He simply set down his beads, rose, took three sticks of incense from the shrine, lit them, and set them into the censer.
It was ordinary sandalwood incense. Once lit, it should have emitted pale blue smoke rising straight upward. But from the moment these three sticks caught fire, something was wrong. The flames flickered erratically, as if repeatedly snuffed and rekindled by an invisible hand. The smoke did not rise straight, but swirled downward, spreading across the tabletop like a snake that had lost its way.
Chen Wangtian stepped back involuntarily. He caught a scent in the smoke that did not belong to sandalwood—the smell of rust. The same rust smell from Nian'an's candy.
Then the middle stick snapped clean in two.
It didn't burn through. It simply broke. The jagged top half tumbled onto the table. The bottom half remained upright in the censer, its flame extinguished utterly. Yet the ash at the break stood rigid, refusing to fall—like a severed finger with a clump of ash still perched on the cut.
Old Wu's face changed in the candlelight. It was not fear. It was something deeper—like a man recalling something from long ago, something he thought he had forgotten.