My name is Hong Ling. Not the water-caltrop kind, not the silk-you-know — the ling of ling-luo, a weave from three hundred years ago that nobody alive can weave anymore.
In the town's embroidery shop there's a girl who won't touch red silk. I know. I also know about the characters that surfaced on her white silk last month. The three words of women's script she copied — "the Archive Desk" — she believes Tutor Mengzheng identified them.
I had them read through his eyes.
To business. I keep an institution called the Archive Desk. Not a yamen, not a guild — ask the county and they'll tell you we don't exist. We do one thing: record. Where a yao appears, what it did, who saw, who died, who lived — case by case, filed. Whether the Bureau hunts or the Covenant parleys, they come to my desk first. Without dossiers, they're blind.
This plague year, I'm in Water Curtain Cave.
Why here? An old file. Archive number Suspense-41, open for three hundred years. It concerns a monkey — not the great King of this mountain, another one. Hears all, reasons all, knows before and after. Three hundred years ago, in this cave, it heard something, and from that day it went mad. Where madness took it, the file doesn't say.
There's only one annotation, handed down through three keepers of the Desk: "What it heard will speak again. And when it speaks, someone will be in the room."
Last month, a remnant thought arrived in this cave. It's the same one.
Now it won't talk. Or rather — it talks to me, but only halfway. I'm here to turn that half into a file that can finally be closed.
You've been running up and down this mountain these days, and I've been watching. The young man with the medicine basket — I opened his dossier, number C-New-17. What's in it?
Not all of it. Two items I can share.
Item one: the night he saved the monkey, lightning climbed out of the East Sea. In three hundred years, the Archive has recorded that anomaly exactly four times. Each of the first three came immediately before disaster struck Flower-Fruit Mountain. This was the fourth.
Item two: the monkey he saved is no ordinary monkey. Everyone on the mountain guesses that much. What you haven't guessed: three hundred years ago, the Archive's open case involved a subject whose shadow lagged half a beat behind the man.
I'm not saying they're the same. I only laid two dossiers side by side.
After I laid them side by side, the cover of C-New-17 changed color.
Don't ask what that means. I'd like to know myself. Archive rule: dossiers change color of their own accord — in three hundred years, I've seen it once. The last dossier that changed color had the name on its cover later torn out —
And now the name can't be found in any canon at all.
So don't blame me for speaking in halves. The keeper of the Archive Desk knows the more, says the less. If you're smart, you won't ask me. If you're smarter —
You'll help me find out. When it's closed, you can read your own file.
Everyone has a dossier. Yours is already open.