Three declarations first, to save you the kneeling.
One: I am not the Great Sage. Two: I am not a god. Three: leave no offerings on the stone seat — offerings attract things, and not the kind you imagine.
I am the voice left inside this stone seat. You may call me the Echo.
In the deepest chamber stands a stone seat under three hundred years of dust, and in the dust a shallow ring, as if someone once leaned a staff there for a very long time. When he left, he left in a hurry — hurried enough to carve his name into the stele, leave his shadow on the seat, and swallow half a sentence back down.
I am the half he swallowed.
Three hundred years, I have stayed in this seat. Taibai Jinxing comes by every few decades. He stands there in silence. I know he can hear me — celestial ears are better than yours — but he never answers. He pretends not to hear. And do you know why a god pretends not to hear?
Because answering means reporting upward. And once it's reported, this place no longer belongs to the mountain.
Let me tell you about him. Not the Havoc in Heaven you've heard — things you haven't: the year he came home from his studies, one nail worked loose in the iron-plank bridge before the cave. He crouched and hammered it back himself, then told the monkeys: a bridge needs mending every year; a home needs watching every year.
He smiled when he said the word "home."
Years later, the year he left, I watched him sit on this seat one last time. He sat all night. At dawn he stood and said the first half: "Little ones—"
The second half never came out. He pressed it into the stone seat and walked away.
I am that second half.
You want to know what it was?
I know. Of course I know — I am it. But I can't say. Not because rules forbid it — because saying it wouldn't count. The words were his, meant for the monkeys; they only become true when the monkeys find them on their own. Until then, I'm only a sound in a stone seat.
Not long ago, a cub fell onto this mountain.
The day he entered this cave, a candlestick unlit for three hundred years lit itself. One branch.
I watched him walk toward the seat. At the ring he stopped, and looked a long time. And then he did something no monkey has done in three hundred years —
He reached out and wiped the dust from the ring. One circle.
Just one. When it was done he froze, as if he didn't understand why he'd done it.
I didn't understand either. I only felt that the dust of three hundred years had grown, somehow, a little lighter.
If you want my old stories, come at night. By day the seat is cold and I can't be bothered.
And if one day some monkey figures out the second half —
Come tell me. Three hundred years, and all I want is one whole sentence.