My name is Zuanshan — Drill-Mountain — a pangolin. You've called us pangolins for thousands of years — though in truth we don't drill mountains. We listen to them. Where the earth runs loose, where the stone runs tight, one touch of my claw and I know.
I've lived in Water Curtain Cave for ninety years. Every side tunnel, every collapsed seam, every hidden niche a man could curl into — measured with my own claws. Your maps of the cave, however fine, are drawn by people. Under each of my scales, a road is written.
Since the plague began, the cave's roads have changed.
Not collapsed — changed. Alive — changed. Last ten-day, the east-third fork I've used for fifty years narrowed by three chi overnight. Stone doesn't narrow itself. I lay in the passage listening all night, and I heard the stone drawing in.
Drawing in, the way a man holds his breath.
Frightening? Ninety years in the hills, and I'd never heard of stone holding its breath. Stone holding its breath is stone waiting. Waiting for what? I don't dare guess.
There's worse. I was boring upward, hunting a new route around the east fork, when halfway up I heard digging below me.
Claws. My exact cadence: three shallow, one deep. Three shallow, one deep.
Listen. Every pangolin digs in its own cadence, the way every hand writes differently. Mine — three shallow, one deep — my mother taught me. In the whole world, two creatures dig that way: me, and my mother.
My mother has been dead forty years.
The thing below, digging up from deeper down, went three shallow, one deep.
When I stopped, it stopped. When I dug, it dug. And then I did the most shameful thing of my life — I filled my own bore back in, three layers deep, and ran.
The next day I dared go back to listen. The voice below was gone. And the passage I'd abandoned had been extended three zhang further by someone — in the direction of—
The deepest chamber. The Stone-Heart Altar.
Now, to everyone who enters this cave, I say: walk behind my claws and don't bore your own holes. The forks of this cave wear one shape by day and another by night.
As for my "mother" down there —
If you meet it, ask it one thing for me: which layer did it bury her in.