The man looked at her with a trace of doubt: “Miss Ling, you're really too impatient—makes me feel I shouldn't be taking this money! And we're complete strangers. You walk in talking about signing a contract—doesn't this sound a bit like what they say outside...”
“You've got that wrong. I sent someone over to look ages ago. That's my agent, Chen Mo, standing outside—he came specially with his partner.” Ling Yu got to the point. “And the moment I mention his partner—well, he's here partly for me, and partly for that partner of his. Who has disappeared.”
She sighed several long sighs as she spoke, and the moment she saw the man's expression shift, she explained again at once: “I'm here for the contract, of course. Though... saving someone matters too. The person has vanished, and we don't have a single friend here who could help. Under the circumstances, all I could think of was coming to you for help.”
The more she explained, the more the man felt something was off. But now that the question he'd wanted to ask was out, digging deeper into the cooperation was merely an afterthought.
The man shook his head: “You shouldn't come to me with something this embarrassing. Our village's police patrol all around here.”
Ling Yu listened and heaved another sigh. She had sighed more today than in all her creative droughts put together—clearly her acting method needed a dedicated overhaul.
She mused while listening to him continue. “Honestly, this sort of thing is normal. When you report it and can't get the result you want, if...”
“My agent told me the person went missing in the desert.” She raised the crucial keyword again.
The man frowned. “If someone's lost in the desert, there's nothing anyone can do. People going missing in the desert here is perfectly normal anyway. Once they're gone, they're gone.”
“Reporting it is useless too?”
The man shook his head. “If it were useful, the missing around here wouldn't keep piling up.”
Having said that, he went back to his work, apparently confident he could handle the situation with ease and would not put a foot wrong.
For the moment Ling Yu watched what he was so busy doing. He appeared to be carving something—his hands simply did not stop.
His hands moved fast, never pausing. Almost in the same breath, the rough head of a sundial was fully carved out, even the markings on it rendered clear and complete.
She could not help marveling—craft like that must take years to train.
The room fell instantly silent, hardly a sound left in it.
The man, too, sank into his work and stopped pressing Ling Yu about why she had stopped pressing him. She simply watched as he carved the small stone in his hands into a little sundial.
In a blink, half an hour of silence had passed.
The man checked the time—and only then discovered Ling still standing behind him, staring. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye and could not help sighing several more sighs.
What his peripheral vision told him: Ling Yu was like someone standing in the dark, fixed on him, refusing to let him go entirely—as if she would kill him today if she got neither an answer nor a contract.
For all he knew, something was hidden in her bag.
The more he thought, the more his hands trembled, his mind racing—was this woman here specifically to ask about his whereabouts?
Because a few days ago his face had been ruined over exactly this matter. If someone hadn't invited him along to the back of the big village...
He refused to dwell on it. The knife nearly slipped from his hand; luckily his other hand was quick enough—it shot out and caught the handle.
“Miss Ling, you'd better come back tomorrow.” The man finally spoke, mounting his second attempt to send her off. “The sundials sold outside are all carved by me. If I miss the delivery, that would be bad.”
Ling Yu smiled. “I'm not in a hurry. You, on the other hand, sir... you look terribly anxious to me.”
The remark hit the man right where it hurt—as if that whole series of movements just now had been watched through, his entire mind read through.
He did not turn to look at her, only pressed down his fear: “I'm anxious about the delivery. Making a living matters.”
Ling Yu pressed at his performance again. “Sir, do you really think I'm here to discuss some deal?”
She paused. The man's back shivered—she had guessed right.
She pulled out the chair the little boy had sat in, sat down quickly, and crossed her legs. “Don't think I don't know what you did.”
Her second performance had begun.
The man's panic deepened; he was now certain this woman was connected to the thing he had done not long ago. This time he finally whipped his head around to look at her, pressed his lips together—and said nothing.
She smiled. “The thing you did with the others—someone already told me all about it.”
“Who?” the man asked.
For a moment Ling Yu had no script. She thought and said, “I don't know who told me. We got in touch online, anyway. Said he knew someone had done something that night.”
The man's face flickered with shock. The location matched.
“How many were there?” he forced out.
“I couldn't say exactly. It was far too late that night—I couldn't tell how many people there were. All I saw was you. Just you.”
The man did not nod to confirm. He was only thinking: the thing had been done stealthily at night, and it was tied to the legend too. What he had seen behind the big village that night had truly been ten thousand times more terrifying than he had imagined.
Above all, that place was forbidden ground. Where had his ears been when the elder of the front village warned them? That place, the old man said, was a sinister yin gate.
....
In fact, the place being discussed had once been where the village lived. Then one day, without warning, the old village met with disaster: the sundial they kept vanished, and a woman inexplicably disappeared from the village too.
This woman's origins were anything but ordinary. Before she came, their village had no sun at all. The sun came from an ancient legend on their side.
The legend went that in ancient times, their land lay closest to the Ringing Bones. The Ringing Bones seemed to have formed naturally—and yet it hadn't—
Because their village existed in the place nearest the Ringing Bones, it existed in a very strange state. For thousands of years, chances to leave had been vanishingly rare.
(The Ringing Bones: not of the original world—one of the other worlds of the desert. More on this later.)
Strange things in the village were, in fact, legion. The sun would not rise forever, for one. Step into the desert and vanish, for another.
Countless things, all handed down from the ancestors.
As for that woman—she was not old, exactly...
Her appearance was itself a strange affair. When the widow found her, there was a sundial in her hands.
The sundial glowed gold, and in time it became the village's sacred treasure.
This treasure let them have a sun. The sun was their savior—and so was the woman. They set her up on high, upon an altar.
But one day the woman vanished without warning—and with her, the sundial. And once the sundial was gone from the village, there was never a sun again.
At first, the sun's disappearance seemed bearable. But as the days accumulated, the villagers' health faltered.
Some could not hold out and tried, furtively, to leave through the desert. But the moment they stepped out of the village, they vanished into the sand, leaving no bones behind.
No one knew how long this went on. Then, at last, good news.
That day they tried to work out whether they might leave by some route other than the desert—and perhaps another way would appear. The bolder ones were already planning it.
But on the very day the plan was set to be carried out, they spotted, not far off beneath a stretch of red sand, two figures.
Looking closely: one of the people who had gone out searching for the woman had returned—and behind him came the woman herself.
In her arms she carried a child, newborn by the look of it, skin impossibly smooth, eyes exceptionally bright beneath the windblown sand.
The village chief promptly arranged for the woman's every need, daring no longer to slight her. Sure enough, once she returned, the sundial's power worked again—and at last the whole village had sunlight once more.
At this point, the village chief had other ideas.
Terrified the woman might flee with someone again, he bound her fast in a cellar dug specially beneath the ancestral hall. Down there it was cold and damp, without a ray of sunlight.
He had meals delivered on schedule, but the woman's health must have been poor—she fell ill day after day in the cellar, and within days she was dead.
Later the man assigned to deliver her food discovered it and hurried back to tell the village chief.
By the time the chief went down, the woman's corpse had vanished from the cellar. All that remained on the ground was a drift of fine sand.
And then, the whole village discovered they could set foot in the desert—and leave for wider places. The chief proposed moving from this village to the foremost one.
At this, the village split into two camps.
One held that staying in the old village was best—they had been out of the world for so many years. The other held they should long since have gone out to seek a new one.
The wrangle did not last long before the village produced its answer: those who wanted to stay, stayed; those who did not followed him.
It was the beginning of the split.
And equally, the beginning of everything.
...
The man's memory cut off abruptly. He had gone to the big village to find the descendant of an old friend and somehow claw back all the money owed from those years.
But that night, travelers from outside had followed them in. Once the old diehards deep in the mountains learned of it, everything after was different.
Those people used the desert's rumors by every means to take people away—and in the end it was those who had left the original village who suffered.
At the thought, he raised his head and looked at Ling Yu. She was still waiting for a definite answer. If the answer proved accurate, then whatever she wanted to learn would present no problem at all.
Thinking this, the man asked abruptly, “What exactly did you see in the big village behind?”
“What I saw is no business of yours.” She answered carefully, terrified he would stop talking. She paused. “It couldn't be that my agent's partner was taken by those elders of the Never-Night Village behind, could it?”
The man froze. At her words a this-is-bad feeling surged in his chest. He sensed this woman truly knew nothing—she seemed specialized in digging into things.
He paused, then said quickly, “You really don't know what you ran into?”