Chapter 13: The Girl Who Ate Lightning

  In the southern district of Xuanyi, they didn’t pray.

  They pyed dice.

  They bartered. They watched dust rise over the streets like ghosts that forgot how to haunt.

  And in a tenement that had no doors, only cloth and rusted hinges, a girl named Yan Qiu stole her breakfast from a drunk.

  She moved like smoke.

  Skin pale from hunger. Eyes sharp with something that never quite became anger.

  People called her a rat.

  They didn’t know she had once been a disciple.

  They didn’t know she had once lit a candle with her bare hands and it burned blue.

  They didn’t know she had killed a man who tried to sell her for silver at age nine — and afterward, asked his corpse what it had learned.

  The corpse never answered.

  She smiled anyway.

  *****

  The sky cracked at noon.

  Not thunder.

  Not natural.

  Just a single, dry sound — like someone breaking a bone under silk.

  No one else looked up.

  Yan Qiu did.

  She saw the clouds moving wrong.

  Not drifting — parting.

  Something fell.

  No one saw it nd.

  But Yan Qiu walked to the alley near the broken bell tower, and found it:

  A tooth.

  As long as her forearm.

  Bck. Warm. Humming.

  When she touched it, she forgot her name.

  When she let go, she remembered everything else.

  The cavern. The voice. The trial. The punishment. The silence.

  And above all — the waiting.

  She picked it up.

  Her palm bled.

  She didn’t flinch.

  And the moment her blood soaked the root, the air around her tasted different. Like metal. Like memory. Like waking up in a room someone died in.

  Then, faint — deep below the city’s stone — she heard chanting.

  Not loud. Not in words.

  But rhythmic.

  Old.

  It knew her.

  *****

  She did not go back to her tenement.

  She did not speak for the rest of the day.

  That night, she buried the tooth under her ribs and stitched the wound shut with thread made from her own hair.

  In the morning, the flies wouldn’t come near her.

  And on her tongue, when she breathed too deeply, a thin spark danced.

  She smiled.

  Because something in the dark had finally remembered her.

  And it was hungry.

  (End of chapter)