Chapter 19: The Well That Holds the Sky

  There was a well behind the old mill, overgrown with moss and memory.

  No one drew water from it anymore. Not because it was dry—but because it wasn’t.

  Shen Liang stood before it now, heart still echoing with the name he couldn’t repeat. The one the tree had given him, or maybe reminded him of.

  The well had no rope, no bucket, no stones to mark its rim. Just a dark mouth in the earth, like someone had begun a question and then forgotten how to end it.

  He stepped closer.

  It smelled of rain that had never fallen.

  And wind that had never left.

  He dropped a pebble in.

  It never hit the bottom.

  *****

  The elder once said: “All things fall. But not all things nd.”

  He never understood it—until now.

  Shen Liang knelt, pced both palms ft on the moss, and closed his eyes.

  Nothing.

  Then, everything.

  He saw no light. But he knew the well was not empty. It held refusal. Not water. Not memory. Something older.

  He reached.

  Not with hands.

  With the part of himself that the lightning had touched and changed.

  And it reached back.

  Not as a greeting.

  As recognition.

  Something inside the well moved.

  A thought without shape. A hunger that wasn’t cruel, only ancient.

  And in that moment, Shen Liang saw—

  —a mountain bleeding sand

  —a river climbing the sky

  —a face that had never been born, smiling without eyes

  Then it was gone.

  His hands were wet.

  But the moss was dry.

  *****

  That night, he didn’t return home.

  He sat beside the well until dawn, watching the sky shiver between stars. Something had begun—not like a journey, but like an answer being built backwards.

  A shape rising around a question.

  In the morning, Nai Nai came and handed him a bundle of dried plum skins and three old fortune sticks.

  “They won’t help,” she said, “but they’ll know when you’re in trouble.”

  He didn’t ask how she knew to come.

  He didn’t ask why he would need help.

  Because some part of him already did.

  She looked at the well. “You opened it.”

  He didn’t nod.

  “You’re going to have to go in.”

  He looked up, startled. “It’s bottomless.”

  She smiled.

  “Only from the top.”

  (End of chapter)