Lu Jiangxian dreamed a long, long dream. He dreamed of rice paddies and swordlight, of immortal sects, of a woman's face, of a great lake.
"Hand over the Lunar Breathing Qi-Refining Art and the Esoteric Moonlight Notes, and we will only cripple your cultivation."
A sweet, cold female voice spoke beside his ear. Lu Jiangxian caught a blurred glimpse of a face — nothing more.
Then the world lurched. A violent shake snapped him awake.
Wild colors swirled behind his eyes. He tried to open his lids, tried to rise, but his body refused him like a stone pinned under a nightmare. Darkness pressed in from every side — until a pillar of white light split it, steady as the sun, burning through the tide of black.
Golden script burst from the light, unrolling across the sky like constellations scattered by a god's hand.
*Beautiful*, Lu Jiangxian thought, dazed.
The script thickened toward some unseen limit. He heard a crack, like glass giving way.
The world lit up.
Sky vast as an ocean. Endless primeval forest. A crescent lake in the distance, where something white slid down and vanished beneath the ripples. Below him, huts with thatched straw roofs and terraced paddies. He wheeled through the air like a light sparrow, skimming over a small brown village, over its smoke, over a clear river.
In the water he caught his own reflection.
*A round, shining thing.*
A cold premonition settled in his chest: *I'm not a man anymore.*
The river swallowed him. The water was too shallow to break his fall, so he scraped against the stones of the riverbed. The jolt hit him like a fist to the chest, but the current flipped him over, face-up, staring at the sun shimmering on the surface.
Wasn't he just now in his rented room, hunched over a document, pulling an all-nighter?
He remembered the smoke of his apartment, the neon glow at the window, the beer on the desk, the dizzy spell, the racing heart, the breath that would not come.
*So I really did die.*
Strange — the thought brought him something close to relief. No more worrying about tomorrow. No more rent, no more deadlines.
But lying in a river as a piece of metal... that would drive a man insane with boredom.
He watched the sun crawl across the sky, then the moon rise over the treetops. Moonlight gathered over his body like something alive, forming a faint white halo. He felt a cool, clear power seeping into him.
*Devouring the essence of the moon?* His heart stuttered. *Then immortals are real. Divine arts are real. Demons and ghosts are real.*
*And I... am an artifact spirit.*
Curiosity warred with dread. The halo gathered strength, then settled over him like a cloak, and he sank into a half-sleeping meditation.
When he woke, the moon was gone and dawn light spilled across the river. Inside him, a thin current of qi circled his rounded body, slow and patient as a tide.
He concentrated, and through that current he saw himself as he truly was: a gray-green mirror lying on the riverbed, stones and silt around it, fish foraging nearby, a crab digging in the mud. His range of sight stretched about a yard in every direction, fuzzy, like an old television.
*This is me now.*
He tested the current, guiding it to the mirror's center. A faint light kindled there.
*Besides glowing, I have no other use yet.*
*I'll keep devouring moonlight. Maybe something will change. And I'd better be careful — if a cultivator finds a sentient artifact, they'll snuff out its spirit without a second thought.*