# Chapter Four | Night at Moon Pool
On the day of the full moon, the Floating City began to feel different from the very first light of morning.
Lin Yuanxi woke to an extremely faint yet omnipresent vibration. It wasn't the steady heartbeat-like sensation of the bridge beneath her feet. This was deeper and slower, a rolling rise and fall, as though the entire Floating City were taking one incredibly long, deep breath. She sat up on the straw mat and discovered that the girls who shared her room had already vanished. The only thing coming through the window—if it could be called a window at all, since it was merely a square opening without glass in the wall—was light that looked whiter and brighter than usual, as though even the moonlight itself had awakened ahead of time.
After hurriedly washing up, she left the room. Everyone she passed wore a similar expression: a mixture of anticipation, nerves, and a spark of excitement they were trying desperately—and failing—to hide. The atmosphere in the Floating City was unmistakably different from the previous two days. A tension she couldn't put into words hung in the air, like a bowstring drawn taut and ready to fire at any moment.
"No cleaning duties today." A-Zhu came trotting after her, her cheeks flushed and her eyes startlingly bright. "Everyone's getting ready and doing their hair. You should hurry, too. Sister Zhiqing sent me to find you."
"Getting ready?" Lin Yuanxi blinked. "We have to dress up for Fish Selection?"
"Of course we do!" A-Zhu looked as though she'd just heard the most ridiculous question in the world. "Think about it. The person you're about to meet could be the most important person in your entire life. How can you not dress up?"
A-Zhu dragged Lin Yuanxi through several long corridors and finally shoved her into a room she'd never entered before. It wasn't large. All four walls were hung with clothes of every color and material—silk, gauze, shades ranging from the palest moon-white to the deepest ink green. Each piece was embroidered with intricate water-wave or lotus-leaf patterns. Several older women were busy combing and arranging the other girls' hair, their movements practiced as if they had repeated them countless times.
"You're the new girl, right?" A woman in a plain-colored long dress approached and looked Lin Yuanxi up and down. Her gaze was as professional as if she were appraising a piece of merchandise, but it quickly softened. "Come, sit down. I'll pick something suitable for you."
Lin Yuanxi hadn't even had time to refuse before the woman pressed her onto a low stool and began rummaging through the clothes. In the end, she chose a gauzy moon-white dress with faint silver water patterns embroidered along the hem. Once worn, it was so light Lin Yuanxi could barely feel its weight, as if the wind might scatter it at any moment.
"Your hair has a natural wave to it, so there's no need to curl it deliberately," the woman remarked casually as she arranged the wisps at Lin Yuanxi's temples. "You're lucky. Hair like yours looks beautiful in the water."
"In the water?" Lin Yuanxi asked, confused.
"You'll find out soon enough." The woman smiled without answering. Her hands never stopped moving as she pinned a tiny white pearl flower beside Lin Yuanxi's temple. "There. Perfect."
Lin Yuanxi glanced at herself in the bronze mirror and was briefly dazed. The person in the reflection wore clothes she had never worn before. The pearl flower at her temple gleamed faintly in the lamplight, and she looked both strange and somehow… fitting, as though she had always been meant to look this way.
By the time her hair and makeup were finished, darkness had completely fallen. The moon had finally become whole, hanging directly above the Floating City without a single gap. It was almost painfully bright, its silver-white radiance spilling generously over the entire city and bathing every pond in an almost dreamlike halo.
All the girls were guided once more toward the largest pond in the center of the Floating City—the courtyard she had seen on her first night, surrounded by lotus flowers and water lilies. The courtyard had been transformed. Every stone-pillar lantern that had previously been arranged in neat rows was now lit, their glow joining into a continuous band that made the pond shine like molten gold. A ring of low wooden viewing platforms had been built along the water's edge. The girls took their places in order, the expressions on their faces pulled back and forth between anticipation and nerves.
Liu Zhiqing stood on a slightly raised stone step beside the pond. Tonight she wore a pale blue-green long dress, and her hair was arranged with flawless precision, lending her a more solemn air than usual. Her gaze moved slowly over every girl present before pausing on Lin Yuanxi for a moment. She gave a small nod, like a silent word of encouragement.
"Tonight is the night of the full-moon Fish Selection," Liu Zhiqing announced, her clear voice cutting through every whisper and instantly quieting the courtyard. "According to the rules of previous years, the girl who entered the city earliest will go first."
As her voice faded, a woman Lin Yuanxi had never seen before slowly stepped out of the crowd and approached the pond. She closed her eyes, folded her hands over her chest, and began murmuring something under her breath. The cadence was strange, unlike any language Lin Yuanxi had ever heard, yet it carried an uncanny rhythm, as though the sound of flowing water itself had been woven into words.
The instant the chant ended, the pond began to churn violently.
Lin Yuanxi held her breath as the once-still surface roiled into ring after ring of ripples. At the center, a streamlined black shadow rapidly approached the surface. Then—she watched with her own eyes as the instant that shadow leaped from the water, its fish-scale sheen twisted and stretched in midair, becoming a blurred human outline. When it fell back to the water, it had already transformed into a young man who looked to be in his early twenties. Soaked from head to toe, he stood quietly in waist-deep water, gazing at the woman on the shore with a tenderness bordering on reverence.
A wave of muffled gasps and sighs rose from all around them.
"It shapeshifted…"
"That was so fast. They must be meant for each other."
"Oh my God, he's gorgeous."
Lin Yuanxi stood frozen. Seeing it with her own eyes was far more shocking than any secondhand account could have been. This wasn't some illusory trick. The young man was real. When he walked out of the water, droplets slid from his hair and the hem of his clothes, leaving wet footprints across the blue stone with every step. And the tenderness in his gaze as he looked at the woman was enough to make the heart tremble, like he had waited through endless years at last to reach the day of their reunion.
The woman held out her hand. The young man took her fingers, and the two of them smiled at each other, their smiles concealing far too many stories for outsiders to glimpse.
The rituals continued one after another. After some girls finished chanting their spells, the water remained still for a long time. Only a few scattered splashes broke the surface before an ordinary fish finally emerged, nowhere near displaying any astonishing shapeshifting. Liu Zhiqing quietly explained that girls had to take fish like those back to their homes and carefully care for them over a long period of time before they had a chance to gradually develop something resembling a human form. That kind of bond had to be nurtured from the beginning. Other girls had barely finished their spells before the water began to surge violently. The fish that leaped out twisted and changed in midair, landing in human form. The familiarity and silent understanding between the two were obvious at a glance, clearly the result of a deep bond that had existed for a long time.
A-Zhu, standing beside Lin Yuanxi, was called forward as well. Her movements were much more awkward. Her voice trembled as she recited the spell, and the water rippled for quite a while before a small silver-white fish finally surfaced. It wasn't large, and its shapeshifting was nowhere near astonishing. It simply floated quietly on the water, gazing in A-Zhu's direction. But A-Zhu showed no disappointment whatsoever. Instead, she crouched down and carefully reached out with both hands, lifting the fish up. Her face shone with joy no less radiant than anyone else's.
"It'll grow slowly," Liu Zhiqing said softly as she came over and spoke beside her ear. "Some bonds need time to be nurtured. Not every encounter begins with thunder and fireworks."
A-Zhu nodded hard and carefully cradled the fish against her chest as she returned to the crowd. She kept looking down at the fish in her arms the entire way, her gaze as tender as if she were looking at a newborn child.
Watching this, Lin Yuanxi felt something stir inside her—something she couldn't explain. So Fish Selection wasn't merely about finding a destined bond that already existed. More often, it was about being willing to spend time accompanying a relationship as it began anew. The realization gave her a deeper respect for the ceremony before her than she had felt at first.
Another burst of exclamations rose nearby. After a somewhat older woman finished chanting, the water remained still for a long time, and everyone began wondering whether she would come away empty-handed. Suddenly, an extremely fast black shadow shot up from beneath the water. By the time it leaped above the surface, it had already completed its shapeshifting. When it landed, it was a calm, reserved young man. The first thing he did was call the woman by her childhood nickname, provoking a wave of good-natured laughter and teasing from the people around them. The woman was startled and delighted, her face turning red as she softly scolded him for being so forward in front of everyone. The young man only smiled, his eyes overflowing with an unmistakable longing. Clearly, this was not the first time the two of them had reunited this way.
Lin Yuanxi watched in a daze until she heard someone call a familiar name.
"Shen Heyin."
She turned and saw an extraordinarily beautiful woman step out of the crowd. Her deep red dress set off her snow-white skin, and her long black hair was swept high, held in place by a hairpin set with a dark red gemstone unlike anything Lin Yuanxi had ever seen. She walked to the edge of the pond with an elegance so perfect it was almost unreal. Yet Lin Yuanxi somehow noticed that when Shen Heyin recited the spell, a trace of tension hid beneath the smile at the corner of her mouth.
The pond rippled. A streamlined black shadow swiftly swam closer, and the instant it leaped from the water, it shapeshifted. When it landed, it had become a handsome young man with a cool, distant air. He stood in the water, looking toward the shore.
But Lin Yuanxi noticed that the young man's gaze toward Shen Heyin lacked the unreserved tenderness she had seen in the eyes of the others who had shapeshifted. Instead, it held a complicated, indescribable expression that was almost apologetic.
For an instant, Shen Heyin's smile stiffened. It happened so quickly that anyone might have thought it was an illusion. Then her smile blossomed again, and she reached out to the young man. The two walked ashore together as a chorus of admiration rose around them. No one noticed that brief hesitation.
"Have those two already shapeshifted many times?" Lin Yuanxi heard two girls beside her whispering.
"I heard Shen Heyin entered the city a long time ago, much earlier than any of us." The other girl lowered her voice. "Her bond with that fish apparently didn't exist from the beginning, either. They cultivated it slowly over time. But they've been very close these past few years. Everyone in the Floating City knows that."
"Then what was that expression on his face just now?"
"What expression?"
"Never mind. Maybe I was seeing things."
As Lin Yuanxi listened to their exchange, the question in her heart deepened. If Shen Heyin's bond with the young man had been cultivated after the fact rather than destined from birth, then where had that flash of apology and hesitation come from?
Only Lin Yuanxi had seen it.
She couldn't explain why she had been so sensitive to a stranger's expression. It was just that the loss in that instant had felt like a fine needle gently piercing her heart, leaving behind a faint ache whose cause she couldn't name.
The ceremony continued. One name after another was called, and shapeshifting after shapeshifting unfolded in the pond. Lin Yuanxi stood at the edge of the crowd, watching the girls beside her step forward one after another, then return to their places one by one with expressions of either joy or disappointment. As time passed, the tension inside her grew heavier and heavier.
She didn't know what she was waiting for.
Or rather, she did know, deep down. She just didn't dare admit it.
Ever since she had seen those golden eyes at the bottom of Liuan Pond that night, that gaze had never left her mind. It kept resurfacing even in her dreams. Again and again, she asked herself: Had that really been just an ordinary fish? What answer was hidden in the words Liu Zhiqing had left unfinished—"Some people…"?
"Lin Yuanxi."
Liu Zhiqing's voice suddenly rang out, cutting clearly through her tangled thoughts.
Lin Yuanxi snapped back to herself and found every eye around her fixed on her. Curiosity and scrutiny mingled in those gazes, along with a trace of barely concealed anticipation—as though everyone present were waiting for the same thing to happen.
She took a deep breath and walked toward the pond one step at a time.
The short distance should have taken only a few steps, but every event of the past few days flashed through her mind: those golden eyes at the bottom of Liuan Pond, every sentence Liu Zhiqing had left unfinished, the smell of earth beside Lianwu Pond that had tightened her chest, and that blurry memory she could never quite grasp, yet somehow knew with absolute familiarity.
She suddenly understood that every irregular heartbeat and every inexplicable flutter she had felt these past few days might not have been a coincidence.
Moonlight covered the entire surface of the water, clear as a gigantic mirror reflecting the full moon and her own slightly pale face. Looking down at the water, she suddenly remembered something Liu Zhiqing had once told her: Water remembers everything that passes through it. Water remembers your name, your appearance, even every road you have walked in your seventeen years of life.
If water truly remembered everything, did it also remember that rainy afternoon twelve years ago, when a pair of tiny hands had once tried in vain to save a little fish dying in the mud?
The memory remained blurred, but as she stood beside the pond, she felt that blur slowly being illuminated by the moonlight, like a photograph sealed away for years, finally having someone willing to brush the dust from its surface.
Lin Yuanxi stood at the pond's edge, gazing at her reflection in the water. For a long time, she did not recite the spell she had heard countless times from the other girls but had never yet had the chance to say herself.
The surroundings fell completely silent. Everyone was waiting.
And within that silence, deep beneath the surface, the black shadow she knew better than anything else slowly emerged.