The mountain had no name.
The surrounding villages did not call it anything, either. When they needed to give directions, they would simply say, “Go that way,” gesture toward the fog, and say no more. If pressed for details, the other person’s gaze would grow hazy, as though they had suddenly forgotten what they had been talking about.
Yan Gui found the trail at dusk on the third day.
Calling it a trail was generous. It was only the mark left by flattened grass, narrow enough for one person to pass sideways. Unknown berries hung from the branches of the shrubs on either side, their color so dark it was nearly black, like beads of congealed blood. He did not touch them. He had already learned not to touch anything that looked as though it should not exist.
There was silence in his ears.
Not ordinary silence. The kind of silence in which he could not even hear his own heartbeat. Three months ago, he could still hear the wind. Two months ago, he could barely distinguish the outlines of human speech. A month ago, even those outlines had vanished. Now his world was a piece of soaked cotton. Every sound had been drawn inside it, sinking to the bottom, never to rise again.
He had once been a musician. Remembering that now felt like remembering someone else’s life.
The stone house appeared at a bend halfway up the mountain, without warning. One step carried him through dense woods; the next brought him into a cleared patch of ground. Irregular stone slabs covered the earth, and moss he had never seen before grew in the cracks between them. Its color lay somewhere between gray and silver, catching the twilight with a faint sheen.
The stone house was very small. One door, no windows. The door stood open.
The hearth’s glow spilled through it, orange-red and thicker than ordinary flames, as if some kind of liquid were burning instead of wood. Yan Gui stood at the doorway and hesitated for a long time. Not because he was afraid, but because he had caught a scent—a scent drifting from within, so faint it almost did not exist. Yet the instant his body detected it, a fine layer of gooseflesh rose across his skin.
The scent reminded him of something. He could not grasp what.
He went inside.
The stone house was smaller within than it had appeared from outside—or perhaps all its space had been taken up by the hearth. It was built of stone, rough and blackened evenly by smoke and fire, as though someone had wiped it inch by inch with their hands. An iron pot sat over the flames. It was empty. Beside the hearth stood a low table. A knife rested on it, blade down, its handle wrapped in strips of cloth made from some unidentifiable material. The edges had worn into frays.
The fox stood behind the hearth.
Yan Gui’s first thought was not fear but confusion. He could not tell whether the being before him was human or beast. A black robe fell from the top of its head all the way to the floor. Beneath the shadow of its hood was a long, pointed face. Its amber eyes, lit by the hearth fire, resembled two pieces of heated amber, with something moving slowly within them. Those eyes looked at him once, then turned away, returning to the hearth.
There was no greeting. No question.
The fox picked up the knife.
Yan Gui noticed its hand. It lay somewhere between a human hand and a claw, the knuckles longer than a human’s, the fingertips slightly curved. Yet its grip on the knife was utterly steady, as though it had repeated the motion thousands of times.
The fox took something from a dark compartment beneath the hearth. Yan Gui could not make out what it was. Its shape resembled a fish, but the fish was covered not in scales, but in an exceedingly thin, translucent membrane. A faint light moved across its surface, like moonlight solidified and pasted to the fish’s body.
When the knife came down, the membrane split.
At that instant, Yan Gui heard a sound.
He did not hear it with his ears. It came from somewhere deeper in his body—from his chest, perhaps, or his bones, or some place farther in that he did not know how to name. The sound was like a single pluck of an exceedingly fine string. The vibration traveled up his spine, and when it reached the crown of his head, it vanished.
He opened and closed his mouth, but no words came out.
The fox did not look at him. Its attention remained entirely on the fish. The blade slid along the body, each cut so precise that it seemed less like cutting than disassembly—separating certain things within the fish from other things. The separated parts gave off different lights. Some dimmed. Some grew brighter. Some became a color Yan Gui had never seen before, somewhere between blue and gray, like the sky in the last moment before dawn.
Once the fish had been prepared, the fox set the iron pot over the hearth.
The flames changed color. Orange-red became a deep indigo, then slowly shifted back again, as if breathing. The fox placed the fish in the pot, then drew a small ceramic jar from inside its robe. The jar had no lid. What it contained looked like water, but it flowed incorrectly—it was too slow, as though it possessed a will of its own and did not want to leave the jar.
The fox tilted the jar. The liquid hesitated, then slowly poured into the pot.
The fish in the pot moved.
Yan Gui took half a step back. But the fox still did not look at him. It only stirred the broth gently with a long-handled wooden ladle. The rhythm was very slow, like some fixed measure, the intervals between each circle perfectly equal. Yan Gui watched that rhythm for a long time, until he realized that his breathing had unconsciously fallen into step with it.
The broth cooked for a long time. Or a short one. Yan Gui could not tell. There was nothing inside the stone house by which to measure time. The hearth’s glow remained the same brightness, while the sky outside seemed to have congealed, suspended in some narrow gap between dusk and night.
The fox extinguished the fire.
It took a bowl from beneath the hearth. The bowl was made of rough earthenware, without a single pattern, and a tiny chip marred its rim. The fox ladled the broth into it, set it on the low table, and then stepped back.
The broth was clear, almost like plain water, but a very faint light floated on its surface, as though someone had crushed moonlight and scattered it over the top.
Yan Gui sat down. He looked at the bowl, both hands resting on his knees. He did not move.
He did not know what he was waiting for. Perhaps a word. An instruction. A please. But the fox only stood behind the hearth, its amber eyes half-lidded, as though it had already lost interest in him.
He lifted the bowl.
The instant the broth touched his lips, his eyes grew hot.
It was not because the broth was hot. Its temperature was just right, even slightly cool, like a spring stream. But when that temperature touched his tongue, something inside his body opened—not healed, but opened, like a door he had never known existed suddenly thrown wide. Beyond it lay a scene he had believed he had forgotten long ago.
He saw a courtyard. Summer. The cry of cicadas. A woman sat on a veranda with a pipa resting on her knees, teaching a very small child how to pluck the strings. The child’s fingers were too short to reach the farthest string and the child was so anxious that its entire face had scrunched up. The woman laughed, took the child’s hand, and guided its fingers across the strings one by one.
That was the first time he had heard music.
Yan Gui set down the bowl. The broth was gone. He did not remember when he had finished it.
His face was covered in tears. He cried for a long time, until the fabric over his knees was soaked through. He did not know why he was crying. The memory was not sad—it was one of the warmest scenes in his life. But he could not stop.
When he finished crying, he realized that the silence in his ears had changed.
His hearing had not returned. The muffled, suffocating silence, like soaked cotton, was gone. In its place was a clean, open stillness. Like a room that had been swept clean. There was nothing in it, but the air could move.
He moved his lips and heard himself breathe.
Then came the crackle of the hearth. Then the wind outside the door. Then the call of some distant bird. Sound returned layer by layer, like the tide washing up over a beach.
He raised his head and looked at the fox.
“What’s the price?”
The fox glanced at him. The hearth fire burned quietly and steadily in its amber pupils.
“You’ve already paid.”
Yan Gui froze. He instinctively touched his body—his hands, his feet, his chest, his face. Everything was there. Nothing was missing. And yet he could feel an emptiness. Not pain, not loss, but the absence of something that had once been there. Like a piece of furniture missing from a room: he could not say which piece, but he knew the space had changed.
He stood. His legs were a little weak, but they could carry him.
He walked to the doorway and looked back once. The fox had already turned away and was wiping the knife with a piece of cloth. The sleeve of its black robe had slipped back an inch, exposing the skin on the inside of its wrist. It was covered in dense marks, like burns, though each one was shaped differently. Some resembled branches, some rivers, and some a kind of writing he did not recognize.
Among the old marks was one that was new. Its edges were still faintly red.
The fox pulled its sleeve back into place.
Yan Gui walked into the night. Under the moonlight, the mountain path was clearer than it had been on the way up, as though someone had deliberately lit the road home for him. He walked a long way before stopping on a rock halfway down the mountain, listening to the wind moving through the forest.
He could hear again. Every leaf stirred by the wind made a different sound.
But he could not remember who the woman in the courtyard was.
He knew there had been a courtyard. He knew it had been summer. He knew there had been cicadas. But the person who had sat beneath the veranda, taken his hand, and guided him across the strings one by one—her face, her voice, the way she smiled—all of it was gone. As though someone had carefully erased her from a painting, leaving behind only the marks of her outline.
He stood in the moonlight, listening to the wind, trying to remember her.
He could not.
He continued down the mountain.