White Clouds See Liu Sixteen Home to the Mountain

(Sorry for the erratic updates this month. There will be many short chapters ahead. Please forgive me.)

On a stone arch bridge in a bustling market, wild grass grew thick between the bluestone slabs.

At an imperial tomb that had gone unvisited for only a few years, foxes and rabbits already roamed through the desolation.

Mountain and marsh spirits left their hidden caves in packs, rampaging through the towns below. They clamored outside Civil and Military Temples, City God Temples, and shrines to mountain and water gods, utterly fearless.

A ruler lay drunk in a beauty's arms, muttering over and over, "The fault is not mine." She gently kneaded the Dragon Robe Man's cheek. Earlier, in the great hall, the generals had gone pale while the civil officials had joined in urging him to leave the city and present his Jade Seal.

During the Lower Yuan Festival on the fifteenth day of the tenth month, when the Water Official lifted calamities, people usually burned incense branches in the fields and gold-and-silver paper packets, and released sky lanterns. This year, no one burned incense or paper packets. No one released lanterns bearing prayers and wishes.

A father and son who served as a country's Prime Minister and vice minister met with an immortal family's enshrined cultivator in a Secret Room. The old man, his country's leader of the literati, kept reassuring himself. There had to be a way. Surely no one would tear them out by the roots, kill every last one of them, and leave nothing behind.

In a county town, a theater stage stood beside a village school. The old teacher had once loathed his pupils going to watch painted women perform. Tonight, he sat with the children learning their first lessons on the long benches, ghosts listening to