The Sansheng Stone split with a sound like shattering jade, its fractures bleeding streams of memories. Song Mingde witnessed his mother’s past lives—a maiden gathering herbs on cliffs, her bones broken on rocks; a farmer’s wife burying her stillborn child beneath a persimmon tree; a nun chanting sutras as invaders burned her temple. In this life, her reincarnated form groaned within the ox dragging a plow through hell’s fields, its branded hide festering with stolen birthdates.
“Niáng—!” His cry tore through the Netherworld’s fog. The Judge’s brush trembled in his grip, its bristles dripping ink that pooled into Yunniang’s pale face—she stood by their marital bed, clutching a swaddled infant whose faint cries echoed the River of Forgetfulness’s dark currents.
At the Ferry of Oblivion, the boatman’s bamboo pole stirred waters thick with drowned memories. “Your seal is incomplete,” came his mother’s voice from beneath the straw hat. Song Mingde looked down. The missing fragment of the City God’s seal pulsed in his palm—a shard of ox bone, still warm with the beast’s final breath.
Midnight found him kneeling in the temple ruins. Behind the cracked xiezhi statue lay half a scroll of Yin Laws, its pages brittle as autumn leaves. When he traced a mulberry-paper talisman across the text, the characters bled into visions—a salt refinery’s blazing furnaces, his father’s jade pendant melting into silver ore, three hundred laborers’ souls trapped in tax ledgers.
“So it was never fate,” he whispered. The ox’s mournful lowing shook the ruins. Yunniang burst through the rubble clutching their child, its wails syncing with the River of Forgetfulness’s tides. She lifted the infant’s robe—beneath its tiny chest pulsed half a golden heart, its chambers mirroring the hollow in Song Mingde’s own.
The xiezhi seal blazed white-hot as Song Mingde plunged it into the River of Forgetfulness. Silver currents recoiled, vomiting up three hundred skeletal hands—their salt-crusted phalanges clawing at the overturned Ferry of Oblivion. Within the disintegrating hull, his father’s jade pendant glowed like a drowned moon, its fractured inscription (Xiào Bù Bì Shùn Tiān) burning through the river’s murk.
Yunniang pressed their wailing child against the ox’s branded hide. Where the infant’s half-heart touched festering wounds, stolen birthdates peeled away like scorched parchment. The beast lowed—a human sound wrenching from its throat—as Song Mingde’s mother emerged from its disintegrating flesh, her soul-threads frayed to translucence.
“Mom…” He reached for her, but the Judge’s brush seared his palm. The Shengshibu materialized overhead, its golden text rewriting itself in real time—each stroke carving fresh wounds into his mother’s spectral form.
“Ten generations of rebirth,” she whispered, her voice the rustle of mulberry leaves, “to nurture this single filial heart.” Her fingers brushed the hollow where his golden heart had pulsed. “Now let it beat for those yet unborn.”
The ox’s skeleton collapsed into salt. Song Mingde grasped the Ferry’s splintered rudder, its wood biting into his disintegrating godhood. Yunniang’s scream tore through realms as their child’s cry crescendoed—the infant’s half-heart blazed, fusing with the jade pendant to form a complete xiezhi.
“Hěn xīn!” Ten Kings of Hell roared as one. The command (Show no mercy!) crystallized the air into daggers. Yet Song Mingde laughed—a raw, mortal sound—and ripped the last vestige of divinity from his chest.
“This ‘mercy’,” he said, flinging his godhood into the river, “is yours to keep.”
The Shengshibu erupted in flames. Through the ash rain, Song Mingde saw his mother’s soul disperse—not into the cycle of rebirth, but as dandelion seeds riding a child’s breath. Where they landed, phantom persimmon trees bloomed along the riverbanks, their roots drinking damned silver.
On the mortal shore, Yunniang cradled their silent infant beneath a sapling phoenix tree. Its leaves whispered with a thousand mothers’ lullabies. When she pressed her ear to the soil, the earth pulsed—once, twice—in the rhythm of a rekindled heart.
Annotations
Sansheng Stone : A mythical rock in the Underworld revealing past, present, and future incarnations.
River of Forgetfulness : The final barrier before reincarnation, whose waters erase mortal memories.
Ferry of Oblivion : A spectral vessel guided by souls burdened with unresolved karma.
Yin Laws : The Underworld’s immutable codes, inscribed on dragonhide parchment.
Xiào Bù Bì Shùn Tiān : “Filial piety need not obey heaven” — a radical inversion of Confucian doctrine.
Hěn xīn : Literally “cruel heart,” a Daoist term for merciless cosmic judgment.
Phoenix tree : Symbol of resilience, its roots said to tether wandering souls to the mortal plane.
