Chapter 7: The Drowned Temple
H1: The Rendezvous
It was past nine when I got back to the city. The taxi dropped me at our rendezvous point, a quiet industrial park on the outskirts, and I saw him immediately. Hu Yang was standing under a flickering streetlamp, two massive duffel bags at his feet. The scruffy, haunted beard was gone. Clean-shaven, he looked younger, sharper—more like the soldier I remembered.
“You look like you’re moving out,” I said, grabbing one of the bags to help. It didn’t budge. I tried with both hands, grunting as I lifted the dead weight. “God, what are you packing in here? Bricks?”
Hu Yang just smiled, and with the easy grace of a man lifting a grocery bag, he swung both duffels over his shoulder.
I stared. I’d kept in shape since leaving the army, but there was no way I could handle that kind of weight so effortlessly.
“Since the scales started spreading,” he explained, flexing his gloved hand, “my strength… it’s grown. I can press a hundred and fifty pounds with one arm, easy.” He said it with a strange detachment, as if talking about someone else.
I didn’t know whether to congratulate him or offer my condolences. He was becoming something other than human.
Headlights cut through the darkness, and a forest-green Jeep Wrangler pulled up to the curb. The driver’s door opened and a young woman hopped out. She had a practical, chin-length haircut and a confident stride. There was a playful, almost mischievous curve to her lips that reminded me of a famous actress, but I couldn’t place the name. She waved.
I shot a questioning look at Hu Yang.
“This is Yang Junjun,” he said, a genuine smile finally reaching his eyes. “The folklorist I told you about. Professor Liu’s granddaughter. She’s going to be a huge help.”
“Right,” I said, shrugging. “Well, at least the ride won’t be boring.” I tossed my pack into the back and climbed in.
Hu Yang took the passenger seat, and soon he and Junjun were deep in conversation, their laughter occasionally filling the cab. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window, watching the city lights blur into streaks, feeling like a third wheel on a date to the end of the world.
H2: A Warning in the Dark
I must have drifted off. When I opened my eyes again, the city was long gone, and we were hurtling through the inky blackness of the countryside. Hu Yang was at the wheel now, his face illuminated by the green glow of the dashboard. Junjun was asleep in the passenger seat beside him. I cracked the window, and the cool night air sliced through my drowsiness.
The familiar craving hit. I fumbled in my pocket for my cigarettes. As I pulled out the pack, a small, folded piece of paper fluttered out and landed on my lap. I picked it up. Scrawled on it in hurried handwriting were four simple words:
Danger. Watch Your Back.
A cold dread, sharp and sudden, seized me. My head whipped around. In the back of the Jeep, there was nothing but our four bags, sitting silently in the shadows.
I broke out in a cold sweat. Where the hell did this come from?
It couldn’t have been Hu Yang or Junjun. It had to have been slipped into my pocket before I left. Back home. By my grandmother? No, that didn’t make any sense. But who else?
I stared out the window, watching the hypnotic flash of the roadside reflectors, a glowing serpent chasing us through the night. The warning echoed in my mind. Was someone following us? Or was the warning about one of the people right here in this car? A knot of unease tightened in my gut. This was not going to be a simple trip.
H3: The Blackwater Sink
Two days and a thousand miles of road later, we arrived in the city of Yixing. We spent a night in a cheap motel, then pushed south, leaving the highway for a winding, muddy track that clawed its way into the mountains. The Jeep handled it, but anything less would have been swallowed by the terrain.
Late in the afternoon, we finally saw it: a quiet village clinging to a mountainside, shrouded in an eerie silence. As our Jeep rumbled onto the main path, a group of children burst out from between the houses, their faces alight with curiosity. Then, one by one, doors opened. Adults appeared, their faces grim, and called their children back inside. Doors were shut, bolted.
Within seconds, the village was dead quiet. The only sounds were the distant crowing of a rooster and the hum of our engine. If it weren’t for that brief flash of life, I would have thought the place was abandoned.
Junjun pointed toward a dilapidated shack. An old man with a long-stemmed hickory pipe sat on a stone by the door, basking in the weak afternoon sun.
“You’re sure this is the right place?” I whispered. “Last time I was here,” Hu Yang murmured, his eyes scanning the shuttered windows, “it was nothing like this. The villagers were everywhere, very welcoming.”
“Well, we won’t find out anything by whispering among ourselves,” Junjun said, shooting us a look. She walked over to the old man.
She knelt so she was at his eye level, her voice sweet and respectful. “Excuse me, grandpa. Could you tell us if this is Zhangjia Village?”
The old man didn’t look up, continuing to fiddle with his pipe as if he hadn’t heard a thing. Junjun, unfazed, tried again.
“Grandpa, is there a place nearby called the Black Dragon Pool?”
At that, the old man’s hands froze. He slowly lifted his head, his gaze passing over the three of us, then returned to his pipe. We were about to give up and try another house when his raspy voice stopped us.
“You city folk and your strange curiosities,” he rasped, not looking at us. “Didn’t take long for more of you to show up.” He began tamping tobacco into the bowl. I quickly stepped forward and flicked my lighter for him. He took a long, slow draw, then eyed me. “You’ve got manners, boy. So I’ll give you some advice. Stay away from that pool. It’s bad business.”
Junjun’s eyes lit up. She sat on a rock opposite him, putting on her most innocent, pleading face. “Oh, but grandpa, we love hearing strange stories. Please, won’t you tell us what happened?”
The old man looked at her, then at Hu Yang and me, our faces full of undisguised eagerness. He sighed, a plume of blue smoke rising into the air. “City folk… alright. I’ll tell you.”
He took a moment to gather his thoughts. “This is Zhangjia Village, aye. And the place you’re looking for, we never called it no ‘Black Dragon Pool.’ To us, it’s always just been the Blackwater Sink. Nothing special about it. Just a deep pond. I’ve lived here seventy-odd years. Used to swim there, water my cattle. Nothing strange ever happened.”
“Until a few months ago. First, livestock started disappearing. A goat here, a calf there. We thought it was rustlers. Then, one of the village lads, a strong young buck, decided he was going to catch the thief. He took his prize bull down to the Sink to graze. That evening… the bull came tearing back to its pen, terrified. But the boy… he never came back.”
“His family raised the alarm. A dozen of us went down to the Sink. All we found was one of his shoes floating near the shore, a few torn scraps of his shirt, and a slick of blood on the water.”
“Someone was dead. We wanted to call the police, but the village’s only phone line was down. So the village elder made a decision. We’d drain the pond. We had to find the body, give him a proper burial. We hauled three big water pumps up the mountain and ran them day and night.”
The old man paused, his eyes distant. “As the water level dropped, we saw something break the surface. Two sharp points, like horns. And when the last of the water was gone, we saw it. Standing in the middle of the mud, where nothing should have been… was a small, strange-looking temple.”
“We’re simple country folk. We believe in spirits. No one dared go down. Except one young lad, braver than he was smart. We tied a rope around his waist, and he waded through the muck and into that little temple. He wasn’t in there a minute before he came screaming out, scrambling back up the rope, his face white as a sheet. He collapsed with a fever, and for days he did nothing but babble about monsters. The village has been terrified ever since. That’s why it’s like this now. Everyone’s afraid the demon in the temple will come for them next.”
H4: The Shadow on the Trees
After thanking the old man, we got back in the Jeep, the silence thick with a new kind of dread. This was no simple myth. This thing had killed. But the water was gone. That was our chance.
We parked at the edge of the village and started the hike up the mountain, Hu Yang carrying the heavy duffels, Junjun and I with the smaller daypacks. The woods were lush and green, but the vibrant life around us felt wrong, a stark contrast to the dark story we’d just heard.
My hand instinctively went to my pocket, touching the crinkled warning note. Should I tell them? Before I could decide, a dry, rasping cough echoed from the trees just behind us.
I started to turn, but Hu Yang’s gloved hand shot out and gripped my arm like a vise. “Don’t look back,” he hissed, his eyes locked forward. “Keep walking.”
We passed a fork in the path. Again, the cough, closer this time. My heart hammered against my ribs. I risked a glance, a quick flicker of my eyes to the side.
My blood ran cold. Clinging to the trunk of a gnarled oak was a dark shape. It was long and thin, hunched over, its limbs bent at unnatural angles. As I watched from the corner of my eye, it detached itself from the tree and began to flow through the branches, keeping pace with us, a silent, shadowy predator.
Hu Yang must have felt me tense up. “Don’t make eye contact,” he whispered, his voice dangerously low. “Just watch it with your peripheral vision. It won’t attack if you don’t look directly at it.”
I wanted to ask him what in God’s name it was, but the grim set of his jaw told me to shut up and walk.
We finally broke through the tree line into a clearing. And there it was. A dry, crater-like basin about sixty feet across, its muddy bottom exposed to the sky. And in the center, caked in mud and draped with dead water weeds, stood the temple.
Junjun suddenly gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. She pointed a trembling finger toward the structure.
“Oh my god,” she whispered, her voice filled with a mixture of terror and awe. “Look at it. Do you see what it’s shaped like?”