In the early years of the Great Chu, there had been an attempt to build a naval force for overseas expeditions — for the founding emperor of the Great Chu had possessed a vision and ambition that far surpassed the ordinary.

Yet for various reasons, the construction of the navy was delayed again and again and never came to fruition. In the Academy of Civil Learning, enormous quantities of design blueprints still lay in storage to this day.

The emperors who came after, generation after generation, gradually lost their sharpness of spirit. Over hundreds of years, few among them had any appetite for expanding the realm’s territory.

The founding emperor’s bold drive had found no continuation.

What was laughable was that the current emperor Yang Jing’s father was the very archetype of the idle ruler — a man who went almost his entire life without attending court — and his grandfather had been a man of incompetence who nonetheless harbored grand delusions of achievement and a burning desire to leave his name in history.

Yang Jing’s grandfather, Yang Yongye, possessed an almost inconceivable arrogance: so thoroughly ordinary, and yet so enormously proud.

His northern campaign against the Black Barbarians squandered hundreds of thousands of the Great Chu’s elite garrison troops and left the empire unable to recover.

And that wasn’t the end of it. Someone — no one quite knew who — told him that one of the eighteen inner disciples of Master Zhou, a man named Yang Sheng, had later unraveled the secret of eternal life. They said Yang Sheng had already lived for several centuries and was living in seclusion on some island. Yang Yongye was immediately consumed by the idea.

For a ruler, the allure of immortality dwarfs every other desire there is.

Just the vague mention of *some island* was enough to send Yang Yongye into an obsessive frenzy.

He immediately ordered the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Works to construct more than two hundred warships, most of them of the kind Li Chi’s group was now sailing — the Wuwei class, roughly twenty zhang in length.

The largest, the Hudou class warships, were about twenty-eight or twenty-nine zhang long. Three of them were built.

Yang Yongye issued an imperial decree, personally hand-picked and assembled a naval force of over eight thousand men, tasked solely with searching every corner of the Great Chu’s territory for any trace of Yang Sheng.

On the surface this did not sound like an enormous undertaking. But several years later, when the Ministry of Revenue submitted a memorial requesting that the emperor halt the military expenditure for this project, Yang Yongye asked how much had been spent and learned that over those few years, the total cost had exceeded even the expenses of his northern campaign against the Black Barbarians.

The rate at which silver was being consumed, and the sheer scale of the total outlay, made the figures so dizzying they gave him a headache.

Yang Yongye assumed the commanding general of the Hugwei Army, a man named Di Chi, had embezzled the funds. In his fury, he issued an edict recalling Di Chi to Daxing, and before Di Chi even arrived, he had the Ministry of Justice seize the entire Di household.

Perhaps Di Chi had received warning, for he never returned to Daxing — he fled and was never heard from again.

With a single imperial edict, the emperor had all of Di Chi’s immediate family beheaded. A few days later, still feeling his anger unspent, the emperor issued another edict extending the punishment to three generations of kin.

After that, the Hugwei Army was disbanded. The more than two hundred warships of various sizes were distributed to various localities for river patrol duty.

But warships of such scale were utterly useless to the local authorities — there were no sailors trained to operate them, no soldiers who had received naval training. Most were abandoned, and after decades, seven or eight out of ten had deteriorated beyond use.

Here at Weian County, river pirates had been rampant. All the merchants pooled together, talked it over, and contributed funds to establish a force under the county office’s authority.

But the merchants had clearly underestimated the greed of the Weian county magistrate and his colleagues. The silver they provided to maintain the county’s naval patrol force vanished as if into a bottomless pit.

The county office people demanded money for one thing today and something else tomorrow. Before long, the merchants understood: the men in that office were far more rapacious than the river pirates. Pirates raided ships and at worst you lost the cargo of one vessel — but if they kept feeding this county naval force, the county magistrate and his ilk would swallow their entire livelihoods.

Compared to dealing with the Great Chu’s officials, the pirates were almost tolerable.

In the end, helpless, the merchants gave up and instead hired more martial escorts to guard their convoys.

This Wuwei warship was the most intact of all those preserved after the Hugwei Army’s disbandment.

Li Chi stood at the bow, listening as the boatmen pieced together the history of the ship one detail at a time, and felt that he had not yet struck the Great Chu hard enough to truly shatter it.

By now, those on board had also learned that the man standing before them was Prince Ning himself. Everyone was curious as to why a prince of his stature would want to venture onto that mysterious island in the lake.

If anything went wrong, the loss would be immense.

Li Chi made further inquiries about the island. None of the boatmen had been there, and what they had heard matched what the old fisherman had told Li Chi the day before — nothing new to be learned.

They all said it was the Palace of Hell, the kind of thing found in every corner of the Great Chu — hidden in places beyond ordinary sight, responsible for receiving and ferrying the souls of the local dead.

Once someone dared open with a story like that, others were sure to embroider it into something more and more fantastical, more and more supernatural.

After word of the island spread, people immediately began saying they had seen something similar somewhere else — a great hall, also rising above a lake.

Some said it had only been revealed because a fierce gale once blew away the clouds and mist, exposing what lay beneath.

Others said the great creature was the palace’s guardian, and also its guide for the dead.

The further they sailed, the heavier the mist. Before long, they could not see anything more than a few zhang ahead, nor could they see the other ships nearby.

Li Chi had already made arrangements beforehand, ordering the ships to use horn signals to announce their positions to the vessels around them.

Prince Ning’s army was well-trained. Though every man felt a creeping unease in his chest, none could really be called terrified.

At first, entering the mist brought only a faint acrid smell. As they pressed deeper, the smell grew stronger.

Li Chi and his men wrapped scarves around their mouths and noses, worried that this might not be water vapor but miasma. Fortunately, after traveling for some time, no one felt any ill effects.

Just as Li Chi and Dantai Yajing were speaking, the hull suddenly shuddered — as if the ship had struck something. Everyone on board lurched sideways, though fortunately no one fell.

Yet there was nothing ahead, and they hadn’t grazed another ship either.

Li Chi and the others gripped the ship’s rail and peered into the water. In the shrouding mist, nothing was visible beneath the surface.

“Ahead!”

Someone cried out.

Li Chi and the others looked up sharply. Through the mist at the prow, something had risen upright in the water — a column-like form, appearing roughly three or four zhang in front of the ship. A moment ago there had been nothing; the sudden black shape looming up made every person on board hold their breath.

“Arrows!”

Dantai Yajing immediately gave the order.

The thing was enormous.

Dimly visible, it appeared to be about as thick as two arms encircling it, the top slightly wider, narrowing somewhat lower down, and then growing thicker again toward the base.

It rose over a zhang above the water’s surface. A giant python in the lake — and it had raised its head to look at them.

“Fire!”

At Dantai Yajing’s command, the Prince Ning soldiers on the Wuwei warship unleashed every bow and crossbow at once. In an instant, countless arrows flew toward the target.

But moments later came a pattering of metallic clangs, and faint sparks could be seen scattering — the arrows had not penetrated whatever this thing was.

The boatmen had by now collapsed in terror, legs useless beneath them, unable to stand.

The portion of the thing above the waterline was already over a zhang tall, and even the narrower section below the head was as thick as a barrel. If the whole thing were fully exposed, how large would it be?

Some of the boatmen were already begging the Prince Ning soldiers to stop firing, afraid that provoking such a creature would cause it to lunge at them and the hull wouldn’t survive.

The Wuwei warship’s bow was fitted with a device for launching water spears. Li Chi adjusted the angle himself and fired one of the thick, arm-width spears. It struck with a crisp metallic clang, sparks flying.

“A pillar?”

Li Chi frowned slightly. “Move closer.”

At his word, the ship drew slowly alongside. Getting near, they found it truly was nothing but a pillar.

Yet the carvings on the pillar were indeed that of a great python. The top was a triangular head, and the eyes had not been carved directly into the stone — instead, two perfectly round stone spheres had been set into the eye sockets.

Though the spheres had grown dim, those eyes — no matter who looked at them — gave the feeling they were gazing directly back at you.

The scales along the python’s body were carved in extraordinary detail, especially the fine scales of the belly. The longer one looked, the more oppressive and unsettling the sensation became, accompanied by a creeping dread.

Li Chi ordered the horns blown to warn the surrounding ships to mind the pillar.

As the warship passed, some who were afraid yet could not stop themselves glanced back — and in the mist, it seemed as though the stone python was slowly turning its head to watch them.

They pressed on some tens of zhang further, and the mist grew gradually thinner. Visibility improved considerably.

They encountered several more of these pillars. In the distance, dimly, even more could be made out.

“That one.”

Dantai Yajing pointed toward a pillar somewhat further away. “It looks different from the others.”

Li Chi followed his direction and looked, noticing that pillar’s form was stranger still — two pythons coiled together, and atop the triangular head at the summit, a slightly smaller snake head was carved, crouching upon the larger one.

This style of carving was somewhat reminiscent of the dragon-coiled pillars in the main hall of the Shiyuan Palace in Daxing.

The deeper they went, the thinner the mist, and after another few dozen zhang, it had almost entirely dispersed. The ships came back into each other’s view.

Li Chi called for everyone to remain alert, saying they should be approaching the shore soon.

He glanced back once more at the pillar with the double pythons — and then his expression changed.

The pillar hadn’t shifted at all. It looked exactly the same as the others — there was no such thing as two pythons. The head at the summit of the pillar bore no second, smaller snake head.

Li Chi called to Dantai Yajing and pointed at the pillar. Dantai Yajing looked, rubbed his eyes, and he too could see neither two pythons nor two heads. He rubbed his eyes again and looked — and the second head reappeared.

When Li Chi looked again, he saw it too. The two men exchanged a glance, both feeling this place was deeply uncanny.

Still, it was probably that their eyes had gone watery after passing through such dense mist for so long. With that much moisture in the air, it was easy for the eyes to play tricks.

Not much further and the shoreline of the island came into view — and there was a wide stretch of immaculate white sand.

This sand was nothing like the golden riverbed sand they were used to. This was white as powdered seashells.

The large ships could not approach the shore, so Li Chi ordered the anchors dropped and the small boats that hung from the warship’s sides lowered into the water.

Each small boat could carry a dozen or so soldiers, so multiple trips would be needed.

Li Chi and the others went ashore first. Stepping onto the sand, the feeling underfoot was not what one would expect — it was not soft. Real sand yields beneath your foot and leaves a print, but here, stepping on it left no impression whatsoever.

The small boats ferried the soldiers over. Aside from those left to guard the ships, seven hundred combat soldiers made landfall on the island.

The island was lush and green, the air slightly warm and humid — before long, skin felt damp and sticky.

Li Chi looked up and saw, at the half-slope position some distance up the island’s hill, the dimly visible roof of a great hall.

Even from that far away, something could be seen coiled atop the hall — something enormous.

He instinctively glanced back one more time. In the water, beside one of the large ships, something that looked like a pillar had just slipped beneath the surface, leaving ripples spreading across the water.

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