I didn't sleep that night.
Not because of the vision.
Because of the soot.
I sat on the edge of my cot in the field tent, the zipper half-open, cold mountain air biting through my sweater. The glove lay on the folding table, under the dim glow of the lantern. I hadn't touched it since I pulled it off in the cave.
It was clean now. Wiped with alcohol, brushed with a stiff bristle. But I knew what I'd seen.
Black dust, fine as powdered coal, clinging to the fingertips.
From a chamber sealed for centuries.
From a wall that had never known fire.
I picked it up again. Turned it over.
Nothing.
And yet.
There are rules in archaeology. Not laws, not commandments — just principles.
One is this: Contamination flows outward, not in.
Dirt, pollen, modern fibers — they invade the past.
The past does not reach out and touch you.
But something had.
I opened my notebook to the sketch of the symbol — dragon and phoenix, nine-jointed spine, wings half-ash. Beneath it, my own handwriting:
He knows you're here.
I hadn't written that.
I remembered writing it — the pressure of the pen, the tilt of the page — but none of it had been conscious. Like sleepwalking with a pen in hand.
I flipped back to my earlier entries. Notes on soil composition. GPS coordinates. A rough translation of the inscription: "To forget is to collapse."
All mine. All rational.
Then, on the next page, a single line I didn't recall adding:
The bell rang for you.
I closed the notebook.
Pressed my palms flat against the table.
Breathed in, breathed out.
Like Dr. Wen taught me. "When the mind races, anchor the body."
Dr. Wen was my mentor at Peking University. A Daoist scholar who believed texts were not just read — they were resonated with. She used to say, "A true historian doesn't study the past. She listens to it."
I'd rolled my eyes. Called it poetic nonsense.
Now, I wasn't sure.
Outside, the wind moved through the pines. A soft creaking, like old bones.
I thought of the black fire in the vision. The man falling from the sky. His voice — not loud, but deep, as if it came from beneath the earth.
"I only wanted to save her."
Grief I recognized. Not my own, but the shape of it — long, sharp, familiar.
Like the silence after my father's funeral.
Like the way my mother still set a cup of tea for him every morning.
I pulled out the photo I kept in the back of the notebook.
Faded, creased.
Me at twelve, standing beside him at the Longmen Grottoes. He's pointing at a broken bodhisattva, mid-sentence, face alight. "Look, Mei — even broken, it remembers how to smile."
He was laughed out of the academy for his theories. Said some carvings weren't Buddhist at all — but older. Pre-dynastic. That they spoke of "cities beneath mountains" and "immortals who wept."
They called him a romantic. A crank.
He died with his notes unpublished, his name quietly erased.
I hadn't come to Wudang to prove him right.
I'd come to prove him wrong.
And now the mountain had shown me a vision.
And my hand had written words not meant for me.
I packed the notebook away.
Zipped the tent.
Lay down in the dark.
I didn't pray. I don't believe in gods.
But I whispered into the silence:
"If you're trying to tell me something…
say it again.
But this time, let me stay awake."
The wind stilled.
The tent fabric stopped trembling.
For a moment, the world held its breath.
Then, from somewhere far below —
so deep I felt it in my molars —
a single, hollow gong.
Once.
Like a bell.
In a cave.
That had no bell.
And in the dark,
I smiled.
Not because I understood.
But because I was no longer afraid.
The mountain had answered.