Called a God

In the end, Mo Fan relented.

Tang Yue had explained to him why he had been haunted by that nameless dread for days — why, every time he closed his eyes, he kept seeing the Sky-Scraping Serpent's face, its tongue flicking toward him.

The Sky-Scraping Serpent had chosen its prey. It was simply waiting for the right moment to appear without warning — just as it had before — and swallow Mo Fan whole.

"Snakes eat only live prey, you know. After being swallowed, you won't die immediately — it takes a while before you're slowly digested." Tang Yue described the details with calm precision, and Mo Fan felt his skin crawl with every word.

"Sis, please stop — I'm coming with you, aren't I?!" Mo Fan said, his face scrunching up in misery.

He followed Tang Yue all the way to West Lake. At the water's edge, they boarded a small wooden boat and drifted slowly out across the surface.

The lake was clear and still. White clouds reflected on the water floated gently around the boat, or merged quietly with its shadow.

Under any other circumstances, sitting alone with Tang Yue in this little boat, Mo Fan's imagination would have run wild. He would have started planning all manner of shameless schemes aboard this isolated vessel where no one could hear him shout and no one would come to save him. But not today. His mind was infected — genuinely, thoroughly infected — with fear, and it refused to let him rest.

At one point, staring into the clear water beside the boat, he could have sworn he glimpsed a vast, coiled shape lurking in the depths directly below them. The boat was a leaf floating above something so immense its full body couldn't be seen — only a fraction of it, like the tip of an iceberg. The water darkened to black, and from that blackness a serpent's face rose upward, drawing closer, sending a tremor through his very soul and dragging him down into the abyss of his fear.

*What is wrong with me?*

Mo Fan had never felt this unsettled in his life.

Was it really as Tang Yue had said — that he was nothing more than marked prey, waiting to be consumed at the beast's leisure?

The boat drifted all the way to the island at the center of the lake.

Seen from above, the island resembled a prohibition sign — a circle with an X through its center — surrounded entirely by water.

The moment the boat touched the shore, Mo Fan spotted a young man in a green robe standing watch. The man's eyes lit up the instant he saw Tang Yue, but when his gaze landed on Mo Fan, his brow furrowed.

"Tang Yue, outsiders aren't permitted here," the man in green said.

"Dasheng, he's not an outsider." Tang Yue helped Mo Fan ashore, then looped the boat's rope around a post.

"Does that mean the two of you are already...?" Dasheng blinked once, twice. Whatever mild wariness he had felt toward Mo Fan a moment ago curdled swiftly into outright hostility.

Tang Yue caught his meaning at once. A flush rose to her cheeks, and she shot him an exasperated look. "What are you thinking? He's my student."

"Oh. Oh! A student. Well, I suppose that counts as one of us." Dasheng broke into a sheepish grin, and every trace of unfriendliness vanished in an instant.

"So you people have the whole place to yourselves," Mo Fan said, genuinely surprised to find not a single tourist anywhere. "I assumed visitors could come up."

The island normally drew quite a few visitors. It was one of the more elegant spots on the lake — small enough that a slow walk brought you back to where you started, yet entirely encircled by water, with pavilions and old trees composing a rare and beautiful scene.

"Dasheng, head back. I'll take watch here today," Tang Yue told him.

"Sure, sure." Dasheng didn't give it a second thought. He stepped into the boat and rowed away.

Mo Fan watched him go with a faint, bemused smile. *A man and a woman alone on a little island in the middle of a lake — and he just walks off like that? He really believed "he's my student" and left without a worry in the world?*

He let his thoughts drift in that direction — and then, right on cue, that wretched serpent face surfaced in his mind again. *Oh, get lost!*

"It's actually my shift today anyway, so having company makes it less boring," Tang Yue said with a smile, apparently at ease around him.

Mo Fan could admit to himself that his head was full of thoroughly impure thoughts. A deserted island. A man and a woman alone together. Wild open-air scenery. A forbidden teacher-and-student dynamic — even if that last part no longer technically applied. The impurity of it was growing potent enough to hold its own against even the dread of the giant snake.

Tang Yue walked with her hands clasped behind her back, like a carefree girl leading a friend to her favorite spot. Her steps were unhurried but light, warm and approachable in a way he hadn't seen when they first met — none of that dazzling, untouchable quality, none of the teacher's imperious authority.

Mo Fan followed her through a path crossing an inner pool and into the pavilion at the island's center, where two covered walkways met. Gray tiles, red pillars — the essence of Jiangnan craft.

Inside the pavilion, ancient artifacts were arranged on display. But as Mo Fan stepped further in, he realized the artifacts weren't confined to the tables. The walls, too, were carved with a succession of murals, each one preserving some fragment of an ancient legend.

The murals were filled with people, and with shapes that were difficult to read — halfway between creature and myth.

There were villages, there was water, and there were strangely formed creatures surrounding those villages, their bodies frozen in mid-flight, scattering as if in terror.

Under ordinary circumstances, Mo Fan would have walked right past without a second glance. And even if he had stopped to look, he wouldn't have understood what the murals were saying.

But now, with Tang Yue's story of her village fresh in his mind, he felt as though he could almost read them.

The village was encircled by a shape that was easy to misread. If you didn't look closely at its head and tail, you might mistake it for the village's outer earthen walls. But it wasn't a wall.

It was a snake.

A snake coiled in a ring, the village nestled safely within.

All around it, a host of Demon-Beasts fled in every direction — not from the village, but from the serpent encircling it.

The image was rendered in spare, simple lines. Without knowing the story, no one would ever think to see a snake in that enclosing ring — let alone a snake vast enough to hold an entire village within its coil.

"It's all true?" Mo Fan looked at the mural, then looked at Tang Yue.

Tang Yue nodded gravely. There was nothing in her expression that suggested she was joking.

"The serpent is really protecting you?" Mo Fan asked, just as seriously.

"Yes. That's why we call it a god." The words came quietly, without ceremony. "This island — its shape — it was always meant to echo that old story."

Mo Fan stood there for a moment, his mind drifting back to the ring-shaped outline of the island as they had approached it.

A ring.

This island — this West Lake island that had stood for who knew how many centuries — had carried the secret all along.

Who could ever have guessed what it concealed?

And quite by accident, his own teacher turned out to be one of its keepers.