There was a time when the God of Mystery could unfurl the whispers of any secret, but now wandered among them – unseen, unknown.

“Well, he’s truly a mystery now,” is what many other gods joked whenever the topic of his disappearance came up in conversation. Tongue-in-cheek, they’d made both peace and war with the fact that he’d been gone for one hundred years, a shroud of untoward assumptions made in his wake. What a way to live up to his name. In a storybook sort of way, it was almost beautifully ironic and Liu Ying would be the first to admit it, if only he weren’t so busy running away from it all.

One would think that being the God of Mystery had its appeal in secrecy, like somehow it would be as easy to slip unnoticed in a crowd as it would be for a sweat-laden farmer in a shrine during a drought. But surprisingly enough, Liu Ying had to go to great lengths to make sure he wasn’t picked out from the dusty villages and towns he often moved between as someone ‘otherly’.

In his natural state, he looked like he had no business toiling along with the commoners he surrounded himself with. While he had not come from any particular sort of wealth, Liu Ying was raised comfortably enough that his hands remained soft and slender, with a face to match. Robes often pristine and made with delicate fabrics, they also did him a disservice in hiding amongst common people. In order to cut his ties as cleanly as possible from the Heavenly Realm, he contented with the fact that he would have to live under a constant shapeshifted form, and could only unravel it when he was alone.

The sensation of slipping out of this form was akin to removing a pair of tight, uncomfortable boots after suffering in them for hours. It put a strain on his already dwindled spiritual powers but it was the only way, he knew, that he could pull off abandoning his post in the heavens and not be dug out by the whispers and rumors of villagers. Word of mouth truly traveled far, and with all the roaming he did, he couldn’t risk one of the gods that owned mortal territory hearing their worshippers gossiping about the ‘god-like young man with the jade earring’ in their devoted shrines.

Liu Ying released a grand sigh as soon as he sealed himself away inside of one of the more distanced shrines from the village he’d arrived in earlier.

He’d spent the better part of the day working the docks with fishermen for a few bronze coins they’d pressed begrudgingly into his palm. As soon as he’d encroached on their domain, they had eyed him wearily – a young man, no older than nineteen or twenty, wearing faded shades of beige and one sleeve longer than the other. His boots were unlaced and his hair was falling out of his ponytail. But it wasn’t his appearance that put them off. When Liu Ying had come around asking for work – or better – demanding work, many of the men who otherwise would have taken him up on a humble offer of help for spare coins, told him to either get lost or get fucked. Only a few of the more elderly men who truly needed assistance in getting their catches to the local market or with fixing their feeble fishing poles had ended up accepting.

It didn’t take a God of Mystery to determine why people were resistant to comments such as, “Old man, you can barely carry yourself, let alone a bucket of fish. Allow me to help you” or “Boss, your shoes won’t survive long enough to take you to the market. I’ll take your catch for you”, but it was lost on Liu Ying for the most part. The stark words, coupled with the frown he wore most naturally on his face were off-putting at the very least, and offensive at most.

Regardless, the work had tired him out, and his spiritual reserves were low. He pressed his back against the door and released the shapeshifting spell. Almost immediately, his body grew another two inches in height, and his features matured from a nineteen to a twenty-three-year-old man. His hair fell away from his limp ponytail and moved into a half-tied style that reached down to his lower back. Delicate robes adorned his limbs in a pale blue, and a long jade earring clinked by his ear.

Now free to allow his spiritual energy to replenish, Liu Ying looked around at the shrine that was darkened by the sky turning to dusk outside.

It was in decent shape, yet signs of how rarely it was visited were evident. A thin film of dust covered almost every surface, from the offering table to the creaking wooden floors. On the offering table, only an incense holder, candles, and some dried flowers were spread across it. Liu Ying opened a window to clear out the dead flowers and lit the two candles with a quick spell, casting flickering shadows across the walls. There was a fallen wooden plaque on the ground from where it had stood at the table, and when Liu Ying picked it up, the characters read exactly what he had expected – this was a shrine devoted to the God of Preservation, Zhou Hui.

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He was in his mortal territory, after all.

Zhou Hui owned the largest expanse of mortal territory, but his shrines weren’t confined to it. All across the land, Liu Ying had traveled from the extreme north to the deep south, and he’d encountered his shrines everywhere he went. It was to be expected – after all, mortals, huddled in all of their fears and uncertainties, took great comfort in a god that symbolized protection and preservation. They could be few and far in between in locations that had other more pressing priorities, such as desert and ocean-side towns worshiping the God of Water, or the central plains worshiping the God of Earth, but Zhou Hui’s presence was always felt during Liu Yang’s travels, as he actively sought it out.

When he was still living in the Heavenly Realm, they had been close friends in the way that people always said that opposites attracted. While one hundred years had come and gone since then and Liu Ying no longer knew how their friendship stood on something as imposing and staggering as time, sleeping in Zhou Hui’s shrines provided him the only nights that he wasn’t plagued by nightmares that would otherwise leave him in a state of cold sweat and a panic. He had wondered on more than one occasion if it was the sense of guardianship that had been infused with shrines devoted to his name that left him at ease enough to sleep a full night’s rest, but he hadn’t thought to ask any of the villagers.

Liu Ying brushed his fingers along the writing on the plaque and removed some of the dust that coated it before setting it back down on the offering table.

There was an unfortunately bare-looking broom sitting in the corner of the shrine that he simply had to make do with if he wanted to sleep on a clean floor that night. After sweeping the place down the best he could, he discovered pieces of cloth folded away on a shelf, mostly likely used as sheets to sleep on whenever the shrine was more visited by people passing Ludong village. This one had been tucked away by time, and a newer, more nicely decorated one had been constructed in the heart of the village that attracted much more attention.

It was an acceptable arrangement, the faded sheets on the floor and his outer robe used as a folded-up pillow. He’d slept in worse conditions, out in the woods on nothing but a big pile of leaves or in a drafty cave dripping water from the ceiling. A natural consequence to his actions, he supposed, and discomfort was something he had learned to push out of his mind long ago.

Just as Liu Ying was settling down into a halfway state of sleep, the smell of the river and fish lingering in his senses, there came a pounding on the shrine door.

His eyes opened and his body jolted from the fog of slumber. Did I imagine that?

For the second time, the door shook with someone on the other side banging their fist against it.

Liu Ying leapt up from the floor and quickly disguised himself back into his scruffy mortal form.

“Who’s there?” he called out as he approached the door, leaning towards it to try and catch any strange sounds.

“Duan Baozhai!” came the muffled, frantic voice of an elderly woman, “You helped my husband out on the docks earlier. We live just down the hill from here. S-Something’s wrong… Please! I need your help!”

Liu Ying threw the door open and was faced with an old woman he’d seen earlier that day. She’d been manning a wooden stall selling the fish that her husband caught and Liu Ying had subsequently been going back and forth between for the better part of the afternoon. The old man, Yao Bo, was mild-mannered enough not to be riled up by his crass words but in turn, didn’t speak much at all. His wife, however, managed to usher in as many words as possible whenever Liu Ying dropped off a fresh bucket of carp, all with a grin on her weathered face.

Now, Duan Baozhai looked even older with the way her face creased in concern. Her hands were trembling when she hurriedly pointed to the little shack down the hill from the shrine.

“Just down there… My husband is in a state I’ve never seen before!” She reached for Liu Ying’s mismatched sleeve and gave it an insistent tug. “I don’t know what to do… Will you come with me?”

“What? I’m not a priest or a healer. What can I do?” Liu Ying said, taken aback.

“Please!”

The desperation in her quivering voice was enough to move mountains. He wasn’t sure what he was getting into, but he couldn’t turn away an old lady that looked moments from a stress-induced collapse. Liu Ying looked between her and the shack for a moment before releasing a breath and saying, “Please lead the way, then.”