The Dragon-Stirring Fragment

The fenjin book handed down in the Shen family. On its face it records fengshui rhymes and the tricks of dragon-seeking and vault-siting; train by it and you can become a dependable Mojin man.

Only half of it survives. In a generation nobody can name the latter half was torn away and locked up, and what the Shens still hold is the First Half, copied and copied again. Shen Zhaoye's own volume he wrote out himself somewhere in his teens: hardbound, thread-sewn, the paper gone furry, the corners of the pages he turns most often curled into waves he can find with his eyes shut.

The First Half is a mixed bag. In the lower right corner of page seven is a line his grandfather added in red ink:

The shrine faces backward, the stele bears no characters, earth breeds damp, the breath-vent half-shut.

Page eleven records the definition of a kind of passage — a road cut from deep in the earth-vein up toward the surface by a body, its width about 1.2 times the body width of the creature that makes it. In the margin of the same page are 2 notes, the ink paler than the main text:

Where the insects do not sing, something sleeps in the earth. A faint tremor in the needle is the earth-vein breathing.

The Shen copies carry one iron rule: a miscopied character may not be blotted out. You start a new line and write it again, and the wrong line stays with a single stroke drawn through it. Anyone turning the pages later can see at a glance which generation of copyist stuck on which character — in Shen Zhaoye's volume the worst sticking is on the pages about magnetic declination.

The Fragment leaves out more than it sets down. The ridgeline of a certain mountain, the old channel of a certain river, what lies buried 3 feet under the bottom of a certain well — all of that the Shens pass by mouth. What is written can be taken; what is spoken can be kept.

In his lifetime his grandfather tampered with one page only. In the blank at its lower right, 3 short parallel strokes had been scored, like the marks 3 fingernails would cut into a tabletop, and beside them a crooked line of characters, the ink so faint it is nearly gone:

Do not site the three vaults. The third vault will come to you.

There is a deeper version of the story in the trade: what this book records reaches far past Chinese fengshui, and the First Half is no more than the Eastern translation of some larger system. Testing that line means waiting until the latter half is back.