The first finger emerged just as the midnight bell tolled.
Ling Tian had been lying awake in the cheap inn, watching moonlight paint shifting patterns across the warped ceiling boards, when the pain started - not in his transforming arm, but deep in his abdomen. At first he thought it was bad food, then he saw the bump moving beneath his skin.
One tiny fingertip breached his navel, glistening with fluid that smelled distinctly of pickled radishes. Then a hand. An arm. A small girl tumbled onto the creaking floorboards with a wet plop, her simple peasant dress clinging to limbs too thin, her hair plastered dark against a face that looked hauntingly familiar.
She blinked up at them with eyes far too old for her youthful features.
"Gege forgot about me again," she announced matter-of-factly, then sneezed violently. A pea-sized pearl shot from her nose and embedded itself in the opposite wall with a solid thunk.
Ling Mei's scream wasn't of fear, but of terrible recognition. "Xiao Hei? But you're just a—"
"Story?" the girl - Xiao Hei - finished, giggling as she wrung fluid from her skirt. The motion revealed a birthmark high on her left thigh - the unmistakable shape of a bamboo steamer basket. She patted it proudly. "Stories are the bones houses grow around."
Qing'er's sword hand trembled for the first time since Ling Tian had known her. "We need to leave. Now."
But the walls were already changing.
The cheap wallpaper peeled away in long strips, revealing beneath it the familiar carvings of the Ling Clan's ancestral hall - except the portraits' eyes tracked their movements hungrily, and the floorboards rose and fell with slow, rhythmic breaths.
Xiao Hei sighed and took Ling Tian's mutated hand in her tiny one. "Gege's turn to wear the house now," she said, as if explaining something simple to a slow child.