Convulsions seized the Cangwu River.
Under the sickly glow of the blood moon, the black water churned in violent, counter-clockwise eddies that dragged sunken freight barges down into the riverbed silt like lead sinkers.
A low, ringing groan rose from the deep trench—a sound like thousands of underwater iron bells grinding together against wet stone.
Then the surface broke.
A hundred paces from the outer harbor docks, the river heaved upward in a monstrous blister of black foam and rotting river weed.
The River Mother emerged from the deep-sea silt.
It wasn’t a beast of scale and claw, but a hundred-meter mountain of waterlogged human misery.
Tens of thousands of bloated corpses were knotted together by tangled skeins of coarse black hair, rotted hemp rigging, and rusted iron mooring chains.
