When Chen Mo opened his eyes, his mouth still held the taste of that damp, earthen darkness from the cave in Guizhou.
Then he saw the heavy wooden beam crossing above him, smoke-blackened to a dark shine, its grain packed with years of grease. The air was thick with tung oil, sawdust, and mildew, and something else underneath it all—a sour, spoiled smell he couldn't quite name.
He shifted, and found himself lying on a pile of straw.
Something was wrong with his body. Too light. His hands—no. These weren't his hands. The fingers were too slender, the knuckles sharp and bare, and the web of the thumb had none of the calluses that decades of a carving knife would leave. He touched his face: high cheekbones, a narrow jaw, a face entirely unknown to him.
His head felt like several drums being beaten at once.
Then the memories came—not his, not Chen Mo's. They belonged to someone else. A boy called Gousheng.
The twelfth year of the Yongle reign. Anzhuang Guard, Guizhou.
The Seven Stars Nuo Troupe. A bought apprentice. Three years, and what had he learned? Splitting firewood, hauling water, running errands. The troupe master, Shen Tieli, had never once let him touch a carving knife. Said his hands were clumsy. Said he had no gift.
Useless. The last time anyone had called Gousheng that was three days ago.
Then Gousheng had caught a fever. Three days and three nights it burned, and he didn't come through.
Then Chen Mo arrived.
"Christ..."
He lay there in the straw and spent roughly three breaths accepting the situation. He was an intangible cultural heritage researcher. Nuo culture was his field. And now he had crossed six hundred years into the Ming dynasty and landed inside a nuo troupe as its most worthless apprentice.
If this were a paper, the title would write itself: On Irrational Transmigration Phenomena in Fieldwork—A Case Study of the Seven Stars Nuo Troupe, Anzhuang Guard, Guizhou.
He gave a short, bitter laugh, then pushed himself upright.
His stomach clenched with a sharp, twisting pain.
Not a side effect of transmigration. Hunger.
Gousheng's memories told him he hadn't eaten a proper meal in two full days. The troupe had no work lately, the pot was empty, and what little grain remained went first to Senior Brother and Second Sister—they were the performers who had to get on stage. As for Gousheng, the lowest apprentice? Two days of watered-down rice gruel, and each day thinner than the last.
"All right," Chen Mo said, drawing a slow breath. "First challenge: don't starve to death."
He steadied himself against the wall and stood. The room was nearly dark, only a thin line of afternoon light leaking through the gap in the door. He scanned the space—dirt floor, mud walls, a wooden table missing one leg, propped on a stone. In the corner, stacks of half-finished wooden blanks and several dust-covered carving knives.
This was Shen Tieli's workshop.
Chen Mo walked over and picked up one of the knives. The blade was dull, chipped in several places—but the moment it settled into his hand, something tightened in his throat.
In his previous life, he had spent three years at the heritage center attending nuo mask carving workshops. His supervisor had been the foremost scholar of nuo culture in the country. He had carved dozens of masks himself—reproductions, all of them, but he knew wood. He knew how to open a face. He understood the cultural logic behind the consecration ceremony.
All of that knowledge was still in his head.
The door groaned open.
A girl of seventeen or eighteen burst in, quick and unselfconscious, carrying a rough ceramic bowl. She saw Chen Mo standing in the corner and stopped short, then let out a breath that became a look of relief.
"Gousheng! You're awake! Do you have any idea how scared I was? Three days burning up—I thought you weren't going to make it!"
Shen Xiaodié. The troupe master's daughter. Second Sister.
She pushed the bowl into his hands. "Drink this. Rice porridge. It's still hot."
Chen Mo looked down at what was in the bowl. Rice gruel thin enough to reflect his own face, a few grains floating on top.
But he was genuinely hungry. He tipped it back and drank it in three swallows. His stomach warmed a little.
"Thank you, Shimei."
Shen Xiaodié blinked. Gousheng had never called anyone Shimei before. He used to just mumble with his head down.
"Well," she said, looking him over. "Fever burns you clean through, and you come out civilized. Rest up—there's work tomorrow."
"What's happened?"
Her expression shifted. She hesitated, then lowered her voice. "The Zhou Troupe again. They went and took the nuo performance from Magistrate Zhou's birthday banquet right out from under us. Father argued for half the day and scraped together one slot—an opening piece. And even that isn't certain. If we can't pull it off this time, the troupe is finished."
Chen Mo combed through Gousheng's memories.
The Zhou Troupe—the biggest nuo outfit in Anzhuang Guard. Their master, Zhou Debiao, had more than a dozen performers who could take the stage, and word was he had connections with the garrison commander. What was the Seven Stars Troupe against that? Shen Tieli, an old master with a ruined hand, four half-grown boys behind him. They barely had room to stand in that company.
"What are we performing?"
"The Road-Opening General, what else?" Shen Xiaodié sighed. "But the Road General's mask—it's cracked."
Chen Mo's eyes went still.
"Cracked? How?"
"During rehearsal a few days ago, Tienius made too big a swing and the mask caught the pillar—split from the center of the brow all the way down to the chin. Father tried to mend it all night, more than once, but the seam won't close. Even lacquer won't hide it. Three days left, and there's no time to carve a new one."
"Where's the mask now?"
"With Father."
"I want to see it."
Shen Xiaodié moved to stop him, but Chen Mo was already out the door.
In the main hall, Shen Tieli sat on a low stool, the nuo mask cradled in both hands.
He was somewhere past sixty, bent nearly double, and his left hand had only three fingers—the index and middle gone to the root, the little finger shortened to half. His face was a permanent scowl, a knife scar pulling from his left brow down to the corner of his mouth, making him look not unlike the wrathful gods carved onto the masks he made.
He heard footsteps, glanced up, and looked down again.
"You're up."
"Yes."
Chen Mo crossed the room and crouched in front of him. "Master Shen. May I look at the mask?"
The old man raised his eyes, said nothing, and handed it over.
Chen Mo took it in both hands.
It was heavier than he'd expected. White poplar, coated in a dark red lacquer that years of smoke and firelight had deepened to a rich brown. The mask was the Road-Opening General—wide mouth, protruding fangs, eyes wide with fury, three deep horizontal furrows riding up the brow. Every line was violent, ferocious. And yet there was something else underneath the ferocity, something that resisted simple naming: a kind of solemnity.
That was what had always drawn him to nuo masks. The terrible face, and beneath it, the compassion of something that fights to keep the world safe.
He turned the mask over and looked at the back.
The crack ran straight down from the center of the brow, splitting the face clean through to the chin. Shen Tieli had packed the back of the crack with fish glue and bound it with several rounds of thin hemp cord, but from the front, the split was impossible to miss.
"Can't be fixed," Shen Tieli said, his voice rasping. "The wood is cracked all the way through—glue won't hold it. We could push it through one performance, but any large movement on stage and it'll likely fall apart in two pieces."
"Then it's truly useless," Chen Mo said quietly.
Shen Tieli made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Truly useless."
Silence settled over the room for a few seconds.
Chen Mo stared at the mask in his hands. The direction of the crack. The grain of the wood. The degree of oxidation along the fractured surfaces. His mind was moving fast. In his previous life, he had read through dozens of case reports on nuo mask restoration at the heritage center, and one of them—a paper on repairing split antique masks—had used a technique involving...
"Slow-drying with hot tung oil immersion."
It came out before he'd thought about it.
Shen Tieli looked up. "What?"
"The wood cracked because the moisture content was uneven throughout." Chen Mo pointed to the break along the back of the mask. "This didn't split all at once. Look here—the oxidation along the edges is deeper than in the center. That means there was a hairline fracture long before this. Every performance, the wood expanded and contracted with the heat, and the fracture widened, little by little, until the impact finished it."
Shen Tieli's brow furrowed. He watched Chen Mo's finger trace the mask.
Where was this boy getting any of this?
"Go on."
"The way to save it—you heat tung oil and submerge the entire mask. The oil works into every gap in the wood fibers, fills all the tiny voids. Then while it's still hot, you apply steady inward pressure on both sides of the crack, pressing the broken faces back together. As the wood cools and contracts, it grips the seam tight."
Chen Mo looked up at Shen Tieli. "But you need enough tung oil, and a stove that can bring it to the point where it just begins to smoke without actually catching flame."
Shen Tieli looked at him for a long moment.
"Who taught you this?"
"I—" Chen Mo paused. "I worked it out myself."
The old man didn't press him. He stood and went to a ceramic jar in the corner, pried off the lid with his three-fingered hand, and ladled out a small amount of tung oil to smell it.
"Oil I have." He turned around. "But I've lived sixty-some years and never heard of this method from anyone."
"That's because—" Chen Mo nearly said because this is basic introductory material in modern wood conservation, stopped himself, swallowed it down. "Because no one's tried it."
"Then let's try."
Shen Tieli set the oil jar down on the table with a thud. "If you ruin it, the mask is finished. But it's already finished. Dead either way."
Chen Mo felt something cold move through him. This was a gamble.
He had no other choice.
That night, the Seven Stars Troupe's kitchen fire was lit.
Shen Tieli tended the stove himself, pouring a generous measure of tung oil into the large pot, heating it slowly over a low flame. Chen Mo stood beside him, holding a sharpened wooden skewer, testing the oil from time to time—when the surface began to tremble and the faintest thread of pale smoke rose from it, the temperature was right.
"Put it in."
Shen Tieli gripped the mask with two iron tongs and lowered it carefully into the oil.
The fat hissed. A dense, sharp smell rolled through the room. The mask sank and floated in the scalding oil, its dark red lacquer catching the sheen of the oil and giving back a deep, burnished glow.
"How long does it soak?" Shen Tieli asked.
"At least an hour."
"Then we wait."
Shen Tieli settled himself by the stove, drew out his pipe, and lit it.
The firelight moved across his scarred face, but his eyes were calm.
"Boy. Who are you, really?"
Chen Mo felt a jolt. "What?"
"I said you're not Gousheng." Shen Tieli exhaled a slow breath of smoke. "I've had that boy with me three