Chapter 75
"
She’d taken over storytelling duties when Cheungyi came and told Aunt Yeung that the preparation for the spell was complete. Now she and Aunt Yeung were in an ink drawn circle to the side of Lok Saan’s tank, along with a few others I didn’t know, while Gou Ngaam and I watched from the sidelines.
"Hundun?" I couldn’t help repeating. "That’s... Chinese?"
"Mandarin," said Gou Ngaam. "In Cantonese it would be wahn-dan. It is actually a... being of sorts, the primordial chaos that life arose out of. Later we discovered that this being had been purposefully created, making the name Hundun not really fit, but by that point the name had already stuck.
"Who created it?" I asked as I watched Aunt Yeung carefully place the lock of hair into one of the smaller circles in the design. She then went on to place four more items at equal points around the edge so that they, and the lock of hair, would have formed a pentagon had someone drawn straight lines between them.
"A weapon of unimaginable power silently left behind for the native population to deal with. Who else could have created it but the Pretans."
I had complicated feelings about Pretan, but flinched when I heard her tone - I still considered the place my homeland after all. "The Pretans? But then, why is it in Pearl City?"
Gou Ngaam sighed and turned away from the spell casting. She slithered some distance away and sat on the ground, tail coiled around her. I followed.
"It has been a long day," she said, once I’d settled beside her. "I apologise for my manner."
I quickly shook my head. "I just don’t get it, that’s all."
She nodded. "You are young, it is understandable. You were born after the colonial era, after the point in time when the powers that be said they’d put an end to their ambitions." She smoothed out the creases of her dress and shirt. "You see, back then, the colonial powers of the day saw the world through the lens of ’what can I take that can make me powerful?’ and ’what can my competition take that can make them more powerful than me?’"
"An arms race for resources," I said. "I learned a little bit about it at school." A little was an understatement. More than one essay I’d written in high school had been on the subject, though I knew that doesn’t make me an expert by any stretch of the imagination.