One day, in order to make out a will, Zheng was sorting through his personal effects. In the bottom of a drawer he came upon a small silk bag, and when he upended it, a ruby fell into his palm. He’d sold the rest long ago and had thought this one lost, and yet here it was, cool and heavy in his hand. Before that moment, he had not thought of his father in half a lifetime.

His hands began to tremble. He hid the ruby out of sight and turned to other business, but he could not seem to stop what was welling up inside him.

Where the moisture was coming from he could not imagine. He had not even sucked on a rag in three days, but his vision began to blur and his eyes to well, as if some secret reserve inside him were being tapped.

“No!” he shouted, slamming his fists down on the table. “No, no, no!”

He looked desperately around the room for something to distract his mind. He counted backward from twenty. He sang a nonsensical song. But nothing would stop it.

When it finally happened, the event was so anticlimactic he wondered if he hadn’t made too much of it. A tear tracked down his cheek, rolled off his chin, and fell to the floor. He stood frozen, staring at the dark splotch it made on the wood.

For a long moment, all was still and quiet. Then, the thing Zheng feared most happened. It began with that old, terrible pressure within him, which in a matter of moments became unbearable. It felt as if his body were having an earthquake.

The glue that covered him cracked and fell away. Sand began to pour from his skin. The tar that had stopped up his armpits disintegrated, and ropes of seaweed shot out of him at an incredible rate. In less than a minute, it had nearly filled the room he was in, and he knew he had to get out of his house or it would be destroyed. He ran outside—and into a driving rainstorm.

He fell down in the middle of the street, sand and seaweed gushing out of him. People who saw him ran away screaming. His wooden feet blew off, and from their stumps rushed endless lengths of grass. His body began to grow, the rain and the grass mixing with the sand to form earth, layers and layers of which wrapped around him like skin upon skin. Soon he was as wide as the street and as tall as his house.

A mob formed and attacked him. Zheng struggled to stand on his grassy stumps and then to run. He fell, crushing a house under his weight. He stood again and lumbered on, laboring up a hill with thundering steps that punched holes in the street.

The mob chased him, joined by soldiers who fired arrows at his back. From his wounds gushed liquid gold, which only encouraged more people to join the attack. All the while, Zheng was steadily growing, and soon he was twice the width of his street and three times the height of his house. His form was fast becoming inhuman, his arms and legs disappearing within the giant, earthen ball that was his midsection.