A Season of Borrowed Rain

About this book

In Qingshan Prefecture, spirit formations decide which cities get water and which farming valleys go dry. Shen Lian is a disgraced irrigation surveyor stuck at the ninth layer of Qi Condensation. She has inherited her late father's notebooks, his debts, and the blame for a diversion that once starved several villages. She returns to Stonewake Valley meaning to measure, expose, and leave. The valley's spring is turning brackish, its channels are running low, and creditors are circling ancestral fields. Then her gauges show something drought cannot explain: on certain nights, the water falls in a steady rhythm, like the pulse of a great formation upstream. The magistrate will not open the restricted canals to one surveyor with a grudge. To reach them, Lian will need something she has never wanted: people who depend on her. What it takes to build that is the question.