The Lotus Prince

Chapter Two- The Demon at Chentang Pass

Double-crested cormorant birds are very skilled divers.

Humans used the birds to fish for centuries and those who lived in Chentang Pass were no exception.

The village had once been part of a military base, but after a series of hurricanes flooded it, the area became a fishing village. Dozens of homes floated on the surface of a large lake like lilies in a pond. Instead of traveling on horses along dirt paths, the residents rowed rafts and boats up and down channels of water. Rope bridges connected houses to one another and anchored them to the high mountains surrounding Chentang Pass.

The fisherman rowed out to sea every morning and set loose the Cormorants to retrieve fish. Snares tied near the base of the birds' throats prevented them from swallowing the ones they caught.

An old fisherman and his double-crested cormorant bird set out to sea earlier than all the rest. They bobbed in a small fishing boat, watching the first rays of sunlight peek over the horizon line.

The bird was well trained and obeyed the man well, diving under the water for a few seconds and resurfacing with a large fish over and over again. The snare tied around the bird's neck also acted as a leash, preventing it from wandering too far. They continued this process for the next several minutes without any trouble.

Then, the bird dived into the water and never resurfaced.

Concerned, the old man leaned over the side of the boat and peered into the water. The snare had snapped in half, the severed end floating limply in the water.

In the case of a broken snare, there are two outcomes. One, the bird resurfaces a few yards away from the boat and instinctively returns to its master. Two, a predator sliced through the line with its teeth and the bird is gone forever. After waiting several minutes for the bird's head to pop up out of the water, the old man assumed the latter of the two outcomes had occurred.

He gathered the broken snare and prepared to row back to Chentang Pass when a jet of water shot out of the sea. The water rained back down and something dark landed inside the boat with an alarming crack.

The mangled corpse of a double-crested cormorant. Blood pooled at the bottom of the boat around it, seeping into the wood.

The old man had barely enough time to gasp before a scaly hand latched onto the side of the boat, its fingertips dripping with blood. A monster pulled itself out of the water and flopped into the boat, rocking it so violently that the old man was nearly tossed overboard.

The demon was a murky green color with muddy scales covering its body. Its limbs were stout and chubby, practically invisible compared to its long tail and spiked fins traveling down the length of its spine.

All the old man could do was watch in horror as the monster tore into the cormorant's flesh with needle-like teeth. Once it had finished licking the last of its meal from the bottom of the boat, it glared over its shoulder at the man with glazed, yellow eyes.

"Human," it hissed, tongue flicking through its jagged teeth like a serpent. "Take me to your village."

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The Monkey King's food tasted suspiciously like hair.

Luckily, Nezha was too hungry to care.

After his bath, Nezha had put on a fresh set of clothes (once Macaque assured him they weren't stolen from a gravesite) and returned to the mountain to gorge himself on the feast the Monkey King had prepared for him. They ate in the Monkey King's treehouse, which was just as shabby and structurally unsound as the ones occupied by the monkeys of Flower Fruit mountain.