"In Shi Family Village, there were those called Flood Watchers. At Roaring Sands, there stood a drum: the Drum…
"In Shi Family Village, there were those called Flood Watchers. At Roaring Sands, there stood a drum: the Drum of Heavenly Vindication. A gash ran across its surface, a wound from the year 960.
That year, the Yellow River raged. The villagers beat the drum until it split, yet the Flood Watcher who should have returned with aid never came. At first, the drumming shook the skies, growing ever louder. Then, the wails of broken families and the frantic screams of children wove into its rhythm, until the drum could no longer drown out the crying. Finally, the weeping stopped. The drumming stopped. The weepers were dead. The drum was shattered.
The man the drum failed to summon was Shi Shouxin.
At the very moment the Drum of Heavenly Vindication shattered, his new lord donned the yellow robe of emperorship, escorted into Kaifeng. The ceremonial procession of the returning army was so thunderous that perhaps he truly could not hear the pleading drumbeats from his home.
He was no longer a Flood Watcher. He was Deputy Commander of the Imperial Guard, then Minister of Equal Rank, and later, Commander of the Imperial Guard. The people of Shi Family Village could not recall this long string of titles. To them, his identity had never changed. Villagers would look at his parents as they passed and spit, ""Our humble village can't hold a general. As for Little Shouxin? He's long dead!""
The gash that split the drumhead was the symbol of his own shattered spine. He was the notorious turncoat, a man who climbed to power over the bones of his kin and friends, one of the murderers of Zhu Yu. The unheeded blood and tears dried into a chasm of hatred.
Shi Shouxin never returned to Shi Family Village.
No one knows if, standing in the imperial court, seeing a winding river churn white waves, or reading official reports of a flood somewhere, he ever remembered a shattered drum. Did the roar of the flood ever fade from his ears? Or had it, for him, never truly sounded at all?"