The sun had been a white-hot eye in the sky for seven months, refusing to blink. In the village of Huangling, the earth didn't just dry up; it disintegrated. The ground was a mosaic of deep, jagged cracks, some wide enough for a man’s hand to disappear into. Dust became the only thing the villagers breathed, a fine, powdery grit that coated teeth and settled in the lungs like silt at the bottom of a dead river.
Every well in the village had failed. The main communal well, which had served the people for generations, now yielded nothing but a thick, foul-smelling black sludge that looked more like oil than water. Women would spend hours lowering buckets, only to pull up a handful of wet mud that tasted of sulfur and ancient rot. They tried to squeeze moisture from it using rags, getting ba
