On a moonless night choked with clouds, An Peng—her belly already rounded with child—walked toward the altar again. There was no reverence left in her eyes, only a livid, resolute cruelty.
A thing of clay—how could it possibly command the world? With one savage motion she ripped away the red cloth, lifted the mud figure and slammed it to the ground.
It shattered with a dry, savage sound. The clay exploded into a scatter of brown lumps and dust, as if a weight had been ripped from her chest. She stared at the ruin for a long moment and, for the first time in years, drew in a lungful of air that tasted like relief.
She gathered the fragments and the omen-stained red cloth, dug a deep pit in the back garden beneath the cover of night, and buried them all.
"It's over… it's finally over." She pressed her hand to the soft mound of life beneath her, whispering the lie she needed to believe.
In due course she gave birth—after ten months of waiting, a daughter arrived into the world, and they named her Xiaoxiao. For a while An Peng let herself be washed in the sweetness of new motherhood. Then the oddities returned, and with a cruelty that only grew.
Half asleep, half awake, she would see a smear of blood beyond the bed curtains—sometimes only a blur, sometimes a torso pushing through the veil. Ice-cold, sticky hands would clamp at her throat without sound, and she would wake choking, clawing at the air.
Xiaoxiao was strange too. She slept like the dead and when she woke she often stared at nothing, her beautiful eyes empty of spark. At first An Peng blamed exhaustion. Then one afternoon she followed the child’s blank gaze to the window.
"Xiaoxiao, what are you looking at?" An Peng asked softly.
The little girl raised a small hand and pointed outward. In a voice that was too calm and old for her years she said, "Sister's waving to me."
An Peng felt a chill run down her spine. She forced a smile, folding the girl into her arms. "There's nobody out there. You must be mistaken."
Xiaoxiao really did lift her hand and wave twice at the empty courtyard, the corners of her mouth curling into a faint, knowing smile that had nothing childlike about it.
It kept happening. Sometimes Xiaoxiao would suddenly draw her hand back and murmur, "Sister's hands are so cold." Sometimes she would wake in the dead of night and point at the darkness beside the bed, speaking in a low voice, "Mother, sister's standing there, watching us."
Each time the words struck An Peng like a splinter of ice. Bit by bit the truth pressed on her: Shi Qiu had never left.
She could not speak of it. She could not ask for help. She feared the husband who knew only the respectable wife she had worked to become, feared the collapse of that image, feared disgrace, arrest, even execution. Everything she possessed—wealth, status, dignity—could vanish in a breath.
Yet the secret would not hold.
An Peng flung herself before Master Shen, pale and shaking, clutching at Shen Cuiyu's sleeve. Tears tracked down her cheeks as she begged, "Master, I—I know I was wrong. I was young and foolish back then… I don't want to die. You must save me."
Shen Cuiyu watched her in quiet, then slowly withdrew her sleeve from the woman's fingers. Her voice was calm to the edge of cold. "You are not pleading because you repent. You are pleading because you are afraid."
Her eyes were bright and hard enough to cut through An Peng's lies. Had her life not been at stake, she would never have felt an ounce of true remorse for Shi Qiu. "This cannot be hidden any longer. You are bound by anger and grievance. If you want to live, the first thing is to find Shi Qiu's bones and bury them properly."
As Shen turned to leave, a small figure appeared at the doorframe—Xiaoxiao. The child stood very still, watching the adults with eyes too calm for her age, as if she had been listening since before she could speak.
Shen examined the girl for a beat, then said to Zhang Yushu, "Bring Xiaoxiao with you."
Zhang hesitated, protective instinct instant. "She's only a child. Taking her to such a place—she might be frightened…"
Shen's gaze remained on the girl, but there was no softness left in it. "Do not worry. Perhaps Xiaoxiao and Shi Qiu share a bond we have yet to understand."
Zhang looked down at his daughter's unchildlike stillness, remembered odd things that had happened over the years, and finally nodded with a heaviness that settled in his shoulders.
When they reached the village—an empty place that might have been conjured from a nightmare—the group felt unmoored. Most villagers had long since moved away, leaving the few plumes of smoke and the skeletal houses to look more forlorn against the fields.
By all rights An Peng should have known this place best. Instead she stood rooted where she was, unable to lead them. Master Shen took a compass and walked on until it guided them to an abandoned mill at the edge of the hamlet.
The mill hunched alone in the gloom, wood eaten away by rot, walls collapsing, like a dying beast folded into shadow. The moment they crossed the threshold the light seemed to be devoured; day had lost its cheer. A cold, damp air closed in, heavy with mildew, crushed leaves, and a deeper, metallic tang—old blood mingled with the sweet-ferment of rot.
The scene matched the visions they had seen in the mirage. At the center sat the great stone grinding wheel, mute and thick with dust and moss. Along its rim there were darker patches, a dried, brownish stain that meant something worse than time.
Shen's compass went insane as she drew it near, the needle spinning like it was unmoored, then slamming toward the stone as if nailed in place, vibrating against its axis.
They exchanged looks and without a word Pei Yu, Zhong Shengwan, Dongfang Xiao and a few bolder disciples moved in. The stone was heavy as a burial slab and seemed fused to the earth. With a concerted, bone-shaking effort and the teeth-grinding protest of old wood, they levered the wheel just enough to create a crack.
From the gap came a sickening breath—cold, putrid and real as a living thing. It smelled of earth and rot and a cloying, almost perfumed sick-sweetness that made the students gag.
Beneath the stone lay a damp, blackened cavity, full of crumbling leaves and the husks of insects. And in its center, curled in an unnatural angle like a letter folded too many times, lay a little white skeleton.
It was small as a child's, limbs twisted as if they had been bent beyond endurance. The forehead bore a gruesome, concave fracture, a cavern in the bone that suggested violent trauma.
The instant the bones saw the light—
—there came a laugh. Thin and close and chill, a child's titter that crept along the rafters and scraped the backs of their necks. It sounded as if it were breathed right into the ear, bright and hateful all at once.
An Peng couldn't hold it. Memories she had tried to slam down came racing back. Her legs folded and she sank to the floor, the air ripped from her as if the past had finally caught up to present.