The Lantern Bearer of the Long Night

At the ferry in Qingxi Town stands an unmarked pavilion. Inside sits a girl who never grows old. She has kept watch over a green lantern for three hundred years. The townspeople say that anyone who asks her for directions will forget the next day that they ever asked. Only she remembers. She remembers the man who pushed her into the river on that rainy night. She remembers him saying, “Keep the lantern lit for me. I’ll come back and marry you.” In three hundred years, he has been reincarnated a hundred times, and each time he has passed by her ferry. Each time, he has failed to recognize her. On his hundred-and-first life, he stops and takes her lantern. Looking back, he asks: “Miss, have we met somewhere before?” She doesn’t dare answer. Because whenever, over these three hundred years, she has imagined the night he might remember her, thunder has struck and taken him away. This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.