Spring on the Grave

Liu Fuchun breathed her last, consumed by cold and hatred, but instead of entering the underworld, she was pulled back by a blinding white light to the springtime of her sixteenth year, the most glorious and carefree time in the life of the Liu family’s legitimate daughter.

The stepmother who had caused her miscarriage in her previous life now knelt before her in utter submission. The half-sister who had pushed her into the water was sent away to a nunnery. Even Shen Yanbai, the former husband who had despised her until her death, arrived with a grand bridal procession and pleaded earnestly for her to take him back. With the advantage of a second chance at life, she exacted revenge to her heart’s content, convinced she had turned her fate around and gained control of wealth, power, and vengeance. She smiled and accepted the marriage proposal, waiting for the wedding night so she could personally finish off the man who had betrayed her.

But as they shared the nuptial wine beneath the red candles, hot wax dripped down and burned through the back of her hand. There was no flesh and blood beneath, only charred bamboo strips! The spirit tablet that slipped from Shen Yanbai’s sleeve bore the true date of her death. He murmured with pity, “Fuchun, can a body made of paper get drunk too?”

The shocking truth drenched her like icy water: she had never been reborn! Beneath the cold earth, her coffin was being buried. Her family wept at her grave. The paper effigies and paper horses set alight, the paper-made “grand bridal procession,” and the “enemies” formed from her obsession… Amid leaping flames and rising ash, they came together in a grand and despairing funeral rite. Her supposed “rebirth,” good fortune, and revenge were nothing but a spring dream built from the ashes at her grave!

In this eternal prison woven from the tears of the living and paper ash, Liu Fuchun discovers in despair that life is the icy confinement of a coffin beneath frozen earth, while death is an endless cycle of paper ash clouding her eyes. This “springtime at the grave” unfolding around her is an infernal prison more terrifying than death itself.