The Lamplighter of the Yellow Springs

Words can bring calamity, and evil lurks in the white lantern.

My name is Chen Qingyan. The year I was born, green smoke rose from my family’s ancestral graves. The villagers all thought I was destined for greatness, sure to become a noble or high official with a brilliant future. Even I believed it, but my grandma didn’t.

She kept me under her thumb, wouldn’t let me go to school, and especially wouldn’t let me make friends.

A ghastly white lantern hung from the beam for more than a decade, until the whole village began to think I was a bringer of bad luck.

Then, when I turned eighteen, strange things started happening in the village, and the white lantern that had hung from the beam in the old Chen family home without ever going out for more than a decade began to turn red.

My grandma died on Corpse-Hiding Mountain trying to save me. There wasn’t even a whole body left.

That was when I learned I could never escape this fate. Sooner or later, I would return here and make those filthy things that had bound my grandma’s life pay in blood. Not one of them would get away…