Chinese Ghost Story

As the granddaughter of a folklorist, I always remember those summer nights - the old man shook the cattail leaf fan and used his pipe pot to draw ferocious spells on the bluestone, sewing half a century of bizarre experiences into the story. He said that he was once a "ghost seller" who specialized in transporting invisible goods for those inhuman things: medicinal wine soaked with child corpses, human skins embroidered with death curses, mandrill tongues in clay pots... Until that night when he was talking about the "Hundred Ghosts Suitcase", he suddenly fell silent, and the swaying lantern behind me was reflected in his cloudy eyes. When the first key opened the iron box with "Bone China Resentment" written on it, the yellowed manuscript contained a black and white photo - in front of the porcelain kiln in 1943, a young grandfather was pushing a struggling human figure into the fire. As twenty-three past events came to light, I gradually discovered that each story corresponded to a real object: the blood-soaked wedding dress tightened automatically, the wine jar filled with human teeth bubbled late at night, and the carved mirror always flashed the figure of my grandfather in his burial clothes. When the last rusty lock was opened, there were twenty-three teeth with talismans neatly stacked on the bottom of the box, each with my birthday engraved on it. The cinnabar on the last page of the manuscript suddenly faded away, revealing the ending that Grandpa had never finished telling: "Anyone who opens the box must re-walk twenty-three sections of the Yin Road within forty-nine days, otherwise..." At this moment, the old locust trees in the courtyard were moving without any wind, and twenty-three twisted human faces appeared on the tree bark. When the first ray of morning light shone on the wedding dress, the hundreds of figures embroidered with gold threads clearly turned into dense corpses of infants with their eyes closed.