The Night I Returned Home, I Inherited the Village's Forbidden Duty

I was eighteen the year I left Linjiakao. I thought I’d never return to this mountain village, where the endless rules were suffocating.

Then a phone call in the dead of night dragged me back to these mountains, where my ancestors were buried alongside their taboos.

Grandma left only seven deadly rules before she died:

Never open the door to a midnight knock. If the incense goes out, don’t relight it or bury it. If you see red clothes, don’t look up. In the ancestral hall, never turn around. Never count the heads beneath the moon. Don’t stare too long at a reflection in a well. Never speak idly in front of a grave.

I had only come to mourn and wanted to finish quickly and return to the city.

But on the first night of the vigil, a figure appeared in the courtyard, someone outside the door called my name in a gentle voice, and a woman in a red dress stood beneath the eaves of the ancestral shrine.

Half a broken stick of incense had appeared in my palm for no reason, and a bone-chilling cold weighed on my shoulders.

The villagers looked at me with a mixture of reverence and avoidance.

Only then did I begin to understand:

The ancestral shrine of Linjiakao was not there to protect the incense. It held back the blood debt incurred a hundred years ago.

I was not guarding the shrine. I was guarding the lives of everyone in the village.

Break one rule, and one household dies.

When the lamp goes out, people die. The shrine falls, and the village perishes.

From then on, I kept the lamp lit and guarded the shrine, never daring to make a single mistake.

As long as the lamp burns, people live. When it goes out, all is lost.