Paper Bride: The Cursed Spirits of the Ancient Village

“The villagers of Fengmen Village always say, ‘There are no ghosts in our village. The roads just take a few twists.’ That is, until folklore blogger Su Ran captures a photo: in the window of an old house on a stormy night, the reflection of a girl in red is adjusting his camera for him.” He finds a bloodstained paper wedding dress in the rafters, digs half a tooth-marked copper coin out of a crack in the wall, the last token a sacrificial girl bit in two, and uncovers twenty of the village chief's diaries in the hollow of an old locust tree. Every diary has the same sentence: “This year we chose Xiao Zhao, the old Lin family's girl from the west end of the village. She cried and said she wanted to live, but it should be us who live.” The villagers start dying. The first is the old village chief, his neck wrapped in paper clothes and the character for “regret” embroidered all over him. The second is the butcher who held the girl down back then. His belly is slit open with paper scissors, and stuffed inside are dried paper figures, identical to those used to “send the bride off” for the girl twenty years ago. Blood begins to seep from Su Ran's Yin eyes. At last, he sees the truth: the so-called curse is nothing but a “guardian deity” the villagers raised on the girl's blood. And the girl in red, who always says “Save me” in his dreams, now stands beneath the blood moon, clutching his birth details in her hand. “They used me to prolong their lives. You... what will you use to save me?”