Notes from Luoxia Village

The fog in Luoxia Village always lingers on the mountainside, the crescent birthmark on Ahe's wrist has not changed its shape in seventeen years, and Grandma Wang's story is always stuck on the third drop of leakage in the eaves of "that rain three years ago". Chen Yan has lived here for seventeen years, thinking that stability is the entire footnote of life. Until the silver pocket watch rolled out from the cracks in the rocks behind the mountain. His name is engraved on the inside of the watch cover, and the hands are nailed to three-seventeen - exactly the same as the stopped clock in the village chief's house, the frequency of the stream flowing over the pebbles, and even the rise and fall of the mallet used by Ah He to beat his clothes. On the day when the fog began to smell like rust, the hollows in the corners of Ah He's eyes suddenly became blank when he smiled. The villagers repeated the word "stability" in the heavy rain, like a stuck tape. Only then did Chen Yan understand: The human world he relied on for a living was a cage of consciousness woven with warmth; the bonds he held tightly were nothing more than written code scripts. Seventeen years of life is a scam. When he smashed the core of the illusion, he did not move towards the so-called real world. The broken crystals were reorganized in his palm and became new rules - the villagers were forever trapped in their most fearful memories, Ahe's birthmark became a wound that played on a loop, and the fog in the back mountain was too thick to dissolve, only covering his cold voice. "Welcome to Luoxia Village." There are no lies here anymore, only the pain that he planted with his own hands and will never end.