Moonlight in a Puddle: A Mystery That Can Never Be Solved

This is an unsolved mystery that spans a long stretch of time, beginning with childhood curiosity and ending with a lifelong quest. Told from the first-person perspective of “me,” it recounts my strange connection with a gentle vampire family and their mysterious ancestor, the “Vampire Ancestor.”

It all began one ordinary Sunday afternoon, in a lonely family building beside a reservoir dam. I met my cousin's classmate's grandfather, never suspecting that he was the ancestor of a vampire clan. I never imagined we would become friends despite our age difference, either. They survived on the blood of livestock and tried to coexist peacefully with humans.

My desire to explore led me to a more secretive world west of the family building: a vampire town that existed only in a particular space and was invisible to outsiders, and, at the far end of the town, a filthy little puddle and a mysterious ancient tree hiding a tree door. A fat man stumbling out through that door set all the mysteries in motion.

When the Vampire Ancestor inexplicably disappeared and the entire clan searched for him in vain, I was the one who used my hazy memories to uncover the tree's secret on a particular full-moon day, the fifteenth. Beyond the tree door lay a dazzling, gold-filled pocket dimension where time flowed strangely. There I found the ancestor, who claimed he “just wanted a few quiet days.” Little did I know that after three years together in that space, the outside world had changed beyond recognition.

When we returned to reality, we found an abandoned, dilapidated building thick with cobwebs. The clan members were nowhere to be found, and time had passed mercilessly. After a brief period of settling in, I went back again, only to discover that even the Vampire Ancestor, who had just returned, had vanished. It was as if that space had swallowed him whole, or he had deliberately gone into hiding.

In the end, I, in the great