Tales of Folk Horror: Ballad of Mirrorwater

At a construction site on Lake Tai in 2024, I clutched a mirror scale bearing the character “Jiao,” hot as a branding iron. Black mud from the lakebed seeped beneath my fingernails. The foreman, Wang Kui, lay dead on freshly poured concrete, and the moss on the back of his neck formed the words “Find the Chi scale.” The crescent pattern on the water sleeves of the opera costume beside him matched the birthmark on the back of my neck perfectly.

No one ever told me that, as a descendant of Su Yueniang, I was born to be the key to a century-old curse. White silkworms at the Silkworm Goddess Temple in Zhenze wrap themselves around human shapes; the carved ceiling of the old opera stage in Luzhi hides a ghost from the theater; purple clay in Yixing’s dragon kiln is fired with bone fragments bearing scales. Across the seven towns, water spirits are crawling out through mirrors and phone screens, searching for someone to take their place.

Zhao Hongyuan’s excavator is still blasting at Panmen Water Gate. He wants the heart of the waterway’s mirror; I want to uncover the wrongful drowning case from 1931. When the last scale bearing the character “Li” falls into place, the figure reflected on the water is not me, but Su Yueniang in an indigo opera costume. “When the mirror shatters into seven pieces, the cycle begins again. As long as greed endures, water demons will never disappear.”

So this was never about finding a mirror. The waterways of Lake Tai are searching for their next guardian, and my name was written on the last page of the Waterway Sutra long ago.