Seeking 9,999 Caves

My name is Li Wangchuan. When I was five or six, a barefoot doctor treated me and left me deaf and mute. By the year my mother, Liu Miaogu, went missing, I was already in my early twenties. Everyone in the village said she had either run off with someone, fallen into a human trafficker's trap, or jumped into a cave.

Since I had trouble getting around, I was responsible for searching the caves one by one. But after combing through every cave without finding my mother, I instead became a regular in dealing with the supernatural.

After I finished searching the last cave, I went one day to the thin-blade fields where my mother had disappeared. Suddenly, I saw her picking beans there. Then she rose into the air and vanished. At the end, I heard her say, "Chuan, stop looking!"

As luck would have it, that same morning, my father couldn't get out of bed. Even stranger, he clung to life for ten days. Only after my maternal uncle came to see him did he seem to escape the jaws of death: as soon as my uncle had stepped outside, Father struggled to sit up and asked for a smoke. But the moment he put the pipe to his mouth, his head slumped to one side.

Hearing the cries behind him, my uncle turned back to comfort us. But at dinner, he said he felt a tightness in his chest and went home. Less than the time it takes an incense stick to burn, my aunt came rushing over, looking distraught, and shouted to my cousin, "Hurry! Your father..."

The whole village was in an uproar. Everyone said my father had "called" my uncle away.

Because people said the two of them had a grudge over my mother's disappearance.