As Grandpa breathed his last, he clutched my wrist and roared, “The Locust God is choosing a new sacrifice!” The bronze lock around my neck suddenly grew hot, and blood-red locust roots pushed out through its keyhole. It was his “keepsake” for me, and also a “death warrant” for Locust Coffin Village.
The locust roots at the Three-Arched Bridge coil around your ankles. When the eyeless paper lanterns light the way, they grow more and more human-looking. The hemp paper the old man in blue gave me lists three deadly rules: look in a mirror at the hour of the Dog and you’ll see a cracked face grinning at you; if you don’t hide in a wardrobe when the gong sounds, your “skin will be hooked off”; touch the red-cloth offering and locust petals will stick to you and make you bleed.
But the rules aren’t the scariest part. The secret Grandpa hid in his diary is: twenty years ago, while retrieving a corpse from the water, he secretly saved a baby girl who was meant to be fed to the Locust God. Now the Locust God has come to collect its debt, swallowing one person every year on the baby’s birthday. The lantern bearer has a peachwood talisman driven into his chest, a hundred locust-wood coffins drift beneath the bridge, and every locust petal in the village chief’s “calming soup” has a “ghost eye” turned upward.
Clutching half of a bronze mirror engraved with “See the locust tree, and do not bury,” I hide in a wardrobe. Suddenly, the locust-leaf pattern on my shroud’s hem begins to glow. That’s when I understand: the bronze lock is a key that suppresses evil, the baby girl has long been living in symbiosis with the locust roots, and the “god” of Locust Coffin Village is actually an evil creature forged from living people a hundred years ago!
As fog spreads across the village, the old locust tree’s branches wrap around the villagers and drag them underground. I have to choose: become a sacrifice and fill the Locust God’s roots, or smash the bronze lock and bury this man-eating village, along with its thousand-year-old taboo, in the fog?
