# The Nuo Rites of Min Town: Paper Figures and River Lanterns
Searching for my missing cousin, I venture into an ancient tulou town deep in the mountains of Min. The Ghost Festival is just around the corner. On a rainy night, a rank-smelling strand of hair snakes out from beneath my inn bed. In an alley, paper effigies of young boys move on their own inside a funeral-paper shop. River lanterns drift across the water, each bearing a young girl's face... One eerie event follows another. The townspeople call it the River God's Wedding, but it is actually a conspiracy by the Lin clan to sacrifice girls year after year, feeding their offerings to the egg of the Cthulhu kin, the Mother of the Deep Pool.
The feng shui master's compass always points to an underground dragon-boat shed. Blood-colored moss that corrodes wood seeps through its foundation, and a hidden compartment beneath a boat conceals a sacrificial doll embedded with real human bones. My cousin's silver ring is unmistakably on the seventh doll. As cognitive contamination closes in, I see residents' shadows trailing black, viscous slime, and hear inhuman gasps mixed into the Nuo opera's singing. My sanity teeters on the brink of collapse.
From the ancient town to the City God temple in the county seat and the Mazu temple in the fishing village, a crisis involving sacrifices across all three domains gradually emerges. Uncle Chen, the feng shui master, dons a Nuo opera mask to fight the kin. Daoist Ma burns talismans to protect the boundaries between domains. Granny Hai gives her life to pass on the Sea-Calming Needle. Together, we form an exorcism team to fight the transformed. When countless human faces pulse across a colossal flesh egg in the sea eye beneath the lighthouse, I clutch the boundary talisman fused with tokens from all three domains. Piercing the core only briefly halts the sacrifice of the entire region.
Yet the black slime left behind by the mother nest still seeps into the soil. A fragment of a Nuo opera mask in an anonymous letter, alongside the words “You are the next sacrifice,” shows that the shadow of the Mother of the Deep Pool has never truly faded.
