Prologue: The Vanished Village
1998, the fourteenth day of the seventh lunar month, midnight.
After three consecutive nights of strange happenings, Yangliu Village at the foot of Xiaoqing Mountain vanished completely on the eve of the Ghost Festival.
It wasn't a landslide or a sinkhole. It had literally vanished, along with the village's seventy-two households, the century-old locust tree at the entrance, the Earth God shrine at the far end, and every chicken, dog, and farm animal. Nothing remained overnight. In their place was a huge, circular pit with walls smooth as a mirror, as though some enormous spoon had scooped out a piece of land.
Even stranger, the bottom of the pit was covered in densely carved talismans, all written backward. At the center sat an empty coffin, bright red as blood.
The police officers from the county walked around the pit three times. At last, one lit a cigarette, his hand shaking so badly he couldn't even work the lighter. Experts from the city came in wave after wave. They offered explanations ranging from geological faults to mass hysteria, from a secret relocation to an alien abduction. In the end, every theory became a dusty unsolved-case file in the archives.
Only on an old pine tree by the pit, which had somehow escaped being "scooped away," had someone scrawled a few words in charcoal:
"Three years from now, I'll come to collect the bodies."
The writing was messy, as if left in a hurry. Hanging beneath it was a faded Five Emperors' coin threaded with red string, swaying gently in the night breeze.
