Wedge: The Lost Village
In 1998, it was the fourteenth day of the seventh lunar month, Zi hour.
Yangliu Village at the foot of Xiaoqing Mountain completely disappeared on the eve of the Ghost Festival after strange things happened for three consecutive nights.
It was not a landslide or a subsidence, but a "disappearance" in a literal sense - seventy-two households in the village, the century-old locust tree at the head of the village, the earth temple at the end of the village, and all the chickens, dogs and livestock in the village disappeared overnight. There was only a huge circular pit left on the spot. The walls of the pit were as smooth as a mirror, as if a piece of land had been dug away by some giant spoon.
What's even more weird is that the bottom of the pit is densely covered with spells written upside down, and in the center is an empty coffin as red as blood.
The police comrade from the county walked around the big pit three times and finally lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking so hard that he couldn't press the lighter. Experts from the city came one after another, ranging from geological faults to mass hysteria, from secret relocation to alien abductions. In the end, they all became unsolved cases gathering dust in filing cabinets.
Only on an old pine tree beside the pit that was lucky enough not to be "digged", someone used charcoal to write a few words crookedly:
"Three years later, I will collect the body."
The handwriting is scrawled, as if it was left in a hurry. And below this line of words, hung a faded Five Emperors coin, worn with red thread, swaying slightly in the night wind.
