The Sunken Web: The Last Gatekeeper

I always thought my folklore professor had sent me to “Shenwang Shoal” just to collect fishing songs on the verge of being lost. That was until I discovered, hidden in a secret compartment in the village ancestral hall, the Observation Notes on Shenwang Shoal, a record spanning centuries and compiled by generations of scholars from our own school.

There were no fishing songs in the notes, only one horrifying, bloody truth after another: “In the eighth year of the Qianlong reign, we observed that the ‘Old Folk’ could perfectly mimic human emotions. The first Gatekeeper sacrificed the entire clan to reset ‘cognition.’” “In the twentieth year of the Daoguang reign, the ‘Gate’ began to loosen. Reflections of stars could be seen across the tidal flats, but they were not stars of this world.” “In 1983, the observation failed. The seventeenth-generation Gatekeeper was… ‘assimilated’ by the observed target.”

Only then did I understand. My family and my school were no scholars. We were Gatekeepers. Shenwang Shoal was no village, either. It was a “gate” situated between the world of reality and some unknowable dimension. And the rites passed down through generations of villagers were no ceremonies. They were a lock. Now, that lock… had rusted. And I was the last person who knew where the key was.