Before he died, my grandfather held my hand and said "I'm sorry."
Thirty years later, a letter came to me. The letter was crumpled and then flattened. Grandpa's handwriting was very sloppy and he only wrote the address of an arcade. He said: Get the requiem bottle back within seven days. Otherwise, the contents inside will come out.
The night I stepped into the arcade, the door closed behind me. A line of pale red words oozed from the floor - Give it back to me. A countdown is engraved on the wall: Day One.
My second master is sealed inside the wall. Thirty years ago, my grandfather built the ashes of his family into the rammed earth wall and made it part of the seal. He asked me: Who did your grandfather say he was sorry to? I said: I thought it was for me. He said: No. He was talking to me.
Su Wanqing held the silver hairpin for ten years. Later, she broke off the hairpin with her own hands and poured out the letter her grandfather had written to her ten years ago from the secret slot: You are the person I invited, not a chess piece of the Zhou family.
An earthen coffin was unearthed in Penang. The inside of the coffin lid is covered with finger scratches, and nail fragments are embedded in the grooves - the people who were sealed inside scratched the coffin until they died. The inscription on the coffin reads: The seal of the thirty-seventh generation of the Zhou family to keep the ruins. Buried in the mud at the bottom of the coffin was half a bronze plaque, engraved with three words: paper seal.
There is a word sewn in the palm of the paper man. The red thread bites into the paper fiber and has been sewn for decades. It is "return".
The Zhou family has guarded the ruins for thirty-seven generations. By my generation, the debt must be paid. Grandpa took away a handful of soil, sealed three doors, and crossed out two names. He thought silence would atone for his sins. But silence did not atone—silence just left all the debt to me.
