The Yin-Yang Guide

My name is Lin Du, and I'm a fourth-year psychology student at Jiangcheng University.

My first “patient” was a girl who dreamed of the same dead person every night. When she woke, there was a red flower beside her pillow. She said they were nightmares. I tried four kinds of therapy and ran three sets of controlled experiments, then checked the surveillance footage. There was nothing on it. But the flower was fresh, its petals carrying the smell of rust and the sickly sweetness of incense.

Later, in an old archive, I found a line: “A ghost wedding has two betrothal gifts: a red flower and a red thread. The flower is in the living person's hand, and the living person is in the bride's heart.”

This morning, when I woke up, I found a red flower beside my own pillow.

A red thread was tied around its stem. At the other end of the thread, a woman in a red wedding dress stood outside my window, holding it.