There are three things in Shibuya Au that cannot be touched after dark: the half-collapsed ruined temple on Buzhou Ridge, the well under the old locust tree in the east of the village, and the Guixu Pond at the entrance of the village.
The old rule is: when it's dark, if someone calls you in the pond, don't answer.
The Ning family has been in charge of things after dark in the Ao for generations - if someone dies in a house, is haunted by ghosts, or a child loses his soul, the Ning family's door will be the first to knock. But the Ning family never collects money, and the names of the men are always in the dark: Shouye, Xianghui, Xiangwan... His name is Xiangyang, and his mother hopes that he will live under the sun for the rest of his life and not touch the family's "food for all the people in the Ao".
When he was twenty-four and sent back to Sha for the first time, something happened - a young wife who drowned in Guixu Pond returned home in the dark and wanted to take away her nursing baby.
Xiang Yang wanted to send her away, only to realize that the drowned soul in Guixu Pond could not be sent away at all.
Underneath the strange things that happened in the lonely countryside, the Ning family guard was never a ghost. It's those two things pressing down under the col...
These are all true. I extracted each sentence from the mouths of the old people who were still alive, from the few nights before my grandma died, and from the old account book of the Ning family that no one was allowed to open.
How much you believe is up to you.
