Red Finery on Paper

Yan Yuegui had been dreaming for three months.

In the dream, a suona horn played through the night as red paper filled the sky. He sat in a bridal sedan, carried toward someone whose face he couldn’t make out. The dream always stopped as the curtain was lifted, as if someone were covering his eyes so he couldn’t see the answer.

Then he received a text from a street that didn’t exist, and found an old book deep inside the City God Temple. In its blank spaces, ink crawled like a living thing, writing out another person’s life: Si Lainian, courtesy name Yuegui, born under a lonely star, sent to a Taoist temple at seven. In the heavy mountain snow, he raised a white fox and named it Rushi.

He thought it was nothing more than a strange tale.

Until he opened the door to his home and found a stone-paved lane covered in red paper money outside. At the far end stood someone who had been waiting through the years.

“You’ve already died once,” that person said. “This time, I won’t let you leave again.”

When he opened his eyes, he had become the abandoned infant of the Si family.

He hadn’t come to cultivate immortality. He’d come to find an answer.

He’d come to ask Su Rushi: Who did you marry, Si Lainian or me, Yan Yuegui?

He asked not about immortality, but about the return home.

“Moon returns, moon returns, waiting for you to come home. Carry me back to where I belong, to the window of my home.”