On the morning when my mother Li Yue disappeared, the fire on the stove was still on, but there were three pairs of bowls and chopsticks strangely placed on the table - my sister and I were the only ones left at home, but there was still a pair of bowls and chopsticks left for my missing mother.
What's even more terrifying is that the night before, I caught my mother looking in the mirror and trying to cut off her own tongue with scissors.
Immediately afterwards, the weak sister Shi Lan suddenly had her hair cut and went down the well. Every time she went up the well, her eyes looked more and more like her mother's, and she even had the unique smell of old mugwort that her mother had when she was alive.
I found a hand-drawn drawing in my mother's old cotton-padded jacket, which circled a "ghost throat" that did not exist on the map. Zhao Manxiang, an old man from the coal washing plant, turned pale when he saw the picture: "Stop checking, that place was closed twenty years ago. That's where your mother saw something she shouldn't have seen."
The women in the mining area seem to keep a covenant and secretly monitor their sister to complete some kind of ritual. Then, a huge gas explosion broke out in the mine. My sister's body was not found in the ruins. I only found a series of barefoot footprints extending deep into the entrance of the "Ghost Throat" - clearly belonging to two women, one in front and one behind.
Ten years later, the mine was abandoned. I received an anonymous letter containing a geological sonar map. At a depth of 800 meters underground that had been sealed for a long time, the detector captured regular knocking sounds.
That's Morse code, which translates to only two words: "Change you."
Intention: Choice? Sacrifice? Redemption? Human nature? Between the earthly and the otherworldly world, the characters challenge their fate while also reflecting on the depths of the human heart.