Banyan Roots Entwined Around the Moon

In Wuyin Town, on the Yunnan border, countless secrets lie hidden among the aerial roots of a thousand-year-old banyan tree. Twelve-year-old A Ying has always felt that the sticky sap inside its hollow trunk carries more than the scent of herbs. There is an old smell of blood in it, like the tale the town’s elders tell of the “massacre on the thirtieth night of the twelfth lunar month.” Whenever the moon is full, the mountain songs drifting from the Dragon-Locking Cave creep into people’s bones.

The day a black donkey named Ink Hoof pawed at the earth facing the deep mountains, A Ying found half a scrap of cloth embroidered with camellias beneath the banyan’s roots. After that came the bloodstained wooden chest of a caravan, a recording cylinder in a night bird’s nest, a tamed leopard, and a flower snake that could heal wounds with resurrection grass. More and more strange events dragged the “wealth-guarding ghost,” “poisonous insects,” and “tree demon” of local legend into reality.

When her grandfather pressed a pine-branch carving engraved with the mechanism of the Dragon-Locking Cave into her hands on his deathbed, A Ying finally understood: the banyan’s roots entwined not only around one another, but around the hatred buried by three generations. The “monsters” in the legends were never beasts. They were the greed and prejudice in people’s hearts. And the “Crescent” jade pendant at her throat had long been destined to become the blade that would cut open the truth. After all, bones entangled in banyan roots for thirty years deserve to see the light.

This is a story of the hidden realms of southern Yunnan, ethnic legends, and the struggle of human nature. When the mountain songs sound again, will you dare to follow A Ying into the banyan’s hollow and uncover the tooth marks time has gnawed into the past?