Mourner

I was born with facial paralysis, 23 years old, and the last mourner in western Hunan. There is a "mortal thread" in the throat of a dead person - an obsession formed by the last breath of his life. I can see it and I can cry it out. Only when the thread comes out can the deceased be buried. The price is that I have to inherit the most painful memory, and my own memory will be squeezed into the depths and become increasingly blurry. I have been doing this job for three years, and my mind is filled with the despair of others before they died - forty-three. The old blind woman said that one person can hold up to a hundred. Once it is full, it will be gone by itself. I'm afraid that one day I will wake up and forget what my mother looked like - she entered Duanlong Mountain when I was 7 years old and never came out again. Broken Dragon Mountain is about to collapse. Hidden in the heart of the mountain is A Xiangpo, a brocade weaver who was burned to death fifty years ago. Her mortal threads are stuck in the throats of all the dead, like fuses, waiting for me to light them. The old swordsman said that if she leads out the thread, the mountain will be stable. But when I found Axiangpo's remains, the face reflected in the bronze mirror was exactly the same as mine. My mother didn't come out of the mountains twelve years ago. Lao Sidao said something before he died: "Do you think you called Yuanshan because the mountain is outside?" I finally understood that it was not me who was saving the souls of the dead. It's them who, with five hundred years of obsession, are waiting for me to come back. In my memory, there lives a woman who has been waiting for me for five hundred years.