The Copper Bell Won’t Ring

When the bronze bells ring, a hundred ghosts retreat. When they fall silent, the mountain lord comes to collect his debt.

To save my missing younger brother, I entered Bronze Bell Village, cut off from the outside world. Everyone here wears a bronze bell around their wrist. When the bells ring, the things lurking in the shadows draw back. But ever since I put on my first bell, it has never rung again. My brother was found, but something inside his body was ripening. With the last of his consciousness, he whispered in my ear, “Big brother, it’s inside you now.”

The bronze bells aren’t protective charms. They’re seeds spread by the mountain lord. Each one feeds a fragment inside its wearer. Once the fragment matures, the person is “replaced”: they look just like you, but inside, they’re someone else. My father’s disappearance, my brother’s arrival, even every step I took into the village, had all been written into a contract twenty years ago.