Balazhai

Su Wanqing, a cadre in the provincial capital, received a bizarre case: Poverty alleviation cadre Lu Qingyuan was "possessed" in Balazhai, western Hunan. He jumped out of the window and off a cliff and was handcuffed into the interrogation room. A colorful silk thread was tied around his wrist and he repeatedly chanted the name of a Miao girl. She walked into Balazhai as an investigator, carrying a notebook and the habit of feeling for her pulse. The village greeted her with silence: the thick fog swallowed up the stilted building, the black dog was cornered, the stooped "grass ghost woman" stirred the potion at four in the morning, and a girl named Ayigu stood barefoot under the loquat tree every night and silently opened and closed her lips, saying only two words - "Waiting for you." She opened the diary left by Lu Qingyuan. A young man who had been assigned a life of twenty-four years was here to build canals and roads, and carry sandbags on rainy nights. Uncle Tian pointed at him and said, "You're not leaving either." He was forcibly transferred back, then climbed out of the window and jumped off the cliff - "The pain is bearable, but the days she waited were painful every day." In the mourning hall, the Taoist priest rang the bell to clear the way, the silent man stepped on the red-hot coals with his bare feet in the grain drying field, and the woman beside the ditch shouted her soul for more than ten years. In fear, Su Wanqing learned to sort herbs, add firewood to the stove, held down the child bitten by a snake all night, and said the words she had learned for a long time to Long Yingshan by the ditch - "Hey!" She found herself no longer feeling for a pulse. People outside say that the people in Balazhai are poisonous, and once they get in, they can't get out. That's not a poison. It's the stove fire at four o'clock in the morning, it's the road that took fifty-one years to build, and it's the two words engraved on the drum that have been in place for a hundred years – stay. Once you're in, you can't get out. It's not that you're trapped, but that you've found a place where you want to stay.