It Heard

When Shen Ye pushed open the door of the ancestral hall in Sanshui Village, he heard a voice. It was not the sound of wind, not the chirping of insects, or the echo caused by his own footsteps on the blue bricks. It was a very low and slow sigh that came from behind the shrine in the deepest part of the ancestral hall, as if someone had been waiting there for a long time, so long that he even forgot how to breathe. He should have turned and run. He is a graduate student in folklore and came to this abandoned mountain village just to write a paper on "paper figures without eyes". But when the clock struck midnight, the paper-figure villagers at the entrance of the village all turned their heads. The sound of the suona to welcome the bride tore through the dead silence. A headless paper bride sat up from the gold-painted black coffin - and he was forced to sit on the Taishi chair, becoming the substitute of the paper bride. The sigh sounded again. This time he heard it clearly—not a sigh, but three words. "You're here." From that day on, Shen Ye found that wherever he went, those old objects that shouldn't speak would speak one after another. The sacred tree in Sanshui Village called his name in the secret room, the old locust tree in Huaishu Village sang a lost lullaby on the twilight of the leap month, the mute tree in Shigu Town counted his heartbeats in silence during the thunderstorm, and the thousand-year-old tree in Ginkgo Village composed a new song for him on the night of frost. Song, the ancient well in Fengming Village echoed "I've been waiting for a long time" when he drank the well water... All the people who shouldn't have spoken spoke to him, and all the voices pointed to the same question - for 8,400 years, they have been listening and waiting. Wait for someone who understands.