I See Myself on the Epitaph

In 2004, at Tingyu Zhai, an old bookstore in the old city, Shen Yan, an ancient book restorer, received a registered letter that should not exist. The sender's name is Shen Chengzhou. That was his father who had been missing for eighteen years. The envelope was dry, but water was condensing on the outer bag. There is a small lamp pressed on the red wax seal, and there are seven short marks under the lamp. There was no stationery in the letter, only a half-page rubbing of the epitaph that had been burned by fire. Shen Yan used the method of repairing broken monuments to read bit by bit, and found that his name was hidden at the end of the epitaph. Also starting from this night, the old things around him began to look strange. Shadow was three breaths slower than him. The word "water" appears in old notes. The postman who has been dead for many years re-delivers old letters. There are no ancestor names in the deserted village ancestral hall, only a row of blank wooden plaques. Someone down the well asked in his father's voice: "Is the Shen family here?" In order to find out the truth about his father's disappearance, Shen Yan, Bai Lu, a former criminal investigation technician, Lu Linzhou, an old-school grave-goer, Fatty Qi, who talks about running on the train but has an unexpectedly confusing fate, and Xu Zhaowei, a folklorist who knows the Xu family's remnant songs, are gradually involved in the old "Night Light" case. Shiyugou Green Brick Tomb, Qingmen Duyin River Water Palace, Miaoling Bone Tower, Northwest Black City, Sea Lamp Sinking Coffin, Snow Mountain Echo, Imperial Tomb without Stele... The seven tombs correspond to seven lanterns and seven kinds of prices. Names, shadows, bones, sounds, dreams, blood, memories. Everyone thinks that shining a night light can bring back the dead. Later, Shen Yan realized that what it really did was to turn living people into dead people bit by bit. The letter my father left behind was not his last words, but a path that was eighteen years late.