In Phoenix Village, there is a profession called night watcher. Whenever someone in the village dies, the night watcher must sit alone in the deceased’s room on the seventh night after their death and record every unusual occurrence.
Chen Du has been a night watcher for fifteen years. He has kept watch in over a hundred rooms where the dead once lived and recorded thousands of strange occurrences. He thought he had seen everything. Until it was his mother’s turn. She died of stomach cancer. On the seventh night, Chen Du found a note under her pillow. It had only two words: “Don’t investigate.” It was in his mother’s handwriting. She had written it three days earlier. Three days earlier, his mother hadn’t been “sick” yet. He soon discovered three things: the day before she died, his mother had gone to the records room and taken two files; every year, on the same day, she went to town to meet the same person, and she had done so for fifteen years; and the night watchers had a rule that could never be written down: each time you reveal a truth, you lose one sense. Smell, taste, hearing, sight, touch, in that order. They never come back.
Chen Du’s master, Old Qin, kept watch for sixty years without saying a word. He was the most experienced person in the world when it came to “silence.” But Chen Du had no intention of following his example.
Thirty years ago, seven women under the age of twenty-five died in Phoenix Village within a single year. They hadn’t died of illness or by accident. Someone had erased their names from the walls of the records room. His mother’s note pointed to them. Every day during the seven days before her death, she had taken action, paving the way for her son. This was a road from silence to speech. He had already paid the first price. The rest of the way, he would walk mile by mile, paying with one sense at a time.
