Reincarnation in a Dong Village

The Dong Village of Reincarnation

Introduction

Deep in the mountains where Hunan, Guangxi, and Guizhou meet lies a Dong village with the strangest rural secrets in the country. In this settlement of fewer than ten thousand people, more than a hundred villagers claim to remember their previous lives in full. It is known far and wide as the village of reincarnated people. Children can speak as soon as they learn to talk, naming their past lives, how they died, their old homes, and the people they knew. Mothers and children switch roles, old friends reunite, and grudges return in endless cycles, generation after generation, with no one able to explain it.

Lu Sheng, a materialist civil servant assigned to the village, arrives convinced that it is all folk superstition and collective suggestion. But as he investigates, he makes a startling discovery: every fragment of these memories of reincarnation corresponds precisely to people who mysteriously vanished from the village over the decades, accidents described only in vague terms, and old cases deliberately buried.

Wu Niansheng, a local young man, carries memories of three past lives and has spent half his life searching for the truth. Their perspectives span two generations, peeling back the village's mists layer by layer. Reincarnation, repayment for sins in past lives: none of it is supernatural destiny, but a comforting lie concealing a century of enforced silence, secret crimes of vigilante justice, and generations of atonement in this ancient mountain village.

When every memory of a past life is matched to a long-buried murder, a century-spanning cycle in which reincarnation has been used to hide crimes will finally be shattered.