The Broken Qin That Settles the Soul

Zhou Tong is the town's qin-maker; he learned the craft from his father.

His father died young, leaving a room full of paulownia wood, raw lacquer, and half a qin unfinished. Zhou Tong is a quiet man who speaks little and spends his days with his head bent over filling the ash-base, lacquering, stringing—as if talking to the wood. Townsfolk say he carries something in his heart: three years ago his wife died in a hard labor, the child lost too, and since then he has not slept soundly, waking at the slightest sound with an empty ache in his chest, as if some place in him was never filled.

That spring, a grave was moved on the west hill, and an old coffin from the Qianlong reign was opened. Buried with the dead was a qin, one string broken, the paulownia darkened by seepage, but of fine, correct make—placed there by someone who knew. The descendant, finding it unlucky, brought it to Zhou Tong to "deal with." Zhou Tong looked at it once and, as if bewitched, kept it, saying "let me try to repair it."

For the first few nights, nothing.

On the seventh night, bent over an oil lamp filling a new qin's ash-base, he suddenly heard sound from the inner room—a qin. The broken string was silent; the other six sounded, very slow, in an old tune he knew, the Soul-Settling. The plane fell from his hand; every hair stood. He was alone in the house; the qin hung on a wooden peg on the west wall, no one touching the strings.

He gripped the plane and went in, stood before it. The body trembled faintly; at the break, a bead of light like water welled, and the sound seeped from there, not struck but hummed by the wood itself.

He should have been afraid. Yet the moment the tune entered his ear, the place empty for three years in his chest was gently filled. His tight shoulders loosened, the tangled thoughts quieted, and he leaned against the wall and slept soundly—the first time in three years without dreaming of his wife standing bloody at the foot of the bed.

In the nights after, the qin played on schedule. Zhou Tong sat under it like a man addicted, a low stool each night. Once, listening past midnight, he suddenly found himself kneeling before the qin without knowing when, his face against the cold wood, his tears spreading the dark red at the break. He tried to rise, but his legs were slack, as if his soul had been pinned to the floor by the tune. When Xiaoman came knocking with shoe patterns, he answered only after a long while, and opening the door his eyes were empty, not recognizing her until she had asked three times.

The more he listened, the calmer he grew; he ate, he slept, even the dull grief of his lost child faded. The neighbor girl Xiaoman came to deliver shoe patterns and was glad to see him thriving—until one day, through the window, she saw him sitting under the qin, eyes open but soul drawn out, a smile on his lips, not blinking for a long while.

Suspicious, she slipped into the inner room while he was out and touched the qin. She snatched her hand back—the wood was cold, painfully cold, and from the break seeped not water but something dark red, like dried blood re-wetted. She turned the qin over; on the base was a line of small characters: "Your servant Wang, dead in childbirth, soul unsettled, buried with this qin to calm it."

Then she understood: the qin was buried to settle the restless soul of Wang, dead in labor. Now, playing the Soul-Settling in the living world, it settles not the dead but the living—drawing the living man's soul inch by inch into that grave to fill Wang's lack. Zhou Tong listened unblinking because his soul was being quietly invited away.

Xiaoman seized the qin and smashed the break with a stone. The strings snapped, the body split, and from it fell half a faded red cord and a small silver lock—such as a baby wears.

That night the wind was fierce. Zhou Tong came back, saw the qin in pieces, stood a long moment without tears, then crouched and gathered the splinters into his arms, like gathering his own child.

After that no one in town heard the qin again. But Xiaoman says that on the nights of the third and seventeenth of each month she still hears, from Zhou Tong's room, the Soul-Settling tune hummed—very soft, very slow—not the qin, but him.

The Midnight Record: a soul settled for the dead will settle the living first; but once the soul is settled, the man is not far behind.