Number Seventy-Three

Old Qin had kept the burial ground for thirty-one years.

The ground lay hidden behind the Qingstone Hollow, the last resting place for the masterless dead within miles. Seventy-three earthen graves, plus the scattered mounds along the west wall — Qin knew each one. Which was freshly heaped, which stele had split, which slumped whenever it rained: he could count them all with his eyes shut.

He was no superstitious man. He had served as a soldier in his youth and seen death, and living men crueler than the dead. So he tended graves without incense or prayer, doing only three things: clearing the paths, righting the fallen stones, and patting the washed-away earth back into place.

What troubled him was Number Seventy-Three.

An empty grave.

Thirty years earlier, the floods had carried seven bodies down the hollow, none claimed. They were buried together in the ground, and the seventy-third plot was left open, marked by a wordless stone for those whose names had gone with the water. In Qin's ledger, that slot held a single character: empty.

Yet the empty grave was not empty.

He first noticed on a frosted morning. Making his round, he stopped short before Number Seventy-Three — the earth he had smoothed flat the day before now bore a fresh ridge, the soil damp, as though someone had come in the night to heap it again.

He crouched and pressed the earth with his hand. It was warm, unlike the autumn cold.

The second night he did not sleep. He took his bamboo broom and hid behind the old cypress at the wall's foot. The air was damp; the hollow was so still he could hear his own heartbeat. Near midnight came a faint sound from the west wall — not wind, but the soft, rhythmic patting of earth.

Qin leaned out.

In the moonlight, a small shadow knelt before Number Seventy-Three, gathering the soil with two hands. The hands were tiny, a child's, fingertips smeared with fresh mud.

His throat tightened. He forced out a whisper: "Who is there?"

The shadow flinched and was gone. Only the smoothed wet earth remained, and half a line of his own footprints.

At dawn he returned. The earth held nothing; even the dampness of the night had been dried by the sun. Only at the stele's base lingered a few shallow prints of mud, small as a sparrow's claw.

Qin was a man of his own counsel. He told no one, and disturbed the village not at all.

He did one thing: each evening he set a coarse clay bowl at the foot of Number Seventy-Three, half-filled with raw rice.

For the first few days the rice stayed. On the seventh night the bowl was empty, the earth flat again. After that the bowl emptied each night, and the earth never ridged.

He never watched to see who took the rice. He had decided that some griefs ought not be witnessed.

Thirty years on, old and stiff-legged, Qin handed the ground to a young man from the village. On the day of the handover he walked the boy around; seventy-two graves passed without remark, but before Number Seventy-Three he paused.

He left one instruction: "This one — ask nothing, dig nothing, leave a bowl of rice."

The boy, puzzled, nodded.

The ground went on as before: paths cleared, steles righted, earth patted flat. Yet at the foot of Number Seventy-Three there is always a coarse clay bowl, half-filled with raw rice — empty each dawn, full each dusk.

Qin never returned to the Qingstone Hollow. He only said once, over wine, that among the seven the flood had carried down, the smallest was a child of four or five, still clutching half a cake.

Then he said no more, and bent to refill the bowl.