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The Scapegoat
In a great drought the village 'sends a sacrifice' to end the calamity; the patriarch, with no goat to spare, pushes a nine-year-old beggar boy into Black Dragon Pool in a goat's disguise. After his death the haunting passes to each new master. The heir realizes the debt knows no face, only the chair of power — and sits by the pool to take his turn.
The Bone Flute
Ravine folk turn stray bones into flutes that must be answered, or the white bones come for a living body. As the old answerers die off, A-Yan blows the missing tail-note in a snowbound night and feels a dead hand climb his ankle. In spring only a new white bone flute is found.
The Joy-Matron
A widow who arranges ghost-weddings for the dead is coerced into marrying a living girl to a drowned young master. Opening her red ledger, she finds her own name already written there as the bride. Come spring, she is found seated on the bridal bed, two small coffins side by side.
The Well Rope
Every night the old well's hemp rope lowers itself over the rim, as if waiting for someone to climb up. Its end creeps night by night toward the Shen family who drove a girl into that well thirty years before—until they flee in the night. The one in the well has not left; she only waited for the wrong person.
The Blood Rice
Before the Dragon-Boat Festival, Old Zhou dumps exorcising blood-rice into the well to seal what she thinks is a dirty thing. She has instead sealed Xi Mei, the drowned girl who kept the well sweet for three years. A wronged soul sealed turns fiercer than any demon, and the well begins to scratch at its stone.
The Road Pass
Broke and drunk, Ah Cheng pockets a dead man's road-pass at a mass grave. The paper will not let go; it leads him off the path, across a rotting bridge, to the door of the corpse who issued it. The pass was never for the dead—it was for whoever picked it up.
The Clay Baby
A childless wife steals a clay baby from the Send-Child Goddess temple. Each night it turns warm and becomes an infant that never cries; by dawn it is clay again. She returns it, conceives a real son—yet nightly she hears a second, silent breathing by the cradle, and her own boy stops crying too. The Midnight Record: the goddess's loan is repaid with a living child's voice.
The Longevity Tablet
In the Zhou ancestral hall an unpainted longevity tablet bears a name absent from three centuries of genealogy. Each night blue incense-smoke rises from it as if offered by an unseen hand. The young heir learns his late mother set it for a brother lost before birth—and finds his own name now being inscribed beneath. The Midnight Record: a living name on such a tablet reserves a seat for the dead.