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The Teahouse
A man takes over a riverside teahouse and, night after night, finds a cup of tea poured for no one — hot to the touch yet cold in scent, ice forming where no ice should. He chooses not to flee, and learns the room was once a pavilion for the river's drowned. A quiet, lingering horror of hospitality offered to the dead.
The Wheelwright
Old Wei, the last wheelwright in riverside Shuanghe Town, is asked to restore a forty-year-old water wheel from the powerful He family's granary. Dismantling the hub, he finds a child's leather boot and a woman's brass hairpin sealed inside — relics of a mother and daughter who vanished without a word decades ago. A quiet, realistic suspense about what a wheel can be made to hide, and what it can no longer keep.
The Salt-Maker
The last salt-maker at the Beizao pans reopens an old well sealed for forty years. At night the brine crystallizes into a hunched human shape; beneath the crust there are no bones, only salt growing an old keeper slowly back. He keeps the secret, pours the salt home, and listens each night—until the salt wind on his face tastes like a single tear.
The Mat-Weaver
Old Zhou, a mat-weaver by the river, refreshes an old reed mat and finds silver bangles and a lock of black hair sewn inside. He recognizes the weave as his own work for the long-vanished Huang family, yet the woman who brought it claims her mother was an outsider named Shen. The two characters inside the bangle — a silversmith's mark — he never speaks aloud. Some knots, once undone, come apart entirely.
The Well-Digger
A young hired hand follows veteran well-digger Old Yin to a mountain village to sink a new well for a widow. As the shaft deepens, a child's shoe and a rotted bucket surface from the earth, and a sound like wet cloth wrung in the dark rises from below. Old Yin knows what the ground was made to forget - and what water, given time, will always find its way back to.
The Roofer
An aged roofer, called to mend a leaking old house, finds a cloth tiger and a few newer tiles hidden beneath the eaves — clues to a daughter the family never spoke of. A quiet, realistic tale of what a person will hide above their own head, and the sorry they dare only say to the roof.
The Miller
An empty mountain mill, a great-uncle taken by the wheel, and a man who returns to stop it — only to find the wooden wheel turning at night with no water in the race, and a child's small shoe pressed beneath the stone. He buries what he finds; the wheel, it seems, has not finished turning.
The Candle-Maker
Old Shen, a candle-maker at the lane's end, waits each third day of the month for a quiet girl who buys plain white candles, saying they are for her mother who fears the dark. Then her brother comes asking after her: their old home burned three years ago, and their mother died in it. One rainy night Shen follows her and finds her lighting a candle on the scorched earth, speaking to someone who is not there. Should a soul who keeps a lamp for the dead each midnight be stopped?