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The Last Order
A delivery rider takes an order to a mountain villa on a stormy night. When he arrives, there is no villa, only a graveyard.
The Net Cure
Fifteen-year-old Adong is sent by his exhausted single mother to a privately run 'internet addiction camp' that promises to cure him in twenty-one days. Behind its banners and certificates, the camp 'corrects' disobedient boys with beatings and electric shocks to the temples. The mother, relieved to receive a silent, obedient son, never learns what was broken. The camp thrives, its director buys a new car, and the whole town looks away.
Codex of the Eight Wildernesses · The Bone-Marsh Bird
By the black mere of Forgotten Bones lives the Bone-Marsh Bird, which feeds on words left unspoken and cries in broken human phrases. The fisher Da heard it carry his dead brother's last unfinished words.
The Cold Ward
A nurse on the night shift hears a call bell ringing from a ward that has been locked for twenty years.
Lao Yan's Needle
Old Yan is the last mortician beyond the North Gate. With warm water, fine needles, and a box of powder he rebuilds ruined faces, and with his eyes alone reads a dead man's whole life from his hands. His iron rule: the wrongfully dead keep their wounds. When the richest man's son tramples a blind tofu seller, he refuses silver to hide the truth, leaving the bruise as the dead man's last plaint.
Codex of the Eight Wildernesses · The Flame-Horn
In the northern burning mountain dwells the Flame-Horn, an ox-shaped beast wreathed in fire whose horn foretells plague and plenty. An old soldier tells how it once strayed to the flatlands and set the crops aflame.
The Guttering Lamp
A cloth trader loses his way in mountain mist and finds a thatched hut with a guttering lamp, where an old woman feeds him porridge. At dawn the hut is gone; only an old grave remains, a lamp still burning before it.
The Green Snake
A shepherd boy spares a green snake from the woodcutter's axe. Years later, when mountain floods sweep him and his mother into the water, the grown snake coils around them and bears them to a tree.