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Number Seventy-Three
For thirty-one years Old Qin has kept the paupers' burial ground in the Qingstone Hollow, sweeping paths and righting fallen steles. One plot, Number Seventy-Three, was meant to be empty — a marker for the nameless drowned. Yet each dawn its earth is freshly smoothed, as if tended at night by small, unseen hands. Qin leaves a bowl of rice and asks no questions: some griefs ought not be disturbed.
The Shouzhuo Brush Shop
In Yanxi Town, brush-maker Han Shouzhuo is asked to craft a brush from a grieving widower's 'dead wife's hair.' His hands read the truth the man's words hide, and a single grey strand of his own becomes the mark that unmasks a murder.
The Tofu He Left in the Rain
Shen Mao, a stubborn tofu maker on Locust Lane, finds a square gone from his slab every rainy night, only to float back in the slop bucket bearing a child's handprint. Keeping watch, he sees a small blue-white hand press into the curd and recalls the mute boy drowned in the sealed well that still feeds his yard. Now he leaves one extra square each wet night, dims the lamp, and says nothing.
The Weaver's Indigo Cloth
In the west lane of Linhe Town, the weaver Shen Arneng takes a job weaving an indigo bolt for a boatman who supplies his own warp. Hidden in the grey thread she finds a length of crimson silk. Following it, she uncovers the truth behind a bride who "drowned" a year before — a truth kept not in the river but in people's hearts. The cloth is finished, the red thread set back in place, hiding a woman's chosen path and a quiet reunion no one will ever name.
The Cattail Basket
By the Qingping ferry lives Gou the basket-maker, who weaves cattail baskets and keeps a hard rule: he will not weave for the bloody, the hiding, or the unknown. After a flood leaves a drowned woman unclaimed, she comes each night to beg a small basket to hold the child the river took. He weaves it on one condition. What he learns about his own craft, and the river's uncounted dead, settles into a quiet dread.
The Ladle Into the River
Old Gou, the last brewer in a riverside town, still keeps the sweet mash he brewed for his late wife, its seal unbroken. Each midnight the clay loosens and pale foam rises into a human shape; a grey-clad youth fetches wine 'for my late father.' Gou follows him to the derelict dock and watches him pour it into the river, where drowned patron Cripple Zhou still waits for one last sip. Now Gou pours a ladle of new brew into the water every new and full moon, never lifting that lid again.
The Man Who Stopped Coming for Wine
Granny Zhou is the third-generation brewer of a small-town winery and keeps every customer in her head. When her quiet regular Old Shen suddenly stops his daily visit and word spreads that he has gone south to relatives, her memory says otherwise: he has no family left and had spoken of saving a jar for his own grave. She investigates without knocking and finds a man who chose to vanish rather than die in debt.
The Silk Beneath the Hog's Skin
Tu Jiu, a hog-butcher of Shahe Town, finds a scrap of silk embroidered with "Ji Sheng Hall" hidden under a slaughtered hog's skin - the mark of an apothecary that burned with its family three years before, no bodies found. Reading the weight, the calluses, and the old coins, he pieces together why the surviving son has returned, then gives the formula back and keeps his silence. A quiet tale of butchery, old debts, and what a man leaves unsaid.