All Posts
Filter by keyword, tag, and category.
Camera 3, Hua'an Mall
In Hua'an Mall, Yunqiao City, night guard Zhou worked twelve years of night shifts. Starting from his third year, every night at 2:07 AM, Camera 3 would show a figure that shouldn't exist — standing in the vacant corridor of the mall's third floor. There is no third floor. The third floor is a lie.
The Temple
A truck driver stranded by snow takes shelter in a half-abandoned mountain temple where his late mother once prayed. Through the night the wooden fish taps on its own, bare footprints appear in the ash, and the incense burns down though no one lit it. A quiet, lingering horror of those who can neither leave nor return.
The Shrine
In the mountain village of Shixi stands a ruined roadside shrine to the local earth god, abandoned twenty years. After retiring, old Zhou returns and begins cleaning it, only to find fresh incense ash night after night, a child's bare footprints in the dust, and a sweet earthly rot in the air. He comes to see the shrine is not being worshipped — it is waiting.
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 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 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 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 Tanner
On Riverside Street, old tanner Yan keeps one hide apart — soft as memory, marked with a child's palm. When his young helper hears the stretching frame creak at night, she follows the scent of river stone and incense to a town secret the river has kept. A quiet horror about what leather remembers, and who is given leave to go.