Chapter 5

Chapter 5

I snatched the keys and bolted out of the kitchen.

The house behind me seemed to come alive. The pillars began to warp, and black water seeped from the cracks in the walls. Someone was calling my name from behind, each shout closer than the last.

“Zhou Jiu.”

“Zhou Jiu.”

“Zhou Jiu.”

I remembered that the Ancestral Hall was behind the west wing.

When I was a child, that place was locked year-round, opened only for ancestral sacrifices during festivals. The adults said children had unstable yang energy and couldn’t enter the Ancestral Hall, or else the ancestors would remember their faces.

As I shoved the key into the keyhole, the lock turned on its own.

The door swung open.

There were no spirit tablets inside the Ancestral Hall.

Instead, one wall was covered in black-and-white photographs.

Every single one was a fire scene.

Collapsed gatehouses, charred courtyards, body bags being carried out-and one of me at seven years old, standing in front of the ruins.

I stepped closer and noticed yellow paper stuck beneath the photos.

Written on the yellow paper were horoscopes, birth dates, times of death, and a term I had never seen before.

Life-Replacement Doll.

In the very center lay a thread-bound book. The cover read: Zhou Family Fire-Warding Record.

I flipped it open.

The first page contained words left by the Zhou Family Ancestor.

The Zhou residence in Huailing suppresses a Fire Gate. Every thirty years, the Yin Fire within the gate undergoes a Return of the Spirit. A member of the Zhou bloodline must guard the gate. If the guardian dies, the household remains safe; if the guardian flees, the entire clan shall burn together.

The second page recorded events from fifteen years ago.

The year of Jiashen, the ninth day of the seventh lunar month. The Fire Gate opened wide. The Zhou Family was to sacrifice their youngest son, Zhou Jiu, to guard the gate.

I continued reading, my fingers beginning to tremble.

The youngest son, Zhou Jiu, would not stop crying. Lin Guizhi could not bear it and secretly performed the Life-Substitution Technique. Using incense ash, Cinnabar, a Paper Effigy, and umbilical blood, she fashioned a child. Borrowing half of Zhou Jiu’s soul and life, she cast it into the Fire Gate to die in his stead.

The technique was a success; the real could not be distinguished from the fake.

I turned to the final line.

Those who survive the fire must not return to the residence, must not look into mirrors, and must not live past the ninth day of the seventh lunar month. If they return to the residence to test their sleep after fifteen years, the Life-Replacement Doll may reclaim its original life.

Today was exactly the ninth day of the seventh lunar month.

I hadn’t encountered a ghost.

I had returned to the home of my creditor.

The sound of crying drifted from the depths of the Ancestral Hall.

I stuffed the record into my shirt and followed the sound.

Behind a wall was a hidden door, with red light leaking through the cracks. I pushed it open and found a tiny room inside.

A wooden bed sat in the center of the room.

A paper figure lay on the bed.

Half of its face had been burned away, revealing the blackened bamboo strips beneath. It wore tattered hospital scrubs, and a yellow talisman was stuck to its chest.

Written on the talisman was my name.

Zhou Jiu.

The crying was coming from inside the paper figure.

As I approached, the figure’s eyes suddenly snapped open.

They weren’t painted eyes.

They were the eyes of a real person.

“You saw it?” a child’s voice emerged from the paper figure.

“Are you the Life-Replacement Doll?”

“I am you.”

“No, you’re just a paper figure Grandma made.”

The figure’s mouth slowly split open. “If I am a paper figure, why is your name written on the tablet? If you are a living person, why haven’t you had a single dream in the fifteen years since then?”

I froze.

It was true that I rarely dreamed.

To be precise, in the fifteen years following the fire, I had almost no dreams at all. The doctor said it was post-traumatic stress-that my subconscious had blocked out the memories of the fire.

The paper figure continued, “It’s not that you don’t have dreams. Your dreams are all here with me.”

The yellow talisman on its chest spontaneously combusted without any wind.

In an instant, countless images flooded my mind.

Seven-year-old me was being pressed down onto a prayer mat in the Ancestral Hall by Grandma, a dot of Cinnabar on my forehead. Another “me” lay beside me, its paper-pasted face not yet dry.

Grandma cut my finger and dabbed the blood onto the paper figure’s brow.

She wept as she said, “Little Jiu, Grandma is borrowing a bit of your life. I’ll give it back once tonight is over.”

When the great fire broke out, my father scooped up the child who looked like me and rushed toward the courtyard gate.

But the gate wouldn’t open.

There was a black hole within the fire, and countless hands reached out from it.

The paper figure stood up.

It walked through the flames and into the black hole.

The gate opened.

Father rushed out carrying the child.

But right at the threshold, he stopped.

He looked down at the child in his arms.

That child’s face was devoid of tears.

The real Zhou Jiu was still crying back in the fire.