Chapter 4

Chapter 4

That was when I learned that my mother had also been to Blackstone Village.

Twenty years ago, she was passing through Qingshan County with a theater troupe when Granny Gui targeted her. She was drugged in the middle of the night and sold into the mountains. Back then, she was also called a Mountain God’s Bride. Just like Ah Ruo and the others, she was sent into a crevice in the mine to wait for death.

But she knew how to run, how to perform, and how to find her way.

She was the first to discover that Blackstone Village didn’t believe in gods at all-they only believed in money.

Ah Ruo said that the ancestors of Blackstone Village used to mine the mountain for saltpeter. Later, a tunnel collapsed, burying over a dozen men alive. From then on, they decided the mountain ‘needed to eat brides’ to stay quiet. In truth, there was no such thing as the Mountain God taking a wife; it was just the village men using old mine shafts and mountain crevices as burial pits, throwing the girls they bought inside.

If they died, it was called a sacrifice.

If they didn’t die right away, men were sent into the mountains to hunt them down, either to be dragged back and sold again or simply beaten to death.

“Wu Shoucai built his fortune on this,” Ah Ruo said. “Every household in the village has taken a share of the silver. Whenever a family is short on money, they help go outside to collect a girl. If a family’s son can’t afford a wife, they pick one from the batch to use for a few days before sending her up the mountain.”

She spoke so calmly that it made my skin crawl.

I had always thought I had been sold to a poor mountain village.

Only now did I realize I had been sold into a pit where women were devoured.

“What about my mother?” I asked.

“She was the only one who truly made it out,” the woman from before said, covering her face as tears fell. “Before she left, she said that one day, someone would return with a lantern and take out all the names buried in this mountain.”

It felt as if something had slammed into my chest.

No wonder my mother wouldn’t let me throw away that lantern even on her deathbed. No wonder she wouldn’t let me forget the lyrics of the Nuo opera, the steps for the Stilts, or the frame for the dragon lanterns. She wasn’t just trying to give me a way to earn a living.

She was afraid she wouldn’t make it back in time, so she was leaving the path for me.

That night, Ah Ruo took me to the deepest part of the cave.

There was a natural stone chamber there, its walls densely carved with names and dates. In the center of the chamber sat a dozen crates filled with items stripped from the village’s brides: silver hairpins, wedding robes, shoes, deeds of sale, half-burnt marriage certificates, and even small bellybands worn by children.

“Those who survived brought back everything they could,” Ah Ruo said. “As for those who died, someone has to remember who they were.”

I knelt down and rummaged through the items one by one.

At the very bottom, I found a damp ledger.

Three words were written on the cover.

Mountain Wedding Ledger.

I opened the first page. It didn’t record wedding gifts or celebratory money, but people.

“Third month of spring, received one Li Family Daughter, seventeen years old, price: eight taels and six mace. Two taels to the Village Head, one tael to Granny Gui, five hundred wen each to the four mountain patrollers…”

I read through the pages, my fingertips trembling more and more violently.

Those girls who were said to have married the Mountain God were, from beginning to end, nothing more than goods with a clear price tag.