After offering incense, the two shinu did not leave as swiftly as usual. They respectfully bowed toward the foremost divine altar and said, “Clan Deity, the divine-birth month is approaching. Recently, nine newborn children in the clan have qualified to receive your blessing.”
Hiding behind the Clan Deity and folding paper flowers, Luo Yuan suddenly froze. Divine-birth month? She had never heard such a thing. And that newborn blessing… it reminded her of the gossip she had overheard earlier; it seemed to be some kind of ritual.
The Clan Deity’s voice was gentle. “According to custom, have them come here on the second day of the divine-birth month.”
“Yes.”
After the two shinu left, Luo Yuan came out from her hiding place and glanced at the pale gray sky outside. She had already been here for a month; when she arrived it was late autumn, and now winter had begun, the weather growing colder and colder.
When she turned around, she saw the Clan Deity watching her, as if waiting for her to ask something. Luo Yuan hadn’t planned to ask any questions, but under that gaze, she tried asking, “The divine-birth month you mentioned just now, does it refer to the time the Clan Deity was born? Why is it a divine-birth month instead of a divine-birth day?”
She recalled those common festivals; generally, deities and Buddhas in legends all had birthdays, but they were always a single day.
“Because the Clan Deity’s birth requires an entire month,” the Clan Deity answered slowly.
Luo Yuan suddenly felt a strange, indescribable unease, yet didn’t know where it came from. “You… where does the Clan Deity originate from? From between heaven and earth?”
The Clan Deity smiled. “The Clan Deity is born from among humans.”
Luo Yuan didn’t quite understand, but she wasn’t the type to insist on getting to the bottom of everything, so she let it go. In her impression, the birthdays of deities were days when temples held ceremonies; she originally thought that during this divine-birth month, this old estate would become more festive than usual, but things were not quite as she imagined.
All the red lanterns outside the courtyard were replaced with white ones. Everyone walking in the outer courtyard—men and women alike—wore black clothing and white flowers. Even the usual private laughter and chatter had vanished. Although people still came and went throughout the courtyards, the entire place was shrouded in a solemn, deathly stillness.
The curtains and drapes of the shrine were changed to black; when they fell down, the inside of the shrine grew dim. After offering incense, the shinu burned paper outside the courtyard—yellow paper covered with red abstract patterns. As they burned the paper, they recited incomprehensible prayers.
Such actions easily reminded one of worshipping the dead.
Luo Yuan wandered the secluded paths of the outer courtyard like an invisible ghost and heard two young girls from the nearby bathhouse whispering as they walked.
“Every time it becomes the ‘ghost month,’ I get scared. It’s like this estate suddenly comes alive… then dies again.”
“Don’t say it like that! And the shinu forbid us from saying ‘ghost month’—we’re supposed to say ‘divine-birth month.’ If they hear you, you’ll be punished again!”
Ghost month? According to the customs she knew, ghost month referred to the seventh month, because of the Zhongyuan Festival, a day for honoring ancestors and delivering wandering souls. But nowadays most people no longer cared about such things. Was their ghost month different from the common meaning?
At dusk, the shrine courtyard closed earlier than usual. From outside came the sound of music. She didn’t know what instrument it was, and it was mixed with the soft jingling of bells, making one feel distant serenity, accompanied by a faint chanting voice—like a lullaby.
Luo Yuan slept and woke again, but everything around her was still pitch-black. She lifted the curtain and looked outside; dawn had not yet come. The music and chanting she heard before falling asleep had not stopped, though now they sounded far, far away, only a faint trace remaining.
Suddenly, she sensed something was wrong and turned to look toward the inner shrine.
The Clan Deity, who normally sat at the deepest part of the shrine, was nowhere to be seen. The narrow space was filled with countless red threads. Luo Yuan scrambled up in shock and crept toward the outermost layer, calling softly, “Clan Deity?”
“What has happened to you?”
A white sleeve extended out from the red threads, a porcelain-white hand dangling weakly as it beckoned to her.
Luo Yuan walked over carefully and reached out with both hands to hold the drooping hand before her. A chill met her touch, as if she were holding a hand molded from ceramic.
Suddenly—
That hand dissolved in her palms, collapsing into a mass of tangled red threads and slipping through her fingers.
Luo Yuan was startled, and she couldn’t help but stand up. In that split second, she discovered that all the light around her dimmed, and she inexplicably arrived at a strange place. In the boundless emptiness of darkness, her breathing and footsteps echoed loudly. The only thing emitting a faint glow was an old, simple divine platform, upon which sat a life-sized porcelain statue.
The statue was wrapped all over with dense red threads. On its face was the Clan Deity’s familiar smiling expression, yet a crack ran across the head of the porcelain statue, splitting that smiling face right down the middle.
The statue smiled at her, but from within the cracked smile came a deep, echoing sigh.
—So painful.
—Painful.
Luo Yuan abruptly opened her eyes. Daylight was already bright. The sound of the courtyard doors opening made her instinctively get up to hide behind the Clan Deity. Only when she ran to the innermost part of the shrine did she suddenly jolt awake, snapping out of her dazed state.
Was that just a dream?
Just like in the dream, a white sleeve extended before her, revealing a porcelain-white hand. Its owner looked at her with the same gentle smile as always. “Come quickly.”
Luo Yuan stopped thinking about that eerie dream and hid behind him again.
This was the second day of the divine-birth month. As previously mentioned, the shinu brought nine infants. These babies were asleep, carried in by their family members and placed inside the shrine, laid in a row upon white brocade cushions.
Those men and women dressed in black dresses or suits were all well-kept and dignified in appearance. Yet without exception, every one of them treated the Clan Deity with humble reverence. They didn’t dare say a single word to him. After bowing and kowtowing, they left the courtyard under the guidance of the shinu.
They would return at dusk to retrieve their children. Before then, these children would receive the Clan Deity’s blessing.
This process had always been a secret, never witnessed even by the shinu. But Luo Yuan, in her muddled confusion, saw the entire thing as an outsider.
In truth, the process wasn’t complicated. The Clan Deity simply brushed a hand across each child’s forehead, then pulled out red threads one by one from his sleeve, loosely looping them around each child’s neck.
Though not complicated, it was a bit frightening. The red threads wriggled slowly and merged into the children’s necks, leaving behind faint red marks. Luo Yuan stared wide-eyed at the scene, inexplicably feeling her own neck tightening.
To her, this should have been very uncomfortable. Yet all nine children remained sound asleep without reacting at all. So for them, this “blessing” was probably painless.
Just as she thought this, one child suddenly moved, scrunching her nose and letting out a small cry.
“Ah… this one woke up.” Luo Yuan looked toward the Clan Deity at the platform.
The Clan Deity smiled. “Awakening during the blessing means this child has good talent and sharp sensitivity.”
His praise did not stop the few-months-old baby from crying. Her wails grew louder and louder—truly noisy now. At this volume, those outside should be able to hear her, but no one came in to comfort the child. Listening to the baby cry at the top of her lungs, Luo Yuan worried she might hurt herself from crying so hard. She kept glancing at the Clan Deity, who only smiled at her each time, completely unbothered.
Following her habits from the past month, Luo Yuan tentatively asked, “Should I… comfort her?”
The Clan Deity nodded. Luo Yuan even wondered whether he had been waiting for her to say that.
A young woman in her twenties who had never cared for an infant, Luo Yuan carefully picked up the swaddled child and gently rocked her. It did help—a little. The baby’s cries quieted a bit. Encouraged, Luo Yuan tried harder, pacing around the shrine with the child. Because the shrine was small, she could only circle around the Clan Deity again and again.
When the baby finally stopped crying, the Clan Deity said with a smile, “How terribly noisy.”
The infant’s eyes were bright and black. When Luo Yuan carried her close, those large eyes reflected the Clan Deity’s figure. Almost the moment he finished speaking, the previously calmed child let out another wail.
Luo Yuan remained patient—perhaps due to raising her younger sister in the past. She soothed the child once more. Just as she was about to put the baby back, the Clan Deity said, “Children truly are noisy.”
Instinctively lowering her head to look, she indeed saw the baby’s mouth tremble as she was about to cry again. Luo Yuan quickly picked her up once more, patting the baby’s back and shoulder. “Good, good, good, don’t cry, don’t cry, not noisy at all.”
Was the Clan Deity like a lonely elder who felt desolate when ignored, or like a youth who occasionally wanted to act mischievous?
Luo Yuan found herself often pondering this question lately. Her impression of the Clan Deity constantly shifted back and forth between those two images.
Although there had been a small interruption in the middle, by dusk the Clan Deity’s bestowal of blessings successfully ended. The nine children were taken away by their families, and the courtyard once again returned to silence.
Every day once the courtyard gate closed, Luo Yuan could move freely within it, because at night none of them dared enter this shrine courtyard. The same music that had played through the previous night began again. Lying on the warm floor of the shrine, Luo Yuan drifted into a dazed sleep.
It was the same dream she had the night before. She dreamt of the Clan Deity upon the shrine’s divine platform, his body unraveling into red threads, his white clothing melting like candle wax, flowing and becoming a heap of strange material.
Whenever she approached, she would be brought into that darkness and see the porcelain statue atop the divine platform slowly crack open from the top of its head. From the dark fissure seeped a faint, deep sound, like something rising from the depths underground. The endlessly repeating murmurs echoed in her mind, as though her consciousness were being ceaselessly gnawed and tainted.
She woke drenched in cold sweat. Placing a hand over her rapidly beating heart, she walked to the divine platform, knelt on a brocade cushion, pressed her palms together in a standard posture of praying to a deity, and said, “Clan Deity, I’ve had similar dreams for two days in a row. I don’t know if they have any special meaning.”
The curtain was lifted by the wind; amidst shifting light, the god on the divine platform—who had seemed no more than a statue—suddenly appeared to come alive. Looking down at her from above, he smiled faintly and said, “How do you know those are dreams?”
Luo Yuan froze. “It wasn’t a dream? That was something I saw when I was half-asleep at night?”
She let out a breath. “As long as it’s not a dream.” She seemed relieved.
The Clan Deity smiled for a while, then sighed with slight regret. “You don’t seem afraid?”
Luo Yuan said, “If I know it’s something happening in reality, not an unknown dream, then I’m not as scared.” Mainly… if the strange thing was the Clan Deity, it somehow felt less frightening.
The Clan Deity warned, “It will happen again tonight, and throughout this month.”
Luo Yuan: “Alright.”
Sure enough, that night she saw the same scene again. She couldn’t quite tell whether it was a dream or reality, but since the Clan Deity had said it wasn’t a dream, she would assume it wasn’t.
The cracked porcelain statue stood upon the divine platform in the darkness, still murmuring from the fissure. The previous two nights, Luo Yuan hadn’t dared do anything. But after asking the Clan Deity today, her courage grew slightly; she thought perhaps she could take a closer look.
Standing on tiptoe to peer into the crack, she asked inside, “Is that you, Clan Deity? Why do you say it hurts?”
The numb, unchanging voice within the crack paused for a moment, then abruptly turned chaotic—countless identical voices in identical tones overlapping and echoing.
