My name is written in the ledger beneath my floorboards, near the bottom of a fading page.
It sits under a column labeled Years Kept, my age rendered in my grandmother’s ink. Beneath it lies Years Given—names beside numbers that were never meant to belong to me. Our family can borrow life through this book, though we are strictly capped at one hundred years.
But this story isn’t about my stolen time. It’s about my best friend, Adrian Leong, and the curse his family had carried for generations.
The night Adrian sat across from me and confessed the horrors of his own family affliction, the shadows in the room behaved strangely.
Instead of stretching across the walls, the darkness cast by the altar lamp began to warp. It seemed to sink into the floorboards. My grandmother used to warn me that when the shadows drown like that, something beneath the house is listening.
As the darkness vanished into the wood, the planks beneath the altar dipped slightly, groaning as if settling over hollow ground.
I stared at the warped boards, an uneasy feeling settling in my chest.
“This district used to be farmland, didn’t it?”
Adrian looked down at the floorboards, his eyes dark with the weight of his own unseen burden. “Yeah,” he replied. “Most of this district was built over old irrigation canals.”
He gave a small, uneasy shrug. “Some of those canals still run under the streets. They just built right over them. It’s probably nothing.”
He thought the danger was just the unstable ground.
But when the floorboards groaned again, I understood that the ledger beneath us was no longer the only thing in the house that was hungry.
The Leong Family Records
Adrian had arrived carrying a folder of copied family records. He spread them across my dining table, pressing the curling pages flat with both hands.
Births. Marriages. Deaths. Generations of the Leong family stretching back more than a century.
At first, everything looked ordinary. Old family trees naturally spread into wide, complicated branches.
But Adrian had circled certain names in red ink. Every one of them died at the same age.
Thirty-two.
Different decades. Different causes of death—sudden illnesses, freak accidents, unexplained heart failure. But always the exact same number.
He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face, his skin looking bloodless under the dining light.
“I thought it was a coincidence at first,” he said quietly. “A weird statistical anomaly. But my thirty-second birthday is next month, and last week, I started dreaming about a clock with no hands. Every night, the ticking gets louder.”
He pulled another stack of documents from the folder—coroners’ reports he should never have been able to obtain.
“It’s not just that they die,” Adrian whispered, his voice trembling. “Every report records the same finding. By the time they died, their bone marrow had turned to ash. Whatever this is, it’s coming for me next.”
The Shrinking Bloodline
Then he handed me another sheet—a chart he had drawn himself. It traced the Leong family across nine generations, and the geometry of it was terrifying.
The early branches were crowded and heavy with life. Seven children in the first generation. Twelve grandchildren. Fifteen descendants in the next. The family was thriving, its roots spreading wide.
Then, the numbers began to shrink.
Fifteen became twelve. Twelve became ten. Ten became seven.
It wasn’t a natural thinning; it looked like something was systematically pruning them. Seven became four. Four became two.
Adrian tapped the final, solitary branch at the very bottom of the page. Only one name remained.
Adrian Leong.
He stared at his own name for a long moment, the silence in the room growing heavy.
It looked less like random death and more like the correction of some ancient mistake. Whatever the curse was, it seemed determined to erase the entire line.
“My parents used to ask when I would start a family,” he said quietly, his gaze fixed on his name at the end of the final branch.
He let out a short, hollow breath that might have been a laugh, though his eyes remained completely vacant.
“I always told them there was time.”
The Village That Remembered
Our conversation ended there. Adrian told me he intended to visit his family’s ancestral village and search for answers, but he kept postponing the journey.
Three weeks later, Adrian finally travelled to the village where his family had once owned farmland. He called me the evening he arrived, his voice sharp with static and unease.
“The canals are still here,” he said over the line. “But the land feels wrong.”
He explained that a wide patch of farmland beside the main irrigation channels had sunk noticeably lower than the surrounding fields.
It formed a bizarre, unnatural crater where rainwater gathered and stagnated, remaining muddy even when the surrounding fields were bone-dry. The local farmers completely avoided the place.
“No one plants rice there anymore,” Adrian said, the wind howling softly in the background.
Eager for answers, he had spent the afternoon asking around the village square. Finally, one old farmer told him the truth, spitting onto the dirt before gesturing toward the hollow field.
“That ground swallows things,” the man warned.
Later, as Adrian was leaving, another voice—older, softer, and trembling with age—added one more detail from the shadow of a doorway.
“That is where the farmer died long ago. A terrible death.” But the old villager refused to say more.
Sitting in my room, listening to Adrian’s breathing over the phone, my mind raced back to the ledger beneath my floorboards.
I thought of the way my own floor had groaned and dipped when Adrian spoke of his curse. The pieces were beginning to fall into place.
Perhaps Adrian’s curse had recognised the hollow ground beneath my house.
The Execution in the Mud
Adrian called me again the next day, his voice trembling. He had found the truth inside the cracked wall of his crumbling ancestral house. Time had fractured the plaster, revealing a concealed cavity packed with decaying parchment.
The record dated back to the famine years of the nineteenth century.
A tenant farmer named Wei Jian had worked the irrigation fields belonging to Adrian’s ancestors for most of his life. The villagers were told he was executed for stealing grain from the estate’s storehouses.
But that was a lie.
Wei Jian hadn’t stolen food; he had stolen ledgers documenting smuggled opium, other illegal cargo, and the bribes paid to officials to keep them silent.
Adrian’s ancestors had grown rich off blood money.
Wei Jian discovered the truth by accident while repairing a collapsed wall, but overseers caught him before he could escape. Because Adrian’s family held absolute authority, the official story went unchallenged.
Under orders from the estate, labourers dragged Wei Jian to the irrigation fields where floodwaters had turned the soil into a swamp. They beat him until his legs shattered, then forced him face-down into the earth, burying him alive.
A witness record claimed the farmer’s hands kept clawing at the mud long after his voice failed, his fingers pushing weakly through the suffocating silt. Before the earth choked the last of his breath away, Wei Jian spat out a final, ragged sentence:
“As I die at thirty-two, so shall your descendants. Branch by branch, your blood will thin until no Leong name remains.”
Wei Jian died at thirty-two, buried in the soil he had spent his life harvesting. More than a century later, his curse had finally reached the last branch of the Leong family.
The Ground Does Not Forget
Reeling from the revelation, Adrian refused to simply wait for death. Time was running out. Adrian later told me that, right after hanging up, he sought out a roadside shrine that had stood near the canals for generations.
There, a wandering monk sat enveloped in the scent of burning incense.
Adrian approached him, expecting little more than village superstition, but out of desperation, he confessed everything about the Leong bloodline. The monk listened in absolute silence.
When Adrian finished, the monk turned his gaze toward the hollow, sunken field beside the canals.
“The ground here does not forget what it swallowed,” he said, his voice as heavy as stones. “Some wrongs sink deeper than memory. Your ancestor buried a man in mud. So, the land will bury his bloodline the same way.”
The monk looked directly into Adrian’s eyes. “Are you the last descendant?”
Adrian nodded, his throat dry.
The monk lowered his eyes, pity settling across his face. “Then the waiting is almost over.”
Those words shattered what little hope Adrian had left. He was the final branch of the Leong bloodline, and the earth had begun collecting its debt.
Something Was Holding Him There
When Adrian came back from the village, he was a hollow shell of the man who had left.
He called me late that night and tried to laugh over the line when he repeated the monk’s grim prophecy, but the sound was completely brittle. “What kind of curse waits a hundred and fifty years just to finish a job?” he muttered.
I could hear his teeth chattering through the receiver. He sounded as if he were freezing from the inside out.
“I keep seeing him,” Adrian whispered, his voice trembling violently. “The farmer, Wei Jian. Every time I close my eyes, I see his face pressed into the wet mud. Trying to breathe. Choking on the earth.”
There was a long pause over the line. I could hear his fingernails scraping against the wood of his desk.
“I thought about leaving the city,” Adrian said, his voice dropping to a jagged whisper. “Packing a bag and running as far away as I can. But something about this place… it’s anchoring me. I can feel it pulling from underneath. I don’t think I can leave this room alive.”
He thought it was only his family’s curse holding him there. He still didn’t know about the ancient ledger hidden beneath the room where we had sat weeks earlier.
What the Ledger Could Not Buy
That was when I finally told him about the ledger.
“If I add your name beneath mine in the family book,” I said quietly into the receiver, “I can place other names under Years Given. Their years will be transferred to you. We can buy you more time.”
Adrian went completely silent. For a long moment, the only sound was the distant hum of static.
“No,” Adrian said softly, his voice remarkably steady. “If my curse is meant to erase the Leong bloodline, stealing someone else’s years won’t change that. And I won’t sacrifice innocent people just to save my own skin.”
He paused, and I heard him let out a slow, heavy breath.
“Some things just don’t belong in your book.”
For the first time since uncovering the truth, Adrian sounded almost calm. He had not accepted death, but he had decided what he would not become to escape it.
But as I hung up and stared down at the floorboards beneath my feet, a cold dread settled deep in my chest.
A familiar pressure stirred at the back of my mind—the same silent warning my grandmother had described whenever the ledger encountered a name it could not claim. It was telling me that Adrian’s years were beyond its reach.
My ledger could borrow and trade all the life it wanted, but it was powerless against a blood debt owed to the earth.
No stolen year could erase what had been buried in that mud. For the first time in generations, our book had encountered a debt it could not collect.
The Ground Opens
On the night of his thirty-second birthday, Adrian called me one last time.
“Listen,” he whispered, his voice buried in a sea of static. “It’s under the house. I can hear it. It’s coming for me now.”
Over the line, I heard the agonizing groan of wood bowing under immense weight. Then, the call cut to dead air.
That night, the storm grew deafening. Shortly after midnight, the earth finally claimed its debt.
People later said the ground beneath the district had been settling for years above the old irrigation canals buried beneath the streets.
Cold, suffocating mud burst upward through Adrian’s broken floorboards, violent and sudden. The walls split with a dry, splintering crack as the foundations gave way. Far beneath the house, something deep in the earth snapped.
Then, the ground dropped. The soil folded inward like a mouth closing, swallowing the structure whole.
By the time rescuers reached the sinkhole, the house was gone. Adrian was buried deep beneath tons of wet, shifting silt and shattered timber. The mud had filled his lungs long before anyone could reach him.
The coroner later found that Adrian’s bone marrow had turned to ash, a finding he could not explain.
He had turned thirty-two less than a day earlier—the same age Wei Jian had been when Adrian’s ancestors forced him into the swamp.
The ancient blood debt was settled—the final branch of the Leong family pruned away. And as I sat in my own quiet room, listening to the rain beat against my windows, I knew that some sins were simply too heavy for any ledger to erase.
Related Stories
Some curses are buried in the earth.
Others wait quietly beneath the floorboards.
The red-thread ledger beneath my house records years taken and years spared — and whoever inherits it must decide whose life keeps the balance.
Inherited Debt Beneath the Ancestral Floorboards
But Adrian Leong’s death did not end with the ground closing over him.
What began at his funeral followed someone else home — and the red packet left near his grave carried a promise the dead had waited too long to claim.
