The first letter lay open beside the rice bowl. Its red print was already beginning to curl from the damp heat that crept through the apartment every evening. Beside it sat another envelope, followed by another, and then another. Soon, the table no longer looked like a place where a family ate. Instead, it looked like a place where failure had been sorted into neat stacks and left under a single weak light for someone to count.
Mei Xuan sat there without moving, listening to the household sounds that had lately become heavier than they should have been: the uneven turn of the ceiling fan; the soft cough from her mother’s room; the scrape of her younger brother’s chair as he bent over his schoolwork, pretending not to hear them worrying about him. The silence between each of these sounds felt longer than it had any right to. As though the apartment itself had begun to wait with them.
Her mother emerged carrying a cup of plain hot water instead of tea, which meant that they had almost nothing left to spare. She set it down without drinking from it.
“The landlord called again,” she said, not sharply, but with an exhausted flatness that was somehow worse. “I told him one more week.”
Her brother kept his eyes lowered, though his pencil had stopped moving. Mei Xuan looked at the bills, then at the thin gold ring still on her mother’s finger. When her mother said, “I’ll find something,” the words sounded weak even to Mei Xuan because they had been repeated so often that they no longer carried the weight of a promise, only its shape.
The Realization That Came Quietly
That night, after her mother returned to the room and her brother switched off the study lamp to save electricity, Mei Xuan remained at the table with the letters spread out in front of her as though they were a punishment that she had been forced to read in full.
She realised that desperation did not arrive in one dramatic moment, but rather by slow degrees, each one small enough to bear until a person suddenly found herself willing to consider things that she would once have dismissed without a second thought.
Two days later, the suggestion came at a coffee shop near the bus interchange. The air conditioning was too cold, the music too soft, and everything around them looked polished in the way places often do when the people inside them are trying not to show strain.
The Suggestion
Liyun, who had once borrowed money from Mei Xuan and repaid it late along with three apologies, kept turning her paper cup in her hands and watching the door, as though she was afraid of being overheard. However, no one was paying them any attention.
Her lipstick was slightly smudged and her eyes had the tired brightness of someone living on too little sleep and too much hope. When she finally leaned forward, her voice was so quiet that Mei Xuan had to lean in to hear her.
“I heard that there is a woman in the mountains,” Liyun said.
“Not a temple woman, not one of those fake fortune tellers in the market, but an old woman that people go to when their prayers stop working.” Mei Xuan almost laughed, but Liyun’s expression did not change.
“I know how it sounds,” she added.
“I thought the same. But my cousin went to see her when her husband’s debts were threatening to swallow up their entire home, and after that things changed.” Mei Xuan stared at her.
“How did things change?” Liyun swallowed.
“Money came in. Work came back. It wasn’t immediate, but it came.” After a pause that she seemed reluctant to acknowledge, she continued, “You only need to be willing to carry something.”
The Search
That night, Mei Xuan searched until her eyes stung. The blue light from her phone washed over the dark kitchen table, making even familiar objects look strange. With every new page she opened, the world belonged only to old stories expanded into something dense and unpleasantly persistent. Article after article and archive after archive led her towards accounts of Gu Hex (蛊术), not as fantasy, but as a practice whispered about in regions where fear had lived alongside daily life for so long that it had learned to take on local names.
One place surfaced again and again among those scattered mentions: the Miao Highlands (苗疆), where older beliefs had never entirely loosened their hold. There, insects, poisons, hunger, oaths and inheritance were spoken of in the same breath. Though half the pages contradicted one another and the other half blurred ritual into folklore, Mei Xuan kept reading. What mattered was not whether every line was true, but many described the same thing with the same caution.
When she finally put her phone down, she saw that the window behind her had gone from black to an early grey. She told herself that she was not making any decisions yet and that she was only gathering information. However, the thought had already crossed the line from curiosity to intention.
The Decision
By dawn, she had checked train routes, searched for the village that Liyun had sent her to, and counted the cash in her wallet twice. She realised that she had already started moving towards this goal long before she had admitted it to herself.
The journey took most of the day. The farther she travelled from the city, the more the world seemed to withdraw its ordinary assurances: the concrete thinned into wet roads winding along mist-shrouded slopes; the signal on her phone weakened until messages stopped coming through; and the houses grew farther apart and older in that particular way old places often do, as though they had learned not to expect visitors and therefore no longer bothered to make themselves readable to strangers.
By the time she reached the final stage of the journey on foot, following a narrow path bordered by weeds and bamboo that hissed softly in the breeze, the silence around her no longer felt natural, but rather as though it were being selectively applied. She had the strange impression that the land itself was choosing which sounds to allow, because even her own footsteps seemed less distinct than they should have been, being swallowed almost at once by the damp air.
The Old Lady
The old lady’s house was located beyond a low ridge, beneath a crooked persimmon tree. It was neither abandoned nor welcoming; it was held in that unsettling state where everything is maintained just enough to prove that it is still inhabited.
She was sitting outside when Mei Xuan arrived. It seemed as if she knew the exact hour to expect her. What struck Mei Xuan was her stillness.
The old lady studied her for a long moment, her gaze neither welcoming nor curious, but assessing in a way that made Mei Xuan feel as though something unseen had already been weighed and deemed sufficient.
“You’ve come a long way,” she said at last, her voice steady.
Mei Xuan hesitated. “I heard that people come here when nothing else works. I wasn’t sure if it was real.”
The old lady did not respond immediately. Her eyes moved once, briefly, not to Mei Xuan’s face, but to her hands and the way they were clenched together.
“Desperation travels farther than intention,” she said quietly.
The words did not answer anything, yet they settled with the weight of recognition.
The Golden Silkworm Hex
Inside the house, the air smelled faintly of dried roots and old wood. Beneath that, however, lingered something sharper and more animalistic that Mei Xuan could not identify and did not want to ask about.
The old lady brought out a small, black lacquered container with a dull gold line painted around the lid and placed it carefully on the table between them, making Mei Xuan sit up straighter at once.
“People come here for the same reason,” the old lady said after a while.
Her voice was calm, but not patient.
“This is the Golden Silkworm Hex (金蚕蛊),” she said. When Mei Xuan’s breath caught, the old lady continued without showing any sign of satisfaction.
“People who hear the name only think of wealth. It gathers fortune, yes. It attracts opportunity, opens doors and turns luck. But it feeds too.”
Mei Xuan stared at the box. “Feeds? On what?”
The old lady’s gaze moved briefly to her throat, then back to her eyes.
“Anything. Whatever is nearest and easiest to take.”
The rules
When the old lady lifted the lid slightly, Mei Xuan could not see anything clearly; only darkness and a faint movement that looked more like pressure in a confined space than actual movement. This was followed by a dry, dragging sound: ‘skrr… skrr…’, as though something tiny and relentless was rubbing against wood, looking for a gap.
A thin, metallic, sweet smell rose from it, and Mei Xuan felt the back of her tongue go cold.
She swallowed. “Can it help?”
The old lady’s gaze shifted briefly to the box, then back to her.
“It can change things,” she said.
The answer was not reassuring.
“But it doesn’t stop on its own.”
Mei Xuan felt her fingers tighten in her lap.
“If I take it…” she began, then hesitated.
The old lady did not interrupt.
“Then you’ll have to feed it,” she said at last.
Mei Xuan kept looking at the container. Beneath the fear and disgust, something uglier lurked in her chest because she could still picture her mother’s untouched cup of hot water and her brother pretending not to hear the envelopes on the table.
Ultimately, she reached for the box; her fingers trembled only once.
The Wealth That Came
The change did not come like a miracle, which would have frightened her more, but rather in practical increments that were easy to understand individually and impossible to dismiss altogether.
A part-time bookkeeping job that she had applied for months earlier suddenly called her back, offering regular hours. The caller spoke as though the delay had been an oversight rather than months of silence. The landlord was unexpectedly mild and agreed to spread the arrears over several months.
Her brother received a bursary to cover the school fees that had been looming over them; even her mother, who had been withdrawing under stress for weeks, started talking again about everyday things: vegetables to buy, laundry to fold, and whether the living room fan needed repairing before the hotter months.
Mei Xuan told herself that luck was sometimes simply late. She repeated this to herself so often that the thought began to sound less like a belief and more like something rehearsed.
The Unease That Stayed
Yet relief never fully sets in.
After everyone had gone to sleep, she could hear faint sounds from the cupboard where she kept the lacquered box: dry shifting, slight scraping, and sometimes a rustling so faint it only surfaced when she stopped breathing to listen.
Although money began to come in, she found herself unable to enjoy it without first calculating what might be asked in return. Whenever she touched the box, the wood felt warmer than the surrounding air, as though it had been resting against living skin.
The disturbances began in ways that could still be dismissed if she forced herself to keep explaining them away.
Her mother claimed that the reflection in the television screen did not match her movements after it had been switched off, but when she looked again, it was normal. She blamed it on fatigue, as if the thought itself had been too strange to hold on to.Some nights, she found herself standing in front of the cupboard without remembering walking there. One afternoon, Mei Xuan opened the cupboard to find the cloth wrapping loosened, though she knew she had tied it carefully. She stood there staring, the lid gave a tiny shiver and a soft, dry sound slipped out: krk. She slammed the cupboard shut so forcefully that pain shot up her wrist.
The Dependence
Months passed, bringing with them a dangerous kind of peace. Once fear survives long enough without fully erupting, a person begins to live around it, adjusting their habits instead of asking questions.
Mei Xuan worked, paid bills and bought groceries without counting every coin twice. She replaced her mother’s cracked slippers and set aside money for her brother’s future. Meanwhile, the box remained hidden yet ever present in her thoughts, a dark fixed point around which every improved day seemed quietly arranged.
She told herself more than once that she would return it and end it before anything else could be asked of her. Yet, each time she stood before the cupboard with the cloth half unwrapped, the thought dissolved into something weaker.
She no longer asked whether she should have accepted it. She only asked how much longer she needed it. In that shift lay the true corruption.
The Rule of Passing
The note was found on a wet evening towards the end of the seventh month. When she returned from work, she found it tucked under a box in the cupboard. Nobody in the house admitted to touching it.
The neat, steady handwriting was undoubtedly the old lady’s. ‘What you carry cannot remain with you for long. If it is not passed on before the next full moon, it will begin to look inward instead.”
Mei Xuan read it three times, then sat with the box in front of her for almost an hour, trying to imagine putting it into someone else’s life while maintaining a calm demeanor and telling a lie. For the first time since the money started coming in, she realised that whatever she had accepted was designed not just to provide for her, but to perpetuate itself.
She unwrapped and rewrapped the box several times. When she finally carried it out of the room, intending to give it to someone outside her circle — someone distant enough to make the guilt bearable — she found herself unable to take even five steps.
By midnight, she had put it back.
The Return of the Box
The following evening, she opened the cupboard to make sure that everything was where she had left it. Her whole body turned cold instantly when she saw that the shelf was empty and the cloth was lying folded neatly on its own. For a moment, she had the strange certainty that it had not been taken, only unobserved
Then she heard a dry scraping sound behind her and slowly turned towards the dining table.
The box was back. INSIDE her house.
It was sitting in the middle of the table where the unpaid bills had once been spread. Its lacquered surface reflected the dim light of the room with a dull sheen as though it had chosen its own place, rather than having been moved there by hands.
The Seven Days
The first pain came at dawn as a tightness in her throat, the kind that makes swallowing feel slightly uncomfortable but not dangerous. By noon, however, it had deepened into a pressure reaching down behind her breastbone. By nightfall, she could no longer eat without feeling as if something inside her chest were shifting upwards with every mouthful.
On the second day, her skin took on a strange, drained pallor and she became tired after climbing a single flight of stairs. On the third day, she woke with a thick metallic taste in her mouth and coughed into the sink until a thin line of blood threaded pink through the water.
Her mother wanted to take her to a clinic, but Mei Xuan said it was stress, then flu, then lack of sleep — each excuse weaker than the last — because deep down she knew that medicine could not cure her.
By the fourth day, sounds began to emanate from within her. They were not constant, but came in brief, hideous moments that left her shaking after they passed: a wet constriction deep in the throat, followed by a dragging, internal gulp — glllkk… — as though something were shifting position just beyond the reach of a cough or a vomit.
She stopped sleeping. She stopped going to work.
When she looked in the mirror on the sixth day, her eyes seemed sunken in a way that no illness should cause so quickly. The skin at her collarbone looked as though it had been gently hollowed out from the inside.
The Return to the Highlands
By then, realisation had become a certainty: the thing had not simply returned because she had failed to pass it on. It had returned because something in her blood had been marked the moment she laid hands on it.
On the seventh morning, she left without fully explaining. Despite the heat, she carried the box wrapped against her chest beneath a coat, her legs were so weak she had to take long pauses against railings and walls on the walk to the station.
The journey back to the Highlands seemed longer than the first, not because the distance had changed, but because the sense of urgency had stripped every mile of distraction, leaving her alone with her pain, fever and the growing terror that she might collapse before she arrived.
By the time she climbed the last slope, battling the damp wind and bamboo shadows, her breathing had become shallow and uneven. The bundle in her arms felt less like an object and more like a living thing, listening to the beat beneath her skin.
The Plead
The old lady was outside again, in exactly the same spot as before. Mei Xuan sank to her knees in the yard and pushed the box forward with trembling hands.
“Take it back,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Please.”
The old lady looked at her for a long moment before answering.
“I told you relief is not the same as help.”
Mei Xuan’s voice broke. “I’ll pay anything.”
A faint expression, not quite pity and not quite contempt, touched the old lady’s face.
“You already did,” she said, and for the first time her voice seemed to settle more firmly into the space between them.
Inside the house, Mei Xuan lay half-curled on the wooden floor while the old lady sat opposite her, the box between them once more.
“It fed on want first,” the old lady said.
“That is always the easiest beginning. Hunger, debt, fear for family… these open a person faster than anything else.”
Mei Xuan tried to speak, but the tightness in her throat forced the words back into a shallow breath.
“Then it fed on attachment,” the old lady continued.
“Because once something improves, no one wants it to stop.”
She paused briefly, as though measuring something unseen.
“When it cannot move forward,” she added softly,
“it turns inward.”
Mei Xuan pressed a trembling hand against her chest.
The old lady watched her, but did not reach out.
For a moment, the strain in her face seemed to ease, just enough for the tension in her posture to soften.
The change was slight.
Mei Xuan did not notice.
She was too busy trying to breathe.
The Truth
When Mei Xuan tried to sit up, the room tilted. The old lady continued speaking, as if understanding were more important than rescue.
“Why me?”
The question emerged thin and uneven, as though forced through a space that no longer permitted it to pass cleanly.
The old lady watched her for a long moment before speaking.
“You asked why,” she said quietly.
Mei Xuan did not answer. She no longer had the strength to ask again.
The old lady rested one hand lightly against her chest as if feeling for something beneath the bone.
“You see. I was not meant to live this long.”
The words came without weight.
“It started here,” she continued, pressing her fingers slightly inward. “A growth that would not stop. The doctors gave it a name: Cancer.”
Mei Xuan’s vision trembled, but she could still see her.
She could still see the steadiness in her posture.
The ease of her breathing.
“It should have taken me years ago.”
There was a pause.
“But I was not raised to accept things ending when they should.”
The box between them gave off a faint, dry sound.
Mei Xuan’s fingers twitched weakly against the floor.
“You felt it, didn’t you?” the old lady said, not unkindly.
“The way it begins with relief.”
Her gaze lowered briefly — not to Mei Xuan, but to the space between them.
“It never stays there.”
Another breath passed.
The True Ritual
“I didn’t invent this,” she said after a while.
“It was passed down. Not quite how it had originally intended, but enough to keep things going.”
The words settled into the room with quiet finality.
Outside, the bamboo swayed in the wind.
“My grandmother used to speak of a girl,” the old lady continued, her voice lowering slightly, though there was no one else around to hear her.
“A talented girl, who chose not to remain among the living.”
Mei Xuan’s eyes flickered towards the doorway.
“She believed there were ways… to surpass it.”
The old lady paused. The air in the room seemed to thin.
“She went through with it,” the old lady continued.
“Every step.”
A faint sound escaped Mei Xuan’s throat, but no words followed.
“I could not.”
The admission came easily.
“I do not have her courage,” she said.
“Or her skill.”
Her hand fell back into her lap.
“So I choose to remain here instead.”
The meaning was clear.
Mei Xuan’s breath hitched sharply once, then again; each intake shallower than the last.
The old lady watched her — not closely or intently, but with the quiet attention of someone who had seen this ending before and did not need confirmation.
Outside, something small and red shifted its weight near the doorway, as though it had been there long before Mei Xuan arrived and had never needed to come inside.
When Mei Xuan took her final breath, it did not return.
The old lady lowered her eyes.
Not in grief.
But in acknowledgement.
In the silence that followed, her breathing settled — slow, even and untroubled — as though something within her had once again been given time.
The Life That Continued
Somewhere far below the mountain, in a dimly lit apartment where the fan turned steadily and the light no longer flickered, the envelopes had been cleared from the table and replaced with a simple meal that no one hurried through.
The cup of plain hot water was still where it had been left, but this time it had gone cold for a different reason. For a moment — brief enough to be dismissed if anyone had been looking directly at it — the surface of the water gave a faint, inward ripple as though something unseen had just settled beneath it.
Related Story
A ritual was performed exactly as instructed—every step followed, every count correct.
But something had already joined before it began… and it was never included in the count.
