The first time Yi Rong saw death, it was not dramatic.
It came quietly as many things did in Qinghe.
Old Ma, who lived in the northernmost house with the crooked roof simply didn't wake up one morning. He had been coughing for days the deep rattling kind that sounded like dry leaves crunching underfoot but no one thought much of it. Coughs came with the cold and the cold had arrived early this year. The fields frosted over at dawn and water from the well tasted sharp and metallic.
Yi Rong stood by the doorway as Fang Zeyu and another villager wrapped the old man's body in cloth. She didn't speak the wind tugged at her sleeves and rustled through the brittle stalks of dried grain, no one cried not even Auntie Mei who had known Old Ma since they were both children. There was only the smell of incense the low murmur of Ruolan's voice reciting prayers and the quiet snap of twigs in the fire pit nearby.
Yi Rong didn't understand all the words Ruolan was saying but she recognized the tone. It was the same voice Ruolan used when patching tears in clothes or when she whispered to the plants in her garden: soft, patient, full of small hope.
"Don't stare too long Rong'er," Ruolan murmured brushing ash from the child's forehead and guiding her away.
"Why not?"
"Spirits might follow children home."
Yi Rong nodded solemnly but she wasn't afraid. She didn't think Old Ma's spirit would follow her If anything she felt he'd already drifted away fast like dry rice husks caught on the wind. Something deeper than fear stirred in her chest though not pain. A kind of emptiness, like a door had been opened somewhere inside her and forgotten to be closed.
That night Yi Rong couldn't sleep.
She lay on her side curled under the quilt Ruolan had sewn from old fabric scraps. The fire crackled low in the corner, casting flickering shadows against the walls of their small house. Fang Zeyu's snores were soft and rhythmic in the next room Still sleep didn't come.
Instead, her mind wandered she thought of Old Ma. His crooked teeth the way he used to tap his walking stick twice before sitting down, the jujubes he always offered even when he barely had any left. Her chest tightened ,a feeling bloomed behind her ribs faint, familiar and out of place.
It wasn't grief not exactly. It was memory.
She saw flames again not from a fireplace but from a burning ceiling falling beams, black smoke curling like serpents through shattered windows. A girl held a child arms blistered, breath ragged and somewhere far away, a voice screamed for help through a speaker in a language that did not belong in Qinghe.
The image vanished in a blink.
Yi Rong sat up slowly the night air bit at her cheeks. She pressed her small hands to her face, searching for an answer for a reason but nothing came only the low rustle of trees beyond the window.
The dreams had returned.
More vivid than before.
More… real.
Sometimes she saw names she didn't recognize sometimes she woke with the taste of metal in her mouth, the sound of alarms in her ears always but she always woke before the end.
The mist hadn't lifted even by late morning, it hung low stretching from the fields to the wooded slope behind the house. The hens refused to leave the coop and even Ruolan's usual humming as she rinsed greens felt quieter.
Yi Rong was meant to gather wild garlic by the well. Ruolan had reminded her twice before heading to the stream with laundry but the path so familiar, felt heavy beneath her feet today. Her small hands clutched the basket, but her eyes drifted toward the back hill where goats didn't graze and even Fang Zeyu rarely ventured.
She wasn't sure why she turned that way.
It wasn't a voice.
It wasn't a thought.
Just a tug like a string pulling gently from the inside.
The slope behind the cottage was steep and tangled with thorny vines and brittle grass. She scrambled up clumsily fingers catching bark, slipping over loose stones once she looked back and couldn't even see the house through the trees.
"Maybe I should go back," she murmured aloud.
But before she could turn, the dirt shifted beneath her bare feet her heel caught on a root, Then came the slide a sharp tumble forward—.
Dry leaves thorns scraping her arms cry caught in her throat.
She fell hard, knees striking something solid and flat hidden beneath the overgrowth.
For a moment, she couldn't move.
Then the sting of scrapes and the dull throb of bruises made her sit up blinking back tears. Her small hands brushed the dirt, pushing aside leaves, moss, and pebbles.
She had landed on a stone smooth which was surprisingly wider than the others not shaped like a rock at all.
Yi Rong stared at it.
Not with recognition.
But with a strange stillness, as if some part of her had been waiting to find this.
She reached out and touched it fingers trembling slightly not from fear, but cold.
And then—
A flicker.A scream—distant, muffled.Orange light against glass. A corridor full of smoke.A figure carrying a child.The child's arm, dangling.Someone shouting.A name. Not hers."Shen Lian—"
Yi Rong gasped and pulled her hand back.
Everything went quiet. The kind of quiet that only lives deep in the woods not even a bird stirred in the trees above.
She sat there, breathing fast, heart racing her scraped knees throbbed. Her arms stung but none of it mattered as much as the strange chill crawling up her spine.
She didn't know what she'd seen or why it made her chest ache.
By the time she clambered down the hill, her dress was torn and streaked with dirt. She limped back toward the cottage, basket forgotten somewhere among the bramble.
Ruolan spotted her near the gate and rushed over alarmed "Rong'er! What happened?"
"I… fell," Yi Rong mumbled, eyes wide but far away.
"Oh, sweetheart…" Ruolan gathered her into her arms brushing bits of bark and leaves from her tangled hair,"Where were you running off to silly girl? That hill's no place to wander."
"I wasn't running," Yi Rong whispered.
Ruolan didn't press she washed her knees with warm water and clean the scrapes, then handed her a pear soaked in honey.
Yi Rong ate slowly the sweetness sitting strange on her tongue familiar and not.
That night, Ruolan slept with her.