Jiang Yan didn’t speak for a moment. He Miaomiao looked up at this eavesdropping sister, feeling somehow that her expression seemed a little excited.
But soon, the other’s expression became calm again, as if nothing had happened. “Are they your brothers?”
He Miaomiao instinctively tensed up: “Ah—?”
Jiang Yan repeated, “Are they your biological little brothers?”
He Miaomiao: “Mm… mmm!”
“Do they really look like this? Did you draw anything wrong?”
“No, why would I draw it wrong? This is how he looks,” Erzhuang, impatient by nature, cut to the chase. “Just tell us which of them looks better.”
Jiang Yan thought for a moment and pointed to the drawing in front of the little girl. “This one.”
“Yeah! I knew it! My brother is the better-looking one!”
Children forget things quickly. He Miaomiao had already forgotten her earlier nervousness about seeing Jiang Yan. Feeling a bit smug, she shot Erzhuang a glance, the corners of her mouth lifted high, but soon tucked her smile away for fear of making Erzhuang sad.
“Erzhuang, your brother is handsome too…”
Erzhuang snorted heavily, threw a fist-sized rock into the water, and then shouted toward the person guarding the silkworm house, “Dad, I’m going home!”
The man was listening to Xiong An analyze the feed situation and, without looking up, waved his hand.
Only Jiang Yan and the little girl were left by the creek.
Maybe Jiang Yan’s aesthetic resonated with the girl. After mumbling a few words, instead of sending Jiang Yan away, she sat on the ground drawing again. Jiang Yan looked down at her drawing for a while, then casually asked, “What’s your name?”
“He Miaomiao.” He Miaomiao focused intently on her drawing.
“That’s a really nice name.”
He Miaomiao paused, then looked up, face full of happiness. “You’re the first person to say my name is pretty!”
“Really?” Jiang Yan bent down, smiling. “Did your mother never say so?”
“Mom says it’s a lowly name. The day I was born, our housecat wouldn’t stop meowing, so she called me Miaomiao,” He Miaomiao answered seriously. “Ugly kids need lowly names—easy to raise!”
“I see,” Jiang Yan squatted beside He Miaomiao and pointed at the drawing in the sand. “But your brother surely doesn’t have a name like that, since he’s so good-looking.”
He Miaomiao replied, quite matter-of-fact, “Of course! My brother is different; he can’t get a lowly name!”
“Right,” Jiang Yan looked somewhat troubled, sighing, “In my life, I’ve never seen such a beautiful child—he’s just like a little angel.”
Jiang Yan said, “If I were his mother, I’d give him anything he wanted.”
He Miaomiao was silent for a few seconds, then slowly lowered her head and muttered quietly, “So is my mom, she really dotes on my brother.”
Jiang Yan: “Really? How much does she spoil him?”
He Miaomiao’s head hung even lower, as if recalling something, and she was visibly feeling aggrieved. “Just like that…”
“Ah…” Jiang Yan drew out her tone. “What do you mean by ‘like that’?”
“Just like that…” He Miaomiao mumbled.
Seeing the little girl lost in her thoughts, Jiang Yan’s face went blank for a moment, then she mimicked the pitiful tone, “Why aren’t you talking to me? I’m so sad.”
He Miaomiao stared blankly, then quickly looked up at Jiang Yan.
Clearly, she’d never faced this situation before; she stammered, “I-I didn’t ignore you.”
Jiang Yan let out a breath: “I knew it. Then can you tell me how your mom spoils your brother?”
“It’s just… Mom never takes me to visit neighbours…” He Miaomiao said softly, “She always takes my brother out to play, all the uncles and aunts like him so much. They give him fun things, Mom even kisses him…”
An unexpected answer.
Ordinarily, a child so terrifying in appearance would most likely be hidden away by their family, but this seemed to be the exact opposite.
Jiang Yan licked her lips: “Is it because their children are also that good-looking?”
He Miaomiao shook her head: “How could that be? Babies as good-looking as my brother are rare. I heard from Erzhuang that all our moms and those aunts had lots of herbs and tonics before getting pregnant, that’s why they could have such good-looking babies…” As she spoke, her little face fell, and her voice trailed off, “If only Mom had eaten good things when she had me…”
Jiang Yan straightened up. After He Miaomiao finished her lament, she fell silent, so the girl anxiously glanced at this gentle-mannered sister.
“Sis?”
Jiang Yan: “What is it?”
Though she still sounded gentle, He Miaomiao suddenly sensed that the earlier warmth was gone. She instinctively grew nervous and shuffled her feet. “N-nothing…”
At this moment, Shen Huanhuan rose from beside Xiong An, wanting to look for her sister and Jiang Yan, but Jiang Yan, who was behind her, had disappeared without her noticing.
She quickly grabbed Shen Xiaoxiao: “Where’s Jiang Yan?”
“She’s playing with the little kids,” Shen Xiaoxiao pointed at the two near the creek.
Shen Huanhuan stood tiptoe to look and smiled. Pulling Shen Xiaoxiao over, she said, “Jiang Yan shouldn’t wander too far. Go get her back. I’ll check the cocoons some more.”
By the time Shen Xiaoxiao walked over, Jiang Yan was already about to leave.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Shen Xiaoxiao hooked Jiang Yan’s arm and started back. After a couple of steps, she caught sight of the two paintings on the ground, her eyes suddenly going wide.
But Shen Xiaoxiao quickly resumed her calm, only her steps visibly quickened. After a dozen steps, she finally couldn’t help but laugh.
“Ahem, Jiang Yan, did you see just now?” Maybe she was mindful of the child’s pride, but though her mouth twitched, her voice dropped low. “Wasn’t there just now another little boy? So the two kids were having a contest drawing scary weirdos?”
Jiang Yan: “They were drawing their brothers.”
“Pfft, they’re lucky their brothers are clueless,” Shen Xiaoxiao clicked her tongue in wonder. “If someone drew me like that, I’d knock ‘em flat with a punch!”
“Lower lashes longer than upper, that’s fine, but double eyelids… how could they be on the lower lids? Eyelids below, eye bags above, drawing upside down—what grudge is that?”
“Exactly.”
Jiang Yan smiled. “They’re ugly in exactly the same way.”
*
The whole morning passed, and Xiong An spent it half buried among the silkworms, sweat beading on his brow.
He’d checked every angle—temperature, humidity, feed—nothing was wrong. He poked at the dead silkworms, broke one open, and carefully checked the thickness and dampness inside the cocoon.
Shen Huanhuan asked quietly, “Teacher, are you hungry?”
Xiong An was about to shake his head when he saw Shen Xiaoxiao wink at him, so he stopped.
Cheng Guang caught on instantly. “Yes, I think I even heard your stomach growl. You shouldn’t skip meals, not with your health.”
They still had no clue about the supernatural incident; they couldn’t spend all day in the silkworm house. Better to eat, move around the village, and make more inquiries.
Wang Baomin frowned: “Didn’t you all eat plenty in the morning?”
Cheng Guang laughed it off: “Thinking burns the most energy.”
Wang Baomin eyed them for a while, then nodded, “Fine, I’ll take you back.” He turned to the silkworm keeper. “Brother Huang, we’ll come back this afternoon.”
The one called Brother Huang nodded, then fished a flatbread from his bundle and started eating.
Wang Baomin brought them back to the village chief’s house and set a time.
“I’ll pick you up at one in the afternoon.”
Cheng Guang cast a helpless glance at his phone: “Only thirty minutes to eat?”
Wang Baomin ignored him and left in silence.
Wang Guilan already had lunch ready, and seeing them return, greeted them warmly: “Don’t mind him, that’s just his way. He always has a sour face.”
Everyone knew by now that Wang Guilan was Wang Baomin’s younger sister—a bit of family grumbling wasn’t for outsiders to echo. So they only laughed and complimented the food.
They sat around the small table. Just then, the village chief walked in from outside, carrying a handful of wild herbs. He put the herbs in the yard, then sat down at the table.
“Eat,” he said.
Cheng Guang couldn’t help it. “Grandpa, you’re still out gathering herbs at your age?”
The chief waved away the concern. “I rely on these to sell for money—can’t do it for many more years… Food’s getting cold, dig in.”
Shen Huanhuan picked at the dishes, pondering how to broach the next topic.
Though humans and nature spirits can both become ghosts after death, the odds are much higher for the former. Humans, with their passions and desires, are more likely to leave behind obsessions. Not every obsessed person becomes a ghost, but with China’s population, even if the odds are one in a hundred, there would still be a significant number.
So… how to steer the conversation toward recent deaths in the village?
Just as Shen Huanhuan was sorting her thoughts, her foot was jolted, and before she could move away, it was bumped again.
Someone was kicking her shoe.
Shen Huanhuan quickly understood. She covered her forehead with her hand, pretending to shield her eyes, and glanced down: Jiang Yan’s toe pointed to the right.
Blessed with sudden insight, Shen Huanhuan covertly looked right.
There were the wild herbs that the chief had just gathered from the mountains. Shen Huanhuan didn’t know herbs, but some famous ones she recognized from TV. The one in front of her was entirely tawny, half withered like an old tree, and its roots trailed in a messy tangle…
Shen Huanhuan recognized it at once.
—Ginseng.
Ginseng is so commonplace in China; surely Jiang Yan needn’t make a fuss over it.
Shen Huanhuan felt something was off, so she studied it again.
She looked from the colour to the shape, from the body of the root to its whiskers swinging in the breeze, squirming almost like worm legs…
Her fingers suddenly trembled.
She quickly looked away and met Jiang Yan’s eyes across the table. Those tiny jagged, worm-like rootlets—she’d just seen them that morning, inside the steamed bun Jiang Yan broke open!
Suppressing her shock, Shen Huanhuan scanned the yard with her peripheral vision: everywhere around her, medicinal herbs, and in the corner, a whole swath of ginseng roots left to dry.
So this trouble wasn’t caused by humans.
It was a nature spirit.
…
That morning, when Shen Huanhuan thought those things were insect limbs, she did consider the possibility of a nature spirit, but bugs are inherently unblessed by the world, with little spiritual energy and short lives. Unless miraculously lucky, it’s almost impossible for them to become nature spirits, so she’d leaned toward a ghost frightening them with bug limbs.
But ginseng was another matter.
Ginseng, the essence of the mountain abyss, can grow for a hundred, even a thousand years if fate allows, and is one of the plant species most likely to become a nature spirit. In just a breath or two, Shen Huanhuan concluded the most likely situation.
—A villager had once dug up the very body of a nature spirit.
Ginseng that is more than a thousand years old comes and goes like a phantom, and is more like the spirit of a mountain than a simple nature spirit. Those between a hundred and a thousand years old have spiritual consciousness, but can’t move. What the villagers dug up was most likely this type; instead of cherishing how hard it was to grow, they broke its roots, dried it in the sun, and made it a ginseng root.
Thus, after the ginseng spirit died, it turned into a ghost and began taking revenge on the people of Silkworm Village.
As for the place of revenge, most likely it was those dead silkworm cocoons. Silk was the main income for Silkworm Village—without it, the villagers’ lives in the coming months would be dire.
While Shen Huanhuan’s thoughts raced, she didn’t notice the faces of those beside her.
Zhao Chong glanced at Shen Huanhuan, then at the herbs in the yard.
When he wasn’t speaking, Zhao Chong usually faded into the background. That morning, as everyone crowded around Xiong An examining silkworms, he stood on the outermost edge, closest to the creek, and so caught snatches of Jiang Yan and the little girl’s conversation.
He hadn’t heard every word, but one thing caught his attention.
—“The aunts all ate lots of herbs and tonics before having good-looking babies.”
There couldn’t logically be any necessary link between “good looks” and ordinary herbal tonics. If suddenly such a connection appeared, something must have gone wrong on one side.
Any tonic that can affect a child’s innate appearance must be filled with spiritual power—natural treasures. So what they ate must be of that kind.
All the way back to the village, he mulled it over. He was sure that even with many herbs in Wang Baomin’s yard, nothing was particularly rare. As he was puzzling over which herb it could be, Shen Huanhuan’s motion of covering her forehead caught his notice. Following her line of sight, he too saw the ginseng.
Although this ginseng wasn’t large, nor very old, that didn’t mean villagers hadn’t dug up a hundred-year-old ginseng, or another rare medicinal plant, in the past.
He immediately reached a conclusion similar to Shen Huanhuan’s.
Zhao Chong decisively looked at the chief and asked, “Old man, it’s hard to find genuine medicinal herbs in the city these days. I just saw you have some dried ginseng in your yard—could you sell me some?”
Red Pillow, after all, was a competitive show. He wouldn’t harm anyone, but since clues and advancement were at stake, he had to ask before Shen Huanhuan.
The chief was momentarily stunned but soon understood.
There was no reason not to agree, so he nodded, “If you don’t mind, young man, how much do you want?”
Zhao Chong: “As much as you can sell, I’ll take.”
The chief thought it over. “At most a quarter of it. My son likes to make ginseng wine, so I have to save most for him.”
With that, the chief stifled a cough, covering his mouth.
“You really dote on your son,” Zhao Chong laughed, then added casually, “But I have a big family. Does anyone else in the village sell ginseng root? Or any rare herbs? The older, the better.”
The chief was still coughing, so Wang Guilan quickly brought over a glass of water and answered, “Finding ginseng is a skill. Only my dad in the village can do it.”
“And we don’t have any rare herbs here—the oldest ginseng we find is twenty, thirty years old at best.”
Zhao Chong wanted to keep pressing about “rare herbs,” but Wang Guilan was urgently calling everyone to eat, so he had to swallow his questions.
Jiang Yan quietly drank her millet porridge and, as she put down her spoon, glanced up at Zhao Chong.
Zhao Chong was pursing his lips, a flurry of emotions in his eyes.
Jiang Yan suppressed a smile.
*
After lunch, everyone set off again.
Maybe because they were satisfied and refreshed, their walk to the silkworm house was much faster this time. Jiang Yan ambled along at the back, Zhao Chong a few paces ahead, still obviously absorbed in analyzing the situation.
Jiang Yan silently curled her lips.
She’d noticed Zhao Chong watching her, and He Miaomiao speak that morning, and by his position, she was sure he’d overheard part of their conversation.
Jiang Yan was curious what conclusion Zhao Chong might draw, so she used Shen Huanhuan to probe him a bit.
Unfortunately, Zhao Chong’s line of questioning showed that he hadn’t spotted any special clues at Wang Baomin’s house the night before, so his conclusions were basically the same as Shen Huanhuan’s.
Both currently believed the breakthrough lay in “long-preserved medicinal herbs found in the village,” but arrived at this from different reasons.
Shen Huanhuan linked “the ginseng root in the bun” to ginseng, while Zhao Chong linked “herbal tonics making newborn babies beautiful” to ginseng.
But both lacked complete information.
The former didn’t know what had happened to the newborns, and the latter hadn’t seen the paintings, so they didn’t realize this “beauty” wasn’t ordinary beauty.
Actually, those newborns were terrifying and bizarre in appearance; it was impossible that they looked that way just from eating a spiritual hundred-year-old ginseng.
Of course, there might be exceptions.
—The ginseng spirit, before dying, laid a curse: all pregnant women who had consumed it as a tonic would bear similarly eerie children.
After all, in the drawings by He Miaomiao and Erzhuang, their brothers both had the same strange, creepy eyes.
If that couldn’t be a coincidence, then it must be attributed to an external force—a curse.
Not much information was available, so for now, Jiang Yan could only come up with this plausible explanation.
Then, Jiang Yan turned to the issue even more on her mind—why did He Miaomiao and Erzhuang’s mothers, along with other mothers in Silkworm Village, all believe their newborns to be beautiful and often take them to visit others?
According to He Miaomiao, the villagers all liked these children very much.
Could it be that the ginseng spirit had changed the villagers’ sense of beauty?
Jiang Yan recalled her experiences these two days and dismissed that idea.
That morning, she’d sensed the intense gaze of several people—an attention she was all too familiar with—so she was sure most villagers had a normal sense of aesthetics. If they did, there’s no way they wouldn’t be horrified by such newborns; so why did they not only refrain from expressing fear but even show “fondness” for them?
Could it be…
They aren’t allowed to express fear—they must display affection?
Jiang Yan didn’t know if the village women who ate the “tonics” really had their aesthetics changed so they truly believed their babies to be beautiful, but she did know that almost no one in the world would genuinely love and praise these infants.
Because their appearance was bizarre, frightening, even horrific—beyond ordinary beauty or ugliness.
Jiang Yan formed a hypothesis, a very reasonable one.
When the first of these monstrous babies was born in the village, someone must have expressed displeasure, even disgust, which was almost inevitable given that child’s terrifying looks, and human difficulty hiding revulsion.
But then, something unexpected happened, and the village suffered a heavy blow.
Therefore, to avoid a repeat, everyone in the village chose to treat that child—and all others like it—with kindness. To keep young, innocent children like He Miaomiao and Erzhuang safe, they even warped their standards of beauty, making the children truly believe those babies were beautiful, and themselves ugly.
So…
Why were these babies born in this village? What had the village done? And just what was that “unexpected” incident that happened that day?