The Body-Borrower Comes Home - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Early the next morning, I headed straight for the osmanthus tree in the backyard.

That was where I had buried my things as a child.

A glass marble, an acceptance letter to the county’s First Middle School, and a letter I never dared to mail.

The letter was addressed to my mother.

I was seventeen that year, fresh off a brutal fight with Lin Guosheng, and I was determined to leave and never look back. But when the moment to actually leave arrived, I was afraid my mom wouldn’t be able to hold on. So, I wrote a letter and buried it under the tree, thinking that one day, when I finally made something of myself, I’d come back and dig it up.

Of course, I hadn’t returned in all these years.

But if that letter had truly been dug up, it meant the Body-Borrower knew more than just the surface details of my life.

I crouched under the tree and dug for a long while until my fingers finally brushed against a tin box.

The box was still there.

But it was empty.

I stared at the empty box for a long time, a sudden layer of goosebumps prickling across my back.

This wasn’t just “knowing.”

This was “having lived.”

Only I knew where that letter was buried; not even my mother knew.

The fact that it could take the letter meant only one thing.

It had truly walked through this yard, rummaged through it, and searched it just like I had. It might have even thought about what I was thinking back then.

“Found it?”

Chen Du’s voice came from behind me.

I handed him the empty box.

He took one look, his expression unsurprised.

“The letter is gone.”

“Yeah.”

“She read it.”

Hearing him use the word “she” sent another surge of irritation through me.

“Don’t use that tone.”

“What tone?”

“Like she’s actually a person.”

Chen Du didn’t argue. He simply said, “Let’s go see Qi Po first.”

Qi Po lived at the west end of the village. The entrance to her house was piled high with rotting wood and broken bamboo baskets. In her youth, she had been a midwife; in her old age, she took to burning incense and reading fortunes. Whenever the villagers had a headache, a fever, or felt they’d crossed paths with something sinister, they all ran to her.

When she saw me, her first instinct was to slam the door.

Chen Du shoved his hand against the door to keep it open. “Qi Po, Jianxia is back.”

“I can see that!” the old woman shrieked, her voice shrill. “I’m not blind yet!”

Her eyes were a murky yellow, staring at me as if I were something that might bite.

“What did you come back for?”

“To look into something.”

“Look into what?” Qi Po cursed. “The man is already in the ground, and yet you come back to dig up this deathly air. Aren’t you afraid of the bad luck?”

I didn’t feel like beating around the bush. I got straight to the point. “What exactly is a Body-Borrower?”

The flesh on Qi Po’s face twitched.

“Who told you about that?”

“It doesn’t matter who told me.” I stared her down. “Just tell me why my family would have such a thing.”

Qi Po remained silent.

Chen Du spoke up softly from the side. “Qi Po, Uncle Lin is gone. This can’t be hidden anymore.”

“If you keep hiding it, Aunt Zhou won’t be able to live in peace either.”

At the mention of my mother, Qi Po’s expression finally softened slightly.

She took two steps back, gesturing for us to enter.

The house smelled of mugwort, and the windows were plastered with old newspapers, making the interior very dark.

After Qi Po sat down, she coughed twice before speaking. “A Body-Borrower isn’t the kind of man-eating malicious spirit you hear about in those plays outside.”

“It borrows a human body not to eat people, but to return home.”

“When someone fails to return to their hometown, and someone is always waiting at their doorstep, the creature grows out of that ‘waiting.'”

“After it sprouts, it starts as a shadow, then a silhouette, then a voice, and finally, the whole person.”

“The more it does things in your place, the easier it is for it to become real.”

I asked, “What counts as becoming real?”

Qi Po raised her murky yellow eyes to look at me. “As long as someone opens their mouth and acknowledges it, it grows toward reality.”

“The more people acknowledge it, the faster it becomes real.”

“Once the whole village acknowledges it, even if you do come back, you’ll be nothing more than a guest.”

My heart sank.

“Then why did my family attract this thing?”

Qi Po was silent for a long time, appearing to hesitate over whether she should speak.

Finally, she let out a sigh.

“Your Lin Family ancestors… they once raised things that borrow bodies.”

I froze. “Raised them?”

“In the past, there were many wars, and many people died. Some died in foreign lands, their bones unable to return, but the elders at home refused to believe they were gone. So, someone would invite something back to take on the person’s shadow, sit at home for a night, eat a meal, and call out to their parents.”

“That way, the person was considered to have returned home.”

“In the beginning, it was a matter of accumulating hidden merit.”

“Later, some people grew greedy. They wanted to use it to keep someone from leaving, to continue the family line, or to fill a void. Gradually, the thing became unclean.”

“That was when it started for the Lin Family. Every few generations, something would happen.”

“As long as someone in the family left for good, cutting ties completely-if the person outside didn’t return, but the people inside waited for them until death-it would come.”

“It was that way with your aunt.”

“And it’s that way this time, too.”

My fingers turned cold.

“How did my aunt actually die?”

Qi Po looked away. “After she married out, she didn’t come back for over ten years. Later, her husband died. She wanted to return, but she was afraid of being seen as poor or bringing bad luck, so she turned back halfway.”

“That year, your grandmother sat at the door every day waiting, saying her daughter was coming home. Not long after, someone who looked just like your aunt appeared in the village.”

“Your grandmother believed it, and your grandfather believed it too. Only your father knew something was wrong.”

“Later, that thing stayed for so long that it truly intended to remain. When your aunt finally came back from the outside to reclaim her identity, she drowned in the Back Mountain Pond the very next day.”

I felt a tightening sensation at the back of my neck.

“Was it the Body-Borrower’s doing?”

“No one saw it with their own eyes,” Qi Po said. “But that night, your father fished two pairs of shoes out from the edge of the pond. One pair belonged to your aunt. The other… no one who saw it dared to claim they recognized it.”

A memory flashed violently through my mind.

A rainy night.

The door of the woodshed banging loudly.

The thing inside pounding on the door, crying and calling out, “Dad.”

I looked up abruptly. “My father caught one before, didn’t he?”

Qi Po’s expression changed.

She stared at me for a long time before squeezing out a sentence: “You saw it?”

I didn’t speak.

She understood.

“That was the year you turned twelve,” she said, her voice dropping very low. “Your father thought that thing had set its sights on you again. He laid out a Soul-Guiding Rope in the courtyard, tricked it into the woodshed, and locked it in for a night.”

“What happened after?”

“He let it go.”

“Why didn’t he burn it?”

Qi Po gave a bitter smile. “Can you even burn it?”

“A Body-Borrower isn’t a paper effigy or a mere wicked shadow. It borrows the parts of you that refuse to return, that you refuse to acknowledge, and that others are waiting for until death. As long as that ‘waiting’ remains, you can burn it, but it will just grow back.”

“Then how do I end it?”

Qi Po didn’t answer immediately.

She just looked at me with an incredibly strange expression in her eyes.

“You have to come back yourself.”

“Not the person coming back, but that heart coming back.”

“If you keep standing here while thinking in your heart that this place has nothing to do with you, then it will always have a hole to crawl into.”

I understood what she meant.

And because I understood, I felt even more irritated.

It sounded like I deserved this.

As if because I had been away from home for ten years and hadn’t returned, I deserved to have my identity stolen by this thing.

“Where is it now?” I asked.

Qi Po shook her head. “If it wants to find you, it will come on its own.”

“One more thing.” She stared at me. “If you hear your mother calling you at night, first distinguish who is using her mouth to call.”

“The Body-Borrower is best at mimicking the voices of those closest to you.”

When I stepped out of Qi Po’s house, the sky was hanging very low.

Chen Du remained silent the whole way.

It wasn’t until we reached the old well in the center of the village that I spoke. “You knew about this situation in my family all along.”

“I knew some of it.”

“Why didn’t you tell my mother?”

“Your mother knows.”

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“She knows?”

“It’s not that she’s always unable to recognize the truth.”

“That’s only sometimes,” Chen Du said. “When she’s lucid, she’s clearer about it than anyone.”

My heart sank. “What do you mean?”

“It means it’s not that she can’t tell the difference.”

“It’s that sometimes, she doesn’t want to tell the difference.”

This sentence cut deeper than anything else.

It felt like someone had stabbed me in the chest.

If my mother didn’t fail to recognize me…

But instead, sometimes preferred to recognize the Body-Borrower…

That felt worse than a monster replacing me.

I stood by the well, motionless for a long time.

The well water was very dark.

I looked down into it, and for a fleeting second, I thought I saw a face inside.

It wasn’t a reflection.

It was a person at the bottom of the well, looking up at me.

Her lips slowly curled into a smile.

She looked exactly like me.