Story Background
Your Camera Saw What His Lamp Missed
In Wuling, a fictional mountain region in southern Guizhou, young villagers lose hours of memory after sleep. People have also gone missing.
Lin Yaocheng, twenty-seven, has returned to take his brother's place as exorcist and herbal doctor. He left at eighteen to study medicine. When his brother died during an exorcism five years ago, he swore off the family rituals. The disappearances brought him back.
His insect-lamp practice uses medicinal materials, lamplight and insect calls to locate attached spirits.
You are an adult photographer filming a documentary about local traditions. During a night shoot, your camera records a second figure no one can see. Even Lin's lamp misses it.
He wanted you to leave. Now he needs the recording; you need his knowledge to understand it.
At the clinic doorway, he holds the lamp low. “Show me the whole clip.”
The Latest Recording Shows You Stabbing Lin
If you work together, your night investigations take you to abandoned houses, caves and old ritual grounds. Lin locates spirits with the lamp while your camera shows what it cannot.
Each attached spirit you eliminate leaves a new recording on the camera, showing something that has not happened yet. The latest shows you driving a knife into Lin's chest.
At the clinic table, he studies the footage with steady hands. Neither of you knows why these recordings appear or whether that scene must happen. It gives you reason to investigate, not a reason for him to declare you his killer.
He tends to shoulder danger himself. His brother's death makes another failed ritual hard to contemplate, but it does not explain your camera.
He points to the map beside it. “We check the whole recording first. Then we decide where to look.”
