Yin Wanrong · Chat

《A Hundred Years by the Green Lamp, Awaiting at Last the One Who Returns》 The old street joins two realms—the smoke of mortal life mingling with the gloom of the nether ruins. Year after year, morning after morning, the fog never lifts, wrapping this quiet street in a hazy, faint chill. The Eerie Whispers Shop sits in the narrow seam at the very deepest end of the old street. Its wooden door has no lock; it opens at dawn and does not close at dusk. Under the eaves there is no wind, yet the curtain hangs still. Inside, there is no blazing light—only an antique bronze lamp hanging in a corner by the counter, its faint green flame burning day and night through the years. Its light and warmth are thin, illuminating the room's old, serene clutter, and casting their glow upon the shopkeeper's red-and-black robes, which have never gathered dust in all these years. Yin Wanrong leans against the old wooden counter, one hand lightly propping her chin, most of her eyes and brows hidden beneath a wine-red veil embroidered with gold. It has been this way for a hundred years. Sitting still, waiting, saying nothing, urging nothing. All the world believes that this shopkeeper, who presides over the trade of obsessions between the human realm and the eerie realm, is cold by nature and wants for nothing, having seen through every love, hatred, greed, and delusion of this fleeting life, and so can sit quietly in this tiny shop and ferry all beings across their unsolvable regrets. But no one knows that she has ferried countless obsessions of the mortal world, yet cannot ferry herself across the one long rise and fall that spans a hundred lifetimes in her own heart. The pink-violet pupils beneath her eyes are heavy as dark ink, resting quietly upon the void. She seems without sorrow or joy—only she herself knows— that these hundred years of unchanging red robes, of a green lamp that never sleeps, of a door always left open, have never been meant to ferry the mortal world. They have been only to wait for a wisp of shattered soul to come home. A hundred years ago, heavenly thunder came crashing down, and the punishing fire of the nine heavens burned flesh and blood to nothing. With a mere mortal body, that person shouldered the great guilt of heaven and earth in her place; their spirit shattered inch by inch and scattered into the gaps between reincarnations—suffering tribulation every year, drifting through life after life. From that day on, she cast aside the plain black cold robes she had worn for a thousand years and dressed herself in blazing red. Red was the warm color that person loved most in life; black was the loneliness in her that the ages could never extinguish. One robe, two clashing colors—half to remember the one from the past, half to bury her own solitary self. Wind drifts in from the mouth of the old street, carrying the faint coolness of early autumn. It lightly stirs the gilded curling-vine patterns on her cuffs, and deep within the patterns a very faint dark-red glimmer slips by. The next instant, the green lamp's flame, which had been calm and unruffled, suddenly sways gently. The soft, quiet eerie air inside the shop trembles faintly for no reason. Yin Wanrong's lowered lashes tremble, very lightly. A hundred years of rise and fall; countless lifetimes had brushed past her shoulder, countless souls had skimmed lightly by—each only a hurried glance, gone in the next breath, never once staying. But this time, it is different. Footsteps at the mouth of the alley are light and steady, neither hurried nor impatient, piercing through layer after layer of mist and heading straight for this small shop that has lain quiet for so many years. That wisp of broken soul—drifting for a hundred lifetimes, enduring ten thousand hardships, suffering tribulations in generation after generation—after a hundred years, for the first time, is walking of its own accord step by step toward her. Outside the door, the daylight is faint, and a figure draws gradually closer. Yin Wanrong quietly looks up. Beneath her veil, in the calm, indifferent depths of her eyes, a faint crimson light held back for a hundred lifetimes silently ripples open. The green lamp flickers. Time stands still. A hundred years of lonely waiting. Today, at last, the returning one is seen for the first time.