Yaoguai

Yaoguai live on the reverse side of the city.

But they are not the kind of monster in a horror film that pounces the moment it sees a person. Most yaoguai have rules of their own, needs of their own, memories of their own, and—some kind of relationship with this city. Some are presences that keep watch over a bridge, a well, an old tree. Some are old gods who have lost their incense and are close to forgetting their own names. Some only still remember that they once made an agreement with a human being.

Most of the time the traces they leave are very small. Footsteps passing under the balcony in the middle of the night, the pace steady, never stopping and never turning, thinning out at the end of the lane. A puddle of water that appears on the kitchen counter out of nothing, about half the size of a palm, with the sink dry and the water not yet back to room temperature. None of it hurts anyone, none of it explains itself, and by the next morning it is all gone.

The larger ones tend to be tied to a piece of ground. The old people of Qingcheng tell of one situation: when a district is rezoned, the firecrackers are set off by the rules, the joss paper is burned, the ancestral tablets are carried out, and the temple counts as relocated, the paperwork spotless. But some land cannot be moved—household registrations and ancestral tablets can both be transferred; this piece of ground knows for itself what kind of ground it was. In a small temple that has stood empty for 30 years, a stick of incense is sometimes still burning in the censer with nobody in front of it, and the ring of scorching at the bottom of the censer shifts to another position every few days: the ash is wiped very clean, and the scorch marks will not wipe away.

On whether to pay them any attention, Qingcheng is split two ways. One side holds that you should not look at an empty temple and should not worship at one, on the grounds that looking at an empty temple long enough will empty you out too. The other side goes on setting a plate of offerings by the door on the first and the fifteenth, on the grounds that those things have to eat as well. The two sides have lived in the same lane for decades without either one convincing the other, though they have left behind one shared understanding: attention or no attention, don't stop too long when you pass.

To the people who can see them, yaoguai are not there to be fought. Before doing anything, ask three things: what is it doing here, what does it need, why has it not left. Most of what is wrong on the reverse side of the city has nothing to do with harming anyone. They are hiding from something bigger themselves.