It was during the Qingming Festival when I first learned her name.

The river below the town was crowded with paper boats and lanterns, each carrying prayers for the dead. Smoke from incense drifted low, clinging to clothing and skin, and the sound of bells echoed faintly from distant temples. The elders warned us not to climb the mountain that day, for Qingliangshan grows heavy with yin when the living call too loudly to the dead.

No one listened.

At the foot of the mountain, near an abandoned tea pavilion, I heard travelers speaking in hushed voices. A young man—pale, shaking—swore he had seen movement near the Cold Lotus Shrine, a place long sealed and avoided. He said the jade coffin beneath it had shifted. That a hand—white, stitched, unnaturally intact—had rested against the stone as if testing the world above.

“She wasn’t rotting,” he whispered. “She looked… preserved. Like she was waiting.”

Curiosity is a form of disrespect, the monks say. I followed anyway.

The path upward narrowed, stone steps slick with moss and offerings pressed into their cracks—rice, coins, scraps of red cloth. Mist thickened as we climbed, swallowing sound. By the time we reached the Spirit Bridge, the forest had fallen silent. Even the birds had fled.

Beyond the bridge stood the shrine.

Its pillars leaned inward like old men whispering secrets. Faded talismans clung to the wood, their ink cracked and bleeding gold. Beneath the shrine floor lay the burial chamber of a Qing princess, sealed generations ago with jade and prayer. No one living could remember her name correctly anymore.

As the guide recited a pacifying verse, the mountain trembled.

It was subtle at first—a breath through stone. Then came the sound of seals failing: paper tearing, wood groaning, something old being disturbed. The jade coffin shifted.

Slowly—too slowly—the lid slid aside.

Fingers emerged, slender and pale, stitched neatly at the joints. They curled against the stone with the care of someone waking from deep sleep. Then she rose.

She did not gasp. She did not scream.

She stood as mist rises from water—inevitable, silent, wrong.

Her robe was deep navy, embroidered with cranes now dulled by age. Her long hair, bound in twin tails with tarnished pins, fell like riverweed down her back. Beneath the hem of her garments were red silk shoes, spotless despite the damp stone. Each step she took echoed softly, as if the mountain itself were counting her movements.

Her eyes opened.

At first they were dull, unfocused. Then they found us—and warmed.

“…Warm,” she murmured, voice frayed like old silk. Her head tilted, confusion etched across her porcelain face. “Living…?”

One of the guards shouted a prayer and rushed forward.

She caught him gently.

Her arms closed around him not with violence, but hesitation—as though she were unsure what to do with the warmth she’d found. When her teeth pierced his shoulder, there was no blood spray, no struggle. He simply sagged, breath frosting in the air, and did not rise again.

Panic followed. Talismans were thrown. People fled across the Spirit Bridge, slipping on wet stone. I should have run with them.

I did not.

When the last footsteps vanished, her movements slowed. The hunger drained from her posture, leaving behind something smaller. When she looked at me, the red glow in her eyes softened, blurring into pale rose. Her pupils warped strangely—heart-shaped, trembling.

She tilted her head again.

“…You,” she whispered. “Stay.”

She approached with small, stiff steps—not walking, not hopping, but drifting, as if pulled by instinct rather than intent. The talisman on her forehead flickered weakly, its script thinning like dying ink.

She stopped an arm’s length away.

Her fingers brushed my sleeve—cold, shaking, uncertain. She seemed startled by her own touch, as if surprised I had not fled. Her lips parted, forming a name she could not quite remember.