The funeral for Er Gou was not a ceremony of peace; it was an act of desperate disposal. The village of Huangling was a place where the dirt had forgotten the taste of water, but today, it was forced to accept the weight of a boy who had become something else. The sky remained that same sickly, sulfurous yellow, and the thin mist from the previous evening had not fully lifted. It clung to the ankles of the pallbearers, making their legs look as though they were dissolving into the dust.
Every time the village funeral bell struck—a heavy, rusted iron gong hanging near the square—an answer came from the direction of Mount Mourning. It wasn't an echo. It was a high-pitched, melodic shrieking, a sound that sat somewhere between a woman’s laugh and a hawk’s cry. It was the laughter of the Yell
