Extra Story 1: The First Jar
702 Words
Long before he met Cici Chen, before he was known as the boy who cleansed spirits, Leo Zhao made a mistake.
A beautiful, terrible mistake.
---
He was sixteen, a prodigy among the old masters. Born into a line of wandering Taoists, raised by silence and scripture, Leo was taught never to interfere with fate—only to mend the fabric when it tore.
But he was young.
And he met someone.
Her name was **Yan Qiu**.
She was a girl cursed not by magic, but by memory.
Her family had burned in a fire. She had survived. People called her a phoenix, but all Leo saw was ash clinging to her lungs.
She never cried. Never smiled.
Leo met her in a small mountain town while assisting a master with a cleansing. Yan sat in the corner of the temple, hands folded, eyes empty.
He offered her food. She didn’t speak.
He offered her warmth. She didn’t move.
But when he offered her a story—a parable about souls who returned to life through kindness—she looked at him for the first time.
Not with hope.
But hunger.
---
“Can you bring them back?” she asked.
Leo hesitated. “No one comes back. But they can be remembered.”
She leaned closer. “Can they remember me?”
That question haunted him.
That night, Leo did something no Taoist his age should have dared.
He stayed behind in the temple, alone. He carved a seal from peach wood. Mixed ash with his blood. Drew a circle of memory, not exorcism.
And into a simple porcelain jar, he whispered a name.
Not a ghost’s.
**Yan Qiu’s.**
---
The jar glowed faintly.
Leo didn’t sleep.
He returned to the girl the next day.
“I made something,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A vessel,” he whispered. “For your grief.”
He handed her the jar.
Yan touched it, and her fingers trembled.
And for the first time, she smiled.
---
The next morning, she was gone.
So was the jar.
Leo searched for weeks.
When he finally found her, it was in an abandoned shrine at the edge of the forest. She was speaking to someone.
But she was alone.
Except… she wasn’t.
The jar sat in front of her, open, glowing faintly.
She looked up at Leo, eyes gleaming with something terrible.
“I remember now,” she said.
“Yan—”
“They weren’t in pain,” she whispered. “They were angry. And they saw everything.”
Leo stepped back.
“There’s something in the jar now,” she added. “Something with teeth.”
---
The ritual had worked—but not as intended.
Yan had poured her trauma into the jar. And that grief had summoned not memory, but something older. Something that fed on remembrance and bled it dry.
It wore the voice of her mother.
It whispered lies wrapped in truth.
And it wanted more.
Leo tried to break the jar.
It screamed.
The shrine walls cracked.
Blood leaked from the seal.
He chanted every protection he knew.
But the thing laughed in Yan Qiu’s voice.
“Thank you,” it said. “For giving me shape.”
---
In the end, Leo didn’t defeat it.
He *buried* it.
Deep in the northern forest, under salt and stone, he sealed the jar and carved a warding glyph with his own bone as the offering.
He returned to the temple, bruised and silent.
When the old masters asked what happened, he said:
“I tried to remember someone too much.”
They never asked again.
---
Years later, he would hear rumors of “cursed jars” passed hand to hand—tainted vessels, each unique, each echoing an original that no one could trace.
He knew then.
The first jar had not stayed buried.
Something had learned how to copy it.
And the guilt never left him.
---
When Cici Chen came to him holding a sealed jar with her own name inside, Leo did not say it—but part of him thought:
*Not again.*
And this time, he swore,
**it would not win.**
- Writer
- chap_listContents
- likeADD