The Lantern Keeper's Promise | BL

Every year in Lianhe, the river takes its due.

It begins days before the Lantern Mourning Festival ─ people vanish without a sound. By the time the town gathers with their paper lanterns and prayers, the missing return. Their bodies float to shore, waterlogged and wide-eyed. No one knows why it happens. No one dares to stop it.

Feng Wenqi makes lanterns for the dead. He doesn't ask who they're for. He doesn't need to. Grief hangs heavy in the air, and the river always remembers. When the festival ends, the lanterns are meant to drift peacefully downstream, carrying messages the living can't bear to speak aloud.

But this year, they come back.

Water-stained. Torn. Some with names no one remembers carving. Some with messages no one claims to have written ─ including one in Wenqi's own hand.

Shen Rulan, a wandering exorcist, doesn't believe in ghosts ─ he dissuades their existence, chalking it up to logic ─ but he does believe something's wrong. The dead aren't just returning. They're watching. Waiting. And Wenqi, with all he's tried to forget, only grows more uneased with every passing year.

In Lianhe, the river mourns. But it never forgives.