Waking up drenched in cold sweat, Ethan Clark patted her rapidly beating heart, walked to the altar, knelt on a brocade cushion, pressed her palms together in a standard prayer gesture, and said, “Family Deity, I’ve had similar dreams for two days in a row. I wonder if there’s any special meaning to them?”

The curtain was brushed aside by the wind, and in the shifting light, the god on the altar, who looked like a statue, suddenly seemed to come alive. Looking down at her, he smiled slightly and said, “How do you know that was a dream?”

Ethan Clark was taken aback. “It wasn’t a dream? Was it something I saw in a daze at night?”

She let out a sigh of relief. “As long as it wasn’t a dream.” She seemed reassured.

Family Deity smiled for a moment, then sighed with a hint of regret. “You don’t seem afraid?”

Ethan Clark: “Knowing it’s something that happened in reality, not some unknown dream, makes it less scary.” Mainly, if the strange thing is Family Deity, it doesn’t feel as frightening.

Family Deity gave a warning: “It will happen again tonight, and it will continue for the whole month.”

Ethan Clark: “Okay.”

Sure enough, that night she saw a similar scene again. She couldn’t quite tell whether it was a dream or reality, but since Family Deity said it wasn’t a dream, she decided to treat it as reality.

A ceramic statue of a god, split by a crack, stood on the dark altar, still murmuring from within the fissure. For the past two days, Ethan Clark hadn’t dared to do anything, but after asking Family Deity today, she felt a bit braver and thought maybe she could take a look at what was going on.

Standing on tiptoe to peer into the crack, she asked inside, “Is that you, Family Deity? Why do you say it hurts?”

The numb, unchanging voice inside the crack paused for a moment, then suddenly became chaotic, countless identical voices and tones overlapping and echoing.

“So dark.”

“So hot.”

“Can’t breathe.”

“So painful.”

Chapter 8 07 The Crack

These similar murmurs made Ethan Clark feel, for a moment, as if her brain was about to be pierced. With a splitting headache, she pressed her hand against the crack. The man-sized porcelain statue should have felt cold, but the moment her hand touched it, she flinched from the burning heat—the surface of the statue was scorching hot.

The voices of “so hot” and “so painful” stopped for a moment, then burst out from the crack even more intensely.

Ethan Clark was now both burned and in pain. If she hadn’t quickly regained her senses and opened her eyes to see the black curtain in reality, she might really have been overwhelmed by that pain and started moaning along with it.

She got up from the floor and went once more to Family Deity. Family Deity sat upright on the altar, looking a bit different from the ceramic statue in that dark world, but giving off a similar feeling.

“Family Deity, what should I do?” Ethan Clark wasn’t a particularly clever person. Faced with something like this, she didn’t dare act on her own and could only come to ask Family Deity. If the statue was related to Family Deity, he would surely have instructions.

Family Deity listened to her question and, smiling, offered a suggestion: “Why don’t you try seeing what’s inside the crack?”

Ethan Clark: “I can’t see clearly… Do you mean I should break it open to look?”

Family Deity spoke slowly and calmly: “Break it? Then go ahead and break it open.”

Because his tone was so calm and indifferent, Ethan Clark’s anxiety gradually faded. Since Family Deity seemed so unconcerned, it probably wasn’t a big deal, right?

She prepared herself, and that night, when she again saw the cracked ceramic statue, she mustered her courage and tried to push it off the altar to smash it. But the statue was much heavier than she’d imagined; she couldn’t move it and instead burned her palm red. Ethan Clark didn’t give up easily. She climbed onto the altar, examined the crack, and stuck four fingers inside, trying to pry it open.

She thought that with a crack, it would be easier to break apart. If she could widen the small crack, she’d be able to see what was inside. As soon as her fingers entered the dark fissure, she sensed something was wrong—the temperature inside was much higher than the outside of the porcelain, as if a raging fire was burning within.

Ethan Clark quickly withdrew her hand, clutching her reddened fingers helplessly. A lock of hair by her cheek was blown to her lips by a breeze from who knows where. Ethan Clark tucked her hair behind her ear, and when she brought her hand back, she found two long strands of hair between her fingers.

Hair?

She held the two strands close to the crack in the statue, trying to insert them inside, then leaned in to sniff if there was any smell of burning hair.

There was no burnt hair smell, only a faint, indescribable fragrance. However, the terrifying voices inside the crack stopped.

It seemed to work? After a while, the voices started up again. Ethan Clark grabbed a handful of her thick hair and thought for a moment. People grow new hair every day, and naturally lose a lot as well, so she patiently combed her hair with her fingers, collecting a dozen or so strands. Whenever the voices in the crack sounded, she’d stuff a strand of hair inside.

She felt as if she’d found a way to block out the voices.

In the morning, as usual, she went to see Family Deity. Before she could speak, Family Deity suddenly covered his mouth and coughed for a while. When he lowered his hand, there were a dozen long hairs in his palm.

Ethan Clark stared at the dozen or so hairs in Family Deity’s porcelain-white palm.