October is the busiest time of the year, busy with the joy of autumn harvest. People born in this season are said to be happy.

  In the old village, there was a household with seven or eight people gathered at the door, including men and women. It was said that the male owner of this family was about to have a baby, and these were all friends of the male owner. These men and women seemed more anxious than the carefree male owner. The doctor was the best in town and was specially invited to the house. The pregnant woman had been in pain for two days and two nights, but it seemed that the moment when the little guy in her belly would be born had not yet arrived.

  The host's surname is Xia, and it is said that his ancestors have been from Hongcun Village for four generations, with their ancestral home in Anhui Province. Their ancestors crossed the towering Tianmu Mountains during a time of war and chaos, bringing their family to escape here. By the third generation of the Xia family, which was the generation of Xia Laoliu's son, something happened.

  What's going on? The owner of this house originally had a son named Xia Yi, who somehow encountered a strange thing one year in the mountains. This Xia Yi went to a place that was said to be an ancient relic, and several people who went with him, except for a Taoist priest named Cha Wenbin from the countryside, have been missing until now.

  Xia Yi, who was brought back by Wen Bin, had already stopped breathing at that time. When his family saw him, their only son was gone, and they cried so much that it was pitiful. Just as they were preparing to handle his funeral affairs, this person suddenly came back to life, scaring the mourning guests who had come to offer condolences into fleeing in all directions.

  Everyone has heard of the phenomenon of "returning from the dead" through some folk tales, and few have seen it with their own eyes. How did Xia Yi come back to life? What happened after he came back to life? This has to start with a Taoist priest named Cha Wenbin.

  The ancient people believed that the place where people went after death was called the underworld, and we call the living world the yang world. Everything in the underworld is similar to the yang world, with laws, organizations, and financial concepts. A very special profession: Taoist priests take on the responsibility of communicating and interacting with the underworld. This profession, which was initially formed by combining shamanism and Taoist thought, gradually developed and flourished, forming its own schools, which became Taoism.

  Just like we have 56 ethnic groups, Taoism also has various different factions. They believe in their own cultivation methods and have different religious customs, but the common thread is that they all claim to be able to communicate with yin and yang and see ghosts and spirits.

  Whether there are ghosts or gods in this world, I don't know when you ask me. All I can say is that maybe I've seen some pretty strange things and experienced some pretty strange events.

  It is said that I was different from others when I was born, my mother carried me for eleven months, of course this story does not belong to me, but it has a lot to do with me.

  I don't believe in past lives, nor do I believe in future lives. I only believe in today. The story begins as before, still starting from Tonghu Village.

  Xia Laoliu, also known as my grandfather, had an only son originally named Xia Yi. It's strange that this name is now used on me, and it's said to be the blessing of a Taoist priest. Using one's father's name on their son is unheard of, I reckon such a heinous act has only been done by me in the past 5,000 years.

  Isn't it a bit confusing? Let's start with this name then.

  I heard that my father originally used the name "Xia Yi", in the 80s he and a few friends went to the other side of the mountain, where there was a village called Shuangyuan Village. It is said that on the opposite bank of the river, there was a three-story tomb designed after the Bagua Tai of Fuxi, but when I had the chance to go again, it had already become a ruin submerged in the water. It is said that during a severe flood at the end of the 1980s, the small island that originally floated above the water surface was washed away and never regained its former prosperity.

  Why am I also called Xia Yi? It is said that using this name saved my father's life.

  That year, when my father was carried back home, he had already stopped breathing. Our family was preparing for his funeral, but one of his Daoist friends wouldn't let us, and I don't know what method he used, in short, my father came back to life. Not only that, he also lost his memory, and many things from the past he couldn't remember, except for a person named Shi Gandang, everything else was unknown, this made my grandparents anxious, wasn't it "borrowing a corpse to return a soul"?

  Whether it was a case of borrowing a corpse to return the soul, I don't know. All I know is that my father changed his name that year to "Xia Qiushi". After changing his name, he never left Hou Hong Village again and married my mother, the daughter of a coffin shop owner, after several years, and then I was born.

  My origin should be clean, but I was given my father's former name: Xia Yi. This once made me a laughing stock among my peers when I was young - this old man and son have the same name, what kind of logic is this? It wasn't until later that I found out I was originally meant to be "sacrificed".

  There is an old Chinese saying called "father's debt, son pays back", perhaps my existence is to pay off the debt for my father, at least in their eyes.

  If I'm different from others, it's that I have a birthmark the size of an old copper coin on my chest. Apart from this, I have four limbs and a decent brain - at six years old, I already knew how to sneak peeks at the neighbor's older sister when she was bathing, and at eight years old, I almost set fire to Uncle's house...

  "The great way is fifty, heaven's fate is forty-nine, and man escapes one." I often heard this sentence when I was a child. The person who said it was the one who gave me my name, Cha Wenbin. He would often come to our house when I was two or three years old. It's said that he and my father were close friends with deep feelings for each other, but that was all in the past, because my father had already forgotten their past completely.

  I was born in the second year after my father's rebirth. Because of this incident, my grandmother was busy arranging a marriage for him, which is also called "rushing into good fortune" in rural areas. My father was a big shot back then, having traveled extensively and done business in the south for several years as a private entrepreneur. In his early twenties, he became a well-known millionaire, which was extremely honorable at that time. After that incident, my father lost his memory and even forgot who he was for a while. Fortunately, he wasn't stupid, and after more than a year of recuperation, he gradually regained some of his vitality.

  My ancestors, probably from my great-grandfather's generation, believed in Feng Shui. By the time of my grandfather's generation, they began to adopt atheism. However, by my generation, we started setting up altars at home again. Even my originally atheist grandfather began burning incense and worshiping gods. It was all because of my father.

  There is a saying that Father's soul has already gone to the underworld, and it was a Taoist named Cha Wenbin who snatched him back from King Yan. However, the Book of Life and Death had already settled "Xia Yi"'s fate, and King Yan couldn't change it - this life was predetermined by heaven. So they came up with a plan to create another "Xia Yi" to hand over to King Yan. Moreover, this new "Xia Yi" had to have some connection to the original old Xia Yi, so his son, that is, "I", became the substitute for death.

  Another version is: My father's soul was recovered, but he still lost a soul and thus lost his memory. Living in this world is like being a walking corpse. The soul he lost was reincarnated into me, so I am the real "Xia Yi". In short, both versions are circulating among the villagers, each with its own basis and logic. Anyway, one thing is certain: my birth seems to be a tragedy from the very beginning.

  Medicine was almost a constant companion throughout my childhood, with hospital and home time roughly divided in half. I had taken all sorts of folk remedies - sparrow gallbladders, insects from the ashes of stoves, and other strange things that were always being stuffed into my mouth by adults through various forms of deception. In addition to this, every day I also had to drink a bowl of dark, murky medicinal soup: a yellow paper with vermilion ink writing on it was burned and then mixed with water.

  They say that my father and I are of the same fate, sharing honor and loss together. But to me, my father is no different from any other child, I fear him, and he rarely speaks to me, only gazing at me from afar. When I was younger, I spent more time on my mother's back, and for me, "father" was just a tall figure that I had to chase after for the rest of my life.

  Because of my birth, because of those rumors. I also fought with others, but I was weak and usually ended up defeated, even when I was beaten to the ground, my father would just look at me coldly.

  But Wen Bin was different, every time he came I knew it meant delicious food had arrived. He has a son and daughter, but I've never seen his wife. I heard that his wife once lived in my house too. And the fact that he could be with his wife was also thanks to my father.

  There are many stories about them, too many clues and fragmented pasts that I only learned from different people's mouths, piecing them together one by one to make it look like a complete story. Some are absurd, some legendary, and some are different from others.

  "We each have to go through life and death once, your father is no exception, I won't be an exception either, the five of us are all the same, just like you, from the moment we were born, this is our fate." This was what Cha Wenbin told me, he's probably the last one among the five to experience it. The old generation's "Xia Yi" slowly fell into the cold cave, and until now it's still a mystery, who was lying? On that yellowed photo, there were four young people with awkward looks, their dressing had a special mark of the era, one of them looked similar to me, that person was my father. Now these four people have different fates, but in Cha Wenbin's words, there is still the existence of a fifth person, I heard that man named Ye Qiu was an enigmatic person, I've never seen him before, but he has always been in my memory.

  Let's start with this photo. I heard that it was because of this photo that my father, also known as the older generation's "Summer Memories", almost lost his life...