Chapter 1 — The Talisman Painter Who Guards the Village

First Ink Stroke

That morning, the dew had not yet completely dissipated from the thatched roof. Mr. Tám Mực was sitting cross-legged in front of the paper workshop's porch, holding an old inkstone with frayed edges in one hand and a brush in the other, holding it out in front of the girl standing behind the pillar.

"Come here," he said, his voice as hoarse as the sound of bamboo leaves rubbing against each other. "You've been standing there waiting for me all morning. Are your legs tired yet?"

Chu Diệp Sương gingerly stepped out, her two tiny hands clutching the hem of her shirt. She was only six years old; her hair was braided to one side because she had done it herself, and her cheeks still had a streak of ash from Mrs. Chín Lài's kitchen that hadn't been washed yet. She didn't answer his question, just stared at the quivering brush in the old man's hand, then looked at the stack of bark paper neatly folded in one corner, the rough, light brown paper that the whole village used to call "Tám Mực paper" after the name of its maker.

"I'm not stalking," she mumbled. "I just stood there watching."

"What are you looking at so intently? I've been grinding ink all my life. No child in this village has ever watched me for as long as you." Mr. Tám Mực smiled, revealing that almost all his teeth had fallen out. He held the brush out to her. "Try it."

Diệp Sương hesitated. She had been scolded once for playing with ink - not Mr. Tám Mực's ink, but black water she mixed with kitchen ash and banana leaf saliva, smeared all over the wall of Mrs. Chín Lài's house in shapeless zigzag lines. Mrs. Chín Lài didn't hit her; she just quietly used a wet rag to scrub the whole afternoon, muttering something about "loitering children with no one to teach them". But the next night, when Diệp Sương secretly went out to the yard to continue drawing with a stick on the ground, Mrs. Chín Lài stood behind her and watched for a long time without saying a word.

"I won't scold you," Mr. Tám Mực said, as if reading the hesitation in her eyes. "I just asked: do you like drawing?"

Diệp Sương nodded, then shook her head, then nodded again. She didn't know what to call that feeling. Every time she held a stick, a coal, anything that could leave a black mark on a flat surface, very clear lines appeared in her mind, as if someone had drawn them somewhere in her memory, and her hand just had to follow. She didn't know what the image meant, or that it could be something other than a meaningless mark.

"Then hold the brush properly," Mr. Tám Mực said, placing it in her hand and adjusting her grip: thumb and forefinger cupped around the shaft, middle finger supporting it underneath. "A brush is not a hoe handle. Grip it too tightly and the strokes will stiffen, your hand will tire, and the writing will die. Hold it like a small bird in your palm—firm enough that it will not fly away, loose enough that it can still breathe."

She imitated him, her small fingers clumsily turning around until she found the correct grip. The pen trembled in her hand, the bristles gently dipped down on the inkstone, pulling up a drop of shiny black ink.

“Now draw,” he said. "Draw what you see in your head."

Diệp Sương looked down at the piece of tree bark that she had flattened and placed in front of her like a small board. She didn't think much — or rather, she didn't know if she was thinking or not, because her hand automatically brought the pen down, drawing a soft curve from left to right, then a horizontal line cutting through the middle, then two small symmetrical dots on both sides like two half-closed eyes.

Mr. Tám Mực watched silently. For a long time, he said nothing, only the sound of grandfather and granddaughter breathing mixed with the morning wind blowing through the paper workshop door.

"Do you know what this is?" he finally asked, his voice different from before — no longer joking, but strangely serious.

Diệp Sương shook her head.

"I'm not entirely sure," he said, scratching his chin. "But when I was young, when I was selling ink in big towns, I saw a few people drawing lines similar to this on the door of a sick person's house, on the crib of a child who often cries at night. People call it a peaceful-sleep talisman. It's not a powerful charm, just enough to coax a child to sleep well and repel a few mosquitoes from the mosquito net. But..."

He stopped and gently touched the piece of bark with his hand, as if afraid of smudging the still wet ink.

"But this drawing is more accurate than anything I've ever seen drawn. You've never studied, right?"

"I... don't know," Diệp Sương replied honestly. "I just saw in my head it had to be like that." Mr. Tám Mực laughed, a short, slightly shaky sound, as if he were relieved and frightened at once. "In my head, it has to be like that," he repeated. "From now on, come here every morning and I will teach you how to hold the brush properly. Whatever comes to your mind, let it appear. Do not force yourself to remember it the way I taught you. I will teach you to hold the brush without shaking and grind the ink to the right thickness. The drawing itself is yours," She didn't understand everything he said, but she nodded, and a strange warm feeling arose in her heart, as if for the first time someone didn't consider her drawing on everything with a stick to be a bad habit that needed to be corrected.

*

Mrs. Chín Lài discovered this in the afternoon, when Diệp Sương came home with two fingers still stained with black ink that refused to be washed off, showing her a piece of tree bark with two round dots drawn like eyes.

"Mr. Tám Mực taught me how to draw talismans, Grandma," she said, in a cheerful voice rarely heard from the normally quiet child. "He said this is a peaceful-sleep talisman to help you sleep."

Mrs. Chín Lài picked up a piece of tree bark and turned it back and forth under the sunset light filtering through the slit. She was illiterate, and knew nothing about spiritual talismans, but she had lived long enough in Tùng Lĩnh Village, long enough to know that this small village located at the foot of Vân Tiêu Peak was not an ordinary place. She remembered the rainy and windy nights of her youth, when the ground under the village's feet seemed to shudder, the cattle in the barn squealed for no reason, and the village elders whispered to each other about "the turning of the earth".

She did not tell Diệp Sương about those things. She was too young, and what's more, she herself didn't understand. She only knew that Diệp Sương's parents - two people she had barely known, a gentle farmer and his wife who was a skillful weaver - died on a night that the whole village called "the night the earth turned violent", when Diệp Sương was less than a year old, still holding her in her cradle. No one told her in detail how it happened, only that the next morning, the baby was found alive in the half-ruined house, crying among the rubble, and her parents never woke up again.

Mrs. Chín Lài, who had been widowed for several years and had no children at that time, took the baby home to raise her without needing anyone to persuade her.

"Grandma," Diệp Sương pulled her sleeve, pulling her out of her thoughts. "Are you angry with me? Because I learned to draw spells?"

Mrs. Chín Lài looked down at the small face that was looking up, her dark eyes waiting for an answer as if waiting for a verdict. She sighed, but not a sigh of frustration.

"I'm not angry," she said, her voice slow. "It's just... you reminded me of something."

"What's going on?"

"Nothing important." She stroked her head, her hands calloused from years of picking medicine gently caressing her braided hair. "If you want to learn, you can learn. Mr. Tám Mực is a kind man; he won't teach you nonsense. It's just that—"

She stopped, her eyes suddenly unusually serious.

"Remember one thing. Drawing spells is not a game. If one day you draw to save someone, you must save it well, don't draw half-heartedly and leave it there to be tormented for the rest of your life. Remember?"

Diệp Sương did not fully understand the meaning of that statement at that time. She just nodded, as if nodding to all her other instructions, then ran into the yard to continue playing with the piece of tree bark, trying to draw two round dots like half-closed eyes, trying to remember exactly the feeling in her head that morning.

But that sentence, for some reason, still lingered somewhere in her memory, like a seed planted in the ground that hadn't yet reached its germination season.

*

That night, after Diệp Sương fell asleep on the bamboo bed next to the wall, Mrs. Chín Lài sat alone by the dead fire, her hand caressing a piece of tree bark with two dots drawn on it.

She was not a superstitious person, but she remembered one thing very clearly: that night when the ground turned violently, a trail of half-burnt coal was found on the ruined floor, as if someone — perhaps the mother, in her last moments — had tried to draw something on the floor before everything collapsed. No one noticed that detail amid the devastation, and she never told anyone, including Diệp Sương.

She folded up the piece of tree bark, put it in the wooden box where she still kept her few mementos, then stood up and closed the door, looking out at the night sky over Vân Tiêu Peak in the distance, where white clouds still lazily drifted across the mountain top as they had for hundreds of years, silent, distant, and - though she didn't know it - guarding something greater than anything a talisman painter in a small village could imagine.

The fire in the kitchen gradually died down to embers. Mrs. Chín Lài stood there for a while longer, then turned back, pulled the thin blanket over the baby's shoulders, who was sleeping soundly, breathing steadily, one hand still loosely grasped as if holding an invisible pen in a dream.