Chapter 1: The Gaze Beneath the Red Umbrella

The town of Qiyun nestled quietly between mist-veiled mountains and a mirror-still lake, like a page torn from an old book and forgotten at the bottom of a drawer. There were no malls, no noisy plazas. Even the clock tower, ancient and stoic, seemed to tick slower than it did anywhere else in the world. Here, time moved like the rain—unhurried, lingering, full of unspoken stories.

As spring edged toward summer, Qiyun saw more rain than sunlight. The kind of rain that came down soft but steady, like a singer’s melancholic vibrato echoing from a dusty gramophone. And on the night of May 31st, a Friday, that rain began to fall just before sunset and showed no sign of stopping.

By midnight, the streets were nearly empty—just the hush of rain hitting pavement and the flicker of dim streetlamps. At the local police station, Officer Li Fang had dozed off in his chair, head tilted back, mouth half-open. The shrill ring of the emergency phone jolted him awake.

He fumbled for the receiver.

“Dispatch,” a hesitant voice crackled on the line, “we got a call from someone near the old theater. They said there’s a woman in a red raincoat, standing in front of it… hasn’t moved in hours. Said she’s just standing there in the rain, not reacting, not doing anything. Like a statue.”

Li Fang blinked. “Wearing red, you said?”

“Red raincoat. Red umbrella, too. She’s been there since around ten. Still hasn’t moved.”

Li Fang felt a prickle down his spine. The old theater? That place had been abandoned for decades. No one had dared tear it down, but no one stepped inside either. Since the beginning of his service, the crumbling building had stood like a forgotten relic—its broken dome letting in the daylight like some celestial ruin, and its yawning black entrance turning sinister at night.

He grabbed his jacket, snatched up his car keys, and bolted out into the downpour.

The rain smacked against his windshield in sheets, distorting everything beyond the glass. Streetlights blurred into glowing halos. When he finally pulled into the square in front of the theater, the clock on his dash read 11:21 PM.

And there she was.

A figure in a crimson raincoat, clutching a matching red umbrella, standing motionless in front of the theater’s main entrance. She didn’t twitch, didn’t flinch. Her form was so still, it barely seemed real. The rainwater cascaded off her umbrella in streams, creating a curtain that separated her from the rest of the world.

Li Fang parked and stepped cautiously out of his vehicle.

“Ma’am?” he called gently, not wanting to startle her.

No response. The figure didn’t so much as lift her head.

He moved closer, reached out to touch her shoulder—

His hand met empty air.

In an instant, the umbrella slipped from where it had been held, clattering onto the wet pavement, its canopy splashing rainwater. But the woman—the raincoat—was gone.

Vanished.

The sound of the rain intensified all around him, thundering like it had swallowed the world whole.

Startled, Li Fang looked down and noticed something fluttering near his feet. A damp, yellowed piece of paper, soaked around the edges.

He bent down and picked it up.

It was a ticket stub.

Old. Faded. The print on it barely legible but still decipherable:

June 5, 1975 — 8:00 PM — “Requiem” Premiere Performance

Li Fang’s hands trembled. He knew that date.

That was the night the old theater caught fire. The blaze had taken twenty-seven lives. The building had been sealed off ever since.

He stared at the rusted doors of the theater.

A wave of unnatural cold crept up from the ground and curled into his chest.

The following morning, in the cramped meeting room of the Qiyun Police Department, the night’s events played out on a screen. A photo had been printed from the patrol car’s dashcam footage: it showed the woman in startling clarity, standing with the red umbrella exactly where Li Fang had seen her.

But in the final seconds of the recording, she began to fade—not walk away, not run. Fade, like mist dispersing into the night.

“Some kind of prank?” Chief Zhao’s brows were knitted. “Tech says the footage hasn’t been tampered with.”

“What about the ticket?” asked Deputy Chief Chen.

Li Fang placed it on the table. “The paper’s authentic. Print style matches documents from the ’70s. The ink's aged appropriately too. And the show listed on it…” He paused. “It was scheduled for the same night the fire broke out—half an hour before the blaze started.”

The room went quiet.

Li Fang continued, “The caller said the woman kept her head down the entire time. Never saw her face.”

“Were there any other items on-site?” another officer asked. “Shoes, maybe?”

“No,” Li Fang shook his head. “Just the umbrella. Oddly enough, it's brand new. Tags were still tucked into the lining.”

“Old ticket. New umbrella.” The chief exhaled slowly. “What are we dealing with here? You think this is… supernatural?”

Li Fang kept his voice even. “No. I think someone wants to resurrect a buried memory.”

Qiyun had its fair share of ghost stories. But none loomed larger than the tragedy at the old theater.

After the fire, every surviving member of the theater troupe left town. What remained were ashes, bodies, and rumors—including whispers of arson. The official cause was never fully established. Some blamed faulty wiring. Others murmured of something darker, deliberate.

“I remember my mom almost went to that performance,” said Officer Zhu, a younger recruit. “But she got a sudden fever and stayed home. She told me afterward she had this strange dream… said she saw rows of people sitting in the theater, but instead of a play, they were watching a funeral.”

“You believe that?” Li Fang arched a brow.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Zhu replied, “but I believe in vengeance. Especially the kind that festers for decades.”

On the third day, Li Fang took a trip to the town library.

The archives room was a dusty, windowless place that smelled of mildew and ink. He began digging through newspapers from the mid-70s, looking for anything connected to that fateful night.

One headline jumped out:

“Rising Star Lin Yun to Take the Lead in ‘Requiem’—Audience Anticipation Soars”

Lin Yun. A name he hadn’t heard before. She had been a promising young actress, only 23 at the time, and “Requiem” had been her debut as a leading lady.

Li Fang kept flipping pages. Three days after the fire, he found her name again—but now in a much smaller article.

An obituary.

“Lin Yun, age 23, perished in the fire. Body found near center stage, clutching her script.”

Next to the notice was a photograph.

Lin Yun—her expression unreadable, somewhere between serene and sorrowful, lips slightly curled into an enigmatic smile. Behind her in the photo was a stage prop.

A red umbrella.

A chill prickled down Li Fang’s spine.

Coincidence? Or something more?

It rained again that night.

A tea shop owner claimed he saw the woman once more. This time, no one called it in. But the old man was certain of what he’d seen.

“She was standing right there,” he told Li Fang. “In front of the theater. Talking to the door.”

“Talking?” Li Fang echoed.

“Whispering something. Over and over again. Couldn’t catch most of it. Just one line I heard again and again… like a line from a play.”

“What did she say?”

The old man frowned, as though plucking it from memory. “She said, ‘The flowers will bloom in the fire.’”

Li Fang stared at him.

“That sound familiar?” the shopkeeper asked.

He looked down at the old ticket again.

Requiem.

That night, back at the station, just as he was about to clock out, an email came in from the town’s historical archive office.

One line in the message made him sit up straight.

“Regarding Lin Yun—there is an anomaly in her autopsy report.”

He called the archive keeper directly.

“What kind of anomaly?” he asked.

“She wasn’t burned,” the voice on the other end said quietly. “Her body showed no signs of fire damage. The cause of death was a broken neck.”

Li Fang’s voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re saying… she died before the fire started?”

“That’s the conclusion we came to,” the archivist said. “Which means…”

“She was the first victim,” Li Fang finished for him.

Outside, the rain pounded harder against the windows.

And the red umbrella had not returned.