The Whispering Coffin

On the winter solstice of 1916, feather-like snowflakes clung to the eaves of Li Clan's ancestral hall in Henan Province. The century-old elm at the village entrance groaned under the weight of ice, its branches snapping like bone — an omen foretelling the passing of Old Master Li, the 99-year-old patriarch whose death left the village orphaned.

For decades, this Confucian sage had mended roads with his burial savings and carried river stones until his spine curved like a plow. Even in famine years, he'd split his cabbages, leaving only wilted leaves for himself while villagers feasted on the hearts. "A living Bodhisattva," they whispered, yet death showed no mercy.

The funeral procession was a sea of hemp robes. Villagers kowtowed before the cedar coffin until dusk, their foreheads imprinting the frostbitten earth. Only the eldest son, Li Da — himself a septuagenarian — remained to tend the vigil fire. "Spend freely in the afterlife, Father," he choked, tossing joss paper into the flames. The ashes spiraled upward, forming ephemeral ingots that dissolved into the northern wind.

Midnight bells tolled when it happened. A sigh, deep and resonant as a temple gong, emanated from the coffin. The vigil boys froze, their pupils dilating like startled hares. "Grandpa… Grandpa's sighing!" the youngest wailed. Li Da stumbled toward the bier, his arthritic knees cracking against stone. "Father, release your earthly bonds!" he pleaded. Another sigh answered, frosting the air with ghostly breath.

In the liminal haze before dawn, the patriarch materialized — not as the wizened elder they knew, but a youth with jet-black queue. "Beneath the third rafter lies my ledger," his voice echoed through pine-scented smoke, "When Old Zhang's crops fail or Widow Chen's roof leaks, let my coins speak."

At the burial ground, the pallbearers' shoulders bowed as if the coffin bore mountain stones. Li Da suddenly recalled the spectral vision. "We vow to uphold your legacy!" he cried, scattering grave soil like rice offerings. The ropes slackened instantly. As the coffin sank into the ancestral plot, snow began anew — villagers swore they saw the old master bowing within the flurries, his silhouette dissolving into plum blossoms.

Decades later, the ledger remains enshrined in the ancestral hall, its pages brittle yet untarnished. When floods ravaged the fields in '43 and again in '75, Li's descendants rebuilt dykes with the same rusted chisel their patriarch used to fortify the riverbanks. Even the Party Secretary, a grandson who now walks the corridors of Zhengzhou's government halls, keeps a joss stick perpetually smoldering by his desk — a silent pact between Confucian virtue and communist pragmatism.