Ngoc Trach entered its third day without sunlight. Thick mist coated the forest trails, crawling down into the village alleys like incense smoke from an ancestral altar. Everyone knew death was near—lurking somewhere behind the layers of damp trees, in the sopping underbrush, in the sound of a child's laughter still drifting from the old shrine each night.
No one left their house after sunset.
No one dared speak the name Ong Mon.
Except for Master Dam—the strange man from Phu Tho—who remained in the thatched hut by the forest's edge. It was the same place where Old Man Tu had once lived, and where, long ago, forgotten sealing rites had been performed by monks who no longer had names.
On the mossy old table, the tools had been prepared: a faded yellow ritual cloth, three blood-smeared candles made from black chicken fat, a bronze mirror, and a crumbling Nom-script manuscript bound in sinew.
Master Dam had studied it for two full days.
Not because he didn't understand it.
But because he understood it too well.
This was no simple exorcism. No banishment. No ghost-summoning. This was a rite of binding—of sealing something that never should have crossed into this world in the first place. Something older than the ghosts. Something that existed between.
Ong Mon was not merely a restless soul.
It was a gate.
And if it wasn't sealed now—while it still resided in the form of a doll—it would grow. It would evolve. And soon it wouldn't need to possess people anymore.
It would have a real body.
Real flesh.
Real children.
That night, the fog turned thick as woodsmoke.
Rain fell like dust.
Inside the hut, the air was thick with forest incense and the stench of blood. Master Dam stood within the blood circle—drawn with a mix of black hen's blood and the powdered bones of a stillborn child. It spiraled inward, an ancient design from a lost era, whispered to him in dreams and old scriptures. He wore his ritual robe, hair tied tightly, eyes closed as if listening—not to the wind, but to something breathing beneath the earth.
On the altar sat the Ong Mon doll, placed inside a bronze basin and covered with a red cloth.
But it was no longer a lifeless toy.
Its body had swollen grotesquely, like a corpse bloated in water.
The wooden surface now resembled pale, veined skin.
Its black hair had grown down its back, damp and matted like seaweed, exuding the stink of long-dead rodents.
And the mouth…
The mouth smiled.
A slit stretched ear to ear, lined with hundreds of tiny, sharpened teeth.
Under the candlelight, they shimmered like polished pins.
Master Dam began to chant.
At first, the words were a mix of old Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese, but as the ritual deepened, the syllables turned guttural, alien—like the wind shrieking through cracks in a tomb. Like boiling water. Like an infant crying as it's buried alive.
Each verse struck the air like a blade.
The room shrank inward.
And then, the doll opened its eyes.
Once nothing more than hollow sockets, they now bore milky white orbs—clouded, dead, veiled with a thin membrane. The pupils were blood-red, glowing like coals in a winter furnace.
It turned its head slowly.
Looked directly at Master Dam.
"Why have you called me back, priest?"
The voice did not come from its mouth.
It came from inside Master Dam's mind—a chorus of many children, layered and overlapping. Some lisping. Some murmuring. Some screaming as if their throats had been slit.
"You want to trap me? Chain me? Bind me?"
"Too late."
Then it sprang upright.
Not a slow rise—but a sudden, snapping motion like a fish leaping from water. The red cloth flew into the air and burst into flames before it hit the floor.
Master Dam stepped back, drawing a wooden sword dipped in dragon's blood. He slashed through the air, activating the ritual circle.
Flames roared up in a ring.
The doll stood at the center of the fire and laughed.
The fire did not burn it.
Instead, it cracked open its skin, and from those cracks crawled white maggots—hundreds of them, writhing, falling to the ground and hissing into ash.
"You think I was the first?" it whispered.
"I was merely the first to survive.
Thirteen others came after me.
You thought I was alone?"
"No… I am many.
I am a nest.
And now, I am ready to hatch."
Suddenly, the floor split open.
A tiny hand reached up from beneath the altar.
Then another.
Then a third.
Dozens of pale, bloodied hands, belonging to children, clawed their way out from the earth.
Master Dam's voice faltered but pressed on. He began reciting the final portion of the rite—the "Heart Seal"—a forgotten invocation once used not to destroy the spirit, but to shatter its mind, to freeze its awareness, rendering it inert until the next cycle.
His throat bled from the strain, but he did not stop.
The flames roared higher. The doll screamed—not alone, but with the voices of hundreds, bursting like thunder in the hut.
Then—
Boom.
A shockwave.
The fire vanished.
By morning, the villagers came.
They found the hut partially burned.
Old Man Tu sat dead against the wall, eyes wide open, hands locked in prayer, flesh already stiff.
Master Dam lay unconscious in the center, hair turned snow white, lips crusted with dried blood.
But the doll?
It was gone.
Only its red robe remained, folded neatly on the altar.
And above it, written in blood, were the words:
"This time I spared you.
Next time, I won't."