Two days after H'Lanh vanished, the village of Ngoc Trach descended into a silent, suffocating dread. No one spoke of it aloud, but everyone felt it—something was growing in the dark, moving softly between thatched rooftops and dense underbrush, sniffing for sleeping souls.
On the first night, there was a crash at the home of old Mr. Tong—the village gravedigger.
By dawn, he was found dead, sprawled flat on his back in the middle of the house.
His stomach had been slit open from neck to groin, his insides entirely removed—so cleanly, so precisely, that there wasn't a single drop of blood left in the room.
Only a small puddle of amniotic fluid at his feet.
And above it—scratches on the wall, tiny like a child's fingernails.
No one understood it.
Mr. Tong was a man, too old for childbirth, with nothing to gestate in his belly.
And yet, he had been cut open like a mother during a stillbirth.
On the second day, three more died.
The first was Old Lady Luu, 58 years old, who lived alone at the village's edge. She often brought offerings to the old shrine. They found her curled on her bed, eyes wide, stomach bloated, and right over her navel was a red palm-print—small, perfect, and vivid as menstrual blood.
The next two were newlyweds, married just three months.
They were discovered on their wedding mat, hands still clasped in rigor mortis.
Both of their stomachs had been sliced open as though for a C-section—but there were no children inside.
Instead, lying between their corpses was a small wooden doll, carved from jackfruit wood, eyes painted in dried blood, grinning ear to ear.
The deaths came quickly after.
The villagers smashed the shrine.
They burned every image of Ong Mon.
They begged their ancestors, wept, tore up every book and charm with the doll's name on it.
But the deaths didn't stop.
Every night, one or two villagers died.
And each was cut open—stomach first—even those who had never been pregnant.
Master Dam did not leave his hut.
He knew.
He had been the only one to face the thing and live.
But even he had begun to dream.
Always the same dream:
A child's voice calling, "Papa…"
Then a vision of a wet, red fetus crawling from a slit in someone's stomach, blinking at him with milky eyes…
And smiling with moss-covered teeth.
He understood.
The thing he had tried to seal had not been destroyed.
It had escaped—into a living vessel.
And from there, it multiplied.
It no longer needed a wooden form.
It needed bodies.
Many bodies.
Each death was a reverse-birth ritual.
Each opened stomach a makeshift womb.
It was once a doll.
Now it was a child.
Or perhaps—many children.
On the seventh night, a group of boys wandered near the ruined shrine just before dusk.
Moments later, screams tore through the trees, and they came running back, pale and trembling.
All except for Dinh, age seven.
They searched all night.
By morning, they found him—inside his mother.
Mrs. Thoa was sprawled in the courtyard, her shirt ripped open, her belly carved from hip to hip.
Inside was the body of little Dinh, still in his red T-shirt, but cold, purple, and with his neck snapped at a sharp angle.
No one understood how a fully-grown child could be "in the womb" again.
Not until Master Dam came to examine the body.
He reached into Thoa's mouth and pulled out a blood-stained talisman, its ink smeared and fragile, bearing a single phrase:
"My son has returned to me."
Master Dam fell silent for a long time.
Then he spoke:
"It is no longer him."
"Anyone who once prayed to the doll—even once in their life—has become a host."
"The belly is no longer flesh. It is a nest."
The deaths became an epidemic.
Each night—another.
Doctors from the district came.
Wanderers passing through.
Travelers.
None were spared.
Each time, the stomach was cut open.
And inside—not blood, not organs—
But children's hair,
Splinters of wooden toys,
And sometimes, tiny human fingers, sprouting roots from the intestines.
Villagers fled in droves.
Ngoc Trach became a village of hollow bellies.
In the darkness of his room, Master Dam reopened the ancient text.
On its final page, nearly illegible from mildew and rot, the script had been scrawled in something not ink—
But the menstrual blood of women who once bore demon spawn.
It detailed one last ritual.
Not a seal.
Not a prayer.
But a killing rite.
Not to bind the spirit.
But to destroy the womb—
So that nothing could ever be born again.
But to perform the rite, one condition must be met:
The womb must still live.
The woman must still breathe.
And she must have once carried Ong's seed.
Only one person fits that description:
H'Lanh.
If she's alive.
If she's still human.