There is a custom in my hometown.

Unmarried women and children who die young are not cremated, nor are they entered into the ancestral tombs.

They are directly buried in a piece of land.

Once, there was a girl who gave birth out of wedlock and later died in a car accident. The mother and daughter were buried separately.

Some people even claimed to have seen their ghosts searching for each other at night.

I was sixteen when I died, caught between being a woman and a child.

So, I wasn't cremated either.

To be honest, I wasn't even buried.

Nobody knew that I was already dead.

My classmates still came to my house, knocking on the door with newly distributed textbooks, asking why I hadn't been to school.

It was my brother who answered the door.

My brother is twelve this year, his first zodiac year, and he's just started junior high school.

After winter passed, spring came. With the pollen increasing, his asthma flared up, and he had to stay home from school.

The TV sound was loud.

It drowned out all other noises in the house.

I was already dead.

Half of my corpse lay on the bamboo mat inside the house.

The other half hung from the beam.

My classmate saw it and exclaimed, "Newly made cured meat at your home?"

My brother rarely interacted with people and didn't answer her.

My classmate peeked inside the house again, "Is Feng Tong home? I have something to ask her."

My brother blocked the door.

"My sister... she... is sleeping."

Indeed, sleeping.

After my classmate left, my brother closed the door.

But soon, someone knocked on the door again.

"A delivery for Feng Tong, please sign for it."

It was something I had bought with the money I earned from part-time jobs before I died.

A food processor.

Specifically for grinding meat.

My mom said she wanted to make dumplings for me, and I bought it to save her the trouble of chopping the filling.

I never expected she'd use it to grind my corpse.

She worked very hard.

My father passed away early, and she single-handedly raised my brother and me.

To make life easier for her, I had always been working part-time jobs.

But this time, before the school term started, she suddenly discussed with me the idea of taking a year off from school to use the tuition fees for my brother's treatment.

My brother's asthma had been getting worse and couldn't be delayed any longer.

I agreed and called my teacher before the term started.

I planned to go to school to handle the formalities at the beginning of the term and then find a nearby factory job to earn money for the treatment during the year off.

My teacher asked about the situation and said that with today's advanced technology, asthma could be completely cured.

He even offered to lend me money.

I didn’t take the money; I just wanted to hurry and tell my mom that asthma could be completely cured.

But before I could say it, I died.

What I didn't expect was that my mom's idea of treating my brother's asthma didn't involve going to the hospital.

Instead, she decided to use a folk remedy.

Drying and grinding the flesh and blood of a loved one, mixing it with honey, and eating it.

The food processor roared to life.

Suddenly, my brother shouted, "Mom!"

"My sister's eye just moved..."