"That's..."
Above the open night sky before Li Ran, a large lantern floated in midair, like a Kongming lantern that had been released into the sky.
According to conventional understanding, a Kongming lantern was made by building a square frame out of bamboo strips, covering it with paper to make a lantern, and burning pine resin at its base. Once lit, the hot air carried it up into the sky.
But the sky lantern before him was made by stretching an entire human skin over bamboo strips. Its limbs, bonelessly bent and stretched, were fixed to the base, while its face had been pulled taut and flattened across the very top of the lantern. From a distance, it looked like a flattened human face grinning eerily at him.
If you lived in a high-rise and opened your window in the middle of the night only to see something like that, wouldn't you be scared out of your wits on the spot?
"Could this be the 'lighting the sky lantern' Grandpa Ge mentioned?"
Grandpa Ge had said that the fifteenth day of the instance was Night of Madness. That evening, there would be activities like dragon lantern dances, lighting sky lanterns, floating river lanterns, and guessing lantern riddles...
At the time, Li Ran had interpreted these things in the ordinary way.
Only when he saw the human-skin sky lantern before him did he suddenly realize how one-sided his assumptions had been.
He couldn't even begin to imagine what the other lanterns, or the Dragon Lantern, would be like.
Fortunately, that thing didn't seem to mean him any harm.
By the time he got back from Back Street, it was eight in the evening.
Li Ran hurried home. The later it got, the more bizarre everything felt.
He could clearly hear children