Village Temple

Village Temple is a long supernatural novel by the online author Duan Dao, serialized on Zongheng Chinese from 2009. It runs to roughly 2.86 million characters and has also circulated under the title Strange Disappearances, the Supernatural Surfaces: Village Temple on platforms such as Sina Reading. Set against the folk-belief reality of rural North China—"every village has a temple, every temple has a god"—the story begins with an eerie village temple: the village has many temples, yet few ever ask where they came from or what exactly people are burning incense and bowing to day after day. The main thread follows rural youths Yin Le, Chen Jin, and others, who come to realize amid a string of strange events that the deities seated in the temples receiving incense may be malevolent entities masquerading under divine names to bewitch the world. The plot is driven by incidents such as the struggle over a stone roller and warnings from a Daoist, and through passages like "Burning Grandma's Temple" and "Hunting Down the Yellow Weasel" it traces the protagonists' journey from ignorant youths to active destroyers of temple evil; woven throughout are images like the thousand-year Sky-Gazing Stone and the Spirit Water That Sees the World, binding greed for treasure, karmic cycles, and rural human feeling into one fabric. With rural culture as its ground, the novel folds folk legend and the strange into a suspenseful atmosphere, producing a narrative style that intertwines the real and the illusory—one of the more representative supernatural web novels around 2009. Its author placed second in the first "Popular Author Contest" on the strength of this work, and a comic adaptation is planned. Note that the book has mainly circulated as a web serialization, with no verified Chinese print publication.