The first time Lin Yifan saw her profile, he swiped right without thinking.

Her name was Xiaoqian. Three photos: one of her standing under a flowering tree, one of her holding a cup of tea with both hands, one of her looking away from the camera as if she hadn’t noticed someone was taking the picture. None of the photos looked staged. None of them looked like they belonged on a dating app at all. She looked like someone’s memory.

They matched within the hour.

“Hi,” she wrote. “Do you like old trees?”

It was an odd opening line. Most girls on this app started with “hey” or a waving emoji. Lin Yifan stared at his phone for a moment, then typed: “Depends on the tree.”

“There’s one near my apartment. A big locust tree. It’s over three hundred years old. I go there every evening. You should come.”

He should have found it strange. A first message inviting him to a tree. No small talk, no “what do you do for work,” no coy emoji. But her profile picture showed a face so delicate it almost hurt to look at, and Lin Yifan was a twenty-seven-year-old software developer who had not been on a date in eight months. Strange felt like an upgrade from boring.

“Sure,” he replied. “Tomorrow evening?”

The locust tree stood in the courtyard of an old residential compound in the southern part of the city—the kind of neighborhood that had somehow survived the wrecking balls and glass towers, its low brick buildings huddled together like old people waiting for a bus that would never come.

The tree was enormous. Its trunk was thicker than a car, its bark twisted into deep furrows that looked like frozen screams. Its branches spread out in every direction, dense with small oval leaves that rustled even when there was no wind. The air around it was cooler than the rest of the street, and it smelled faintly sweet—the scent of locust blossoms, though it was not the season for blooming.

Xiaoqian was already there, sitting on a stone bench beneath the canopy. She looked exactly like her photos, which almost never happened in real life. She wore a simple white dress and her hair was tied back loosely, a few strands falling across her face. When she saw Lin Yifan approaching, she smiled.

“You came,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Most people don’t.” She gestured for him to sit beside her. “They say they will, but then something comes up. Work. Traffic. A sudden headache.” She laughed softly. “Ghosts, I guess.”

Lin Yifan sat down. The stone bench was cold—colder than stone had any right to be on a summer evening. He felt a chill run up his spine, but he told himself it was just the shade of the tree.

They talked for two hours. Xiaoqian asked him questions no one else ever asked: what he dreamed about as a child, what he was most afraid of, whether he believed in things he couldn’t explain. She listened to his answers with an intensity that made him feel like the only person in the world. Her eyes never left his face. They were beautiful eyes—dark and deep—but there was something in them he couldn’t name. Something hungry.

When he finally checked his phone, it was past ten. “I should go,” he said reluctantly. “Work tomorrow.”

“Come back,” she said. It was not a question. “Come back tomorrow evening. Same time. I’ll be here.”

He came back the next evening. And the next. And the next.

By the end of the first week, Lin Yifan was exhausted.

He told himself it was the late nights, the long walks to and from the old compound, the lack of proper sleep. But it was more than that. He woke up every morning feeling like something had been drained out of him while he slept. His limbs were heavy. His thoughts were slow. His skin had taken on a grayish pallor that his coworkers commented on.

“You look terrible,” his desk-mate Zhou told him. “Are you sick?”

“Just tired.”

“Tired from what? You’ve been leaving at six every day. You never used to leave at six.”

Lin Yifan didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to explain that every evening, as the sun began to set, he felt an almost physical pull toward that old courtyard—a need to see Xiaoqian that went beyond desire or affection. It was like a thread had been tied around his chest and was being reeled in, slowly, one evening at a time.

His dreams had changed too. Every night, the same dream: he was lying at the base of the locust tree, and its roots were growing over him, wrapping around his legs, his arms, his throat. Xiaoqian sat on the stone bench above him, watching. She wasn’t smiling. She looked sad—profoundly, terribly sad—but she didn’t move to help him.

“Don’t come back,” she whispered in the dream. Her lips didn’t move. “Please. Don’t come back.”

But he always came back.

On the tenth evening, Lin Yifan arrived at the courtyard earlier than usual. The sun was still above the rooftops, painting the old bricks in shades of orange and gold. The locust tree cast a shadow that seemed far too large for its physical size, stretching across the entire courtyard like a dark blanket.

Xiaoqian was not on the bench.

He waited. The sun sank lower. The courtyard emptied of light. Still no Xiaoqian. An unease he couldn’t explain crept into his chest. He stood up from the bench and walked around the tree, peering into the deep shadows between its roots.

A sound reached him. A low, rhythmic scraping. It came from the other side of the compound, where a row of dark windows stared out like empty eye sockets. Lin Yifan walked toward the sound, his footsteps unnaturally loud on the old flagstones.

Through a gap in a crumbling wall, he saw a courtyard he had never noticed before. It was smaller than the main one, hidden from view by the angle of the buildings. In the center stood another locust tree—smaller than the first, but clearly connected to it by a network of roots that broke through the ground like the back of some buried sea creature.

Xiaoqian was there. She was kneeling before a woman.

The woman was ancient. Her skin was the color and texture of tree bark, cracked and furrowed. Her hair hung in long gray ropes, tangled with dried locust blossoms and dead leaves. She sat on a throne of twisted roots that emerged from the ground as if they had grown specifically to hold her body. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth was open—a dark, bottomless hole.

Kneeling beside Xiaoqian were two other girls. They were just as beautiful as Xiaoqian, just as pale, just as still. All three of them were pressing their hands against the tree-woman’s body, and something was flowing from their palms into her bark-like skin. Something that glowed faintly, the color of moonlight on water.

Life force. The life force of every man they had seduced and drained, now being fed to the thing that owned them.

The old woman’s eyes opened. They were not human eyes. They were hollow spaces filled with crawling things—beetles, centipedes, pale worms that had never seen light. They swiveled in their sockets and fixed directly on Lin Yifan.

“Another one,” the tree-woman said. Her voice was the sound of branches scraping against a window in winter. “Xiaoqian, you’ve brought me another one. Good girl. Bring him closer.”

Xiaoqian turned. Her face, which had always looked sad in Lin Yifan’s dreams, now streamed with silent tears. Her mouth moved, forming a single word: Run.

Lin Yifan ran.

He did not go home. He did not know where to go. He wandered the city streets until dawn, shivering despite the summer warmth, feeling the thread in his chest pull tighter with every step. He knew that when evening came, he would go back. He knew he could not stop himself.

At a small temple on the outskirts of the city—a place he had passed a hundred times without ever entering—he collapsed on the steps. An old Taoist priest found him there, pale and shaking, muttering about roots and beetles and a girl who cried without making a sound.

The priest listened. When Lin Yifan finished, the old man nodded slowly.

“A locust tree demon,” he said. “One of the worst kinds. They grow for centuries, feeding on the dead, until they learn to feed on the living. They trap young women’s souls—suicides, mostly, girls who died with nowhere to go—and use them as bait. The girls don’t want to do it. They have no choice. The tree owns their spirits the way it owns the soil it grows in.”

“How do I stop it?”

“You don’t. You’re already half-drained. If you go back, you’ll die. If you don’t go back, the thread will pull until your heart gives out. Either way—” the priest shrugged, “—the tree gets what it wants.”

“There has to be something.”

The priest was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached into his robes and pulled out a small pouch made of yellow silk. “This is cinnabar mixed with the ashes of a peach-wood charm. It’s the only thing that hurts a tree demon. But someone has to get close enough to pour it into the roots. Very close. And the tree will fight.”

Lin Yifan took the pouch. His hand was steady for the first time in days.

That evening, he walked back to the courtyard.

Xiaoqian was on the bench, exactly where she always was. The setting sun caught her white dress and made her look like she was glowing. She looked up at him with those deep, sad eyes.

“You came back,” she said. There was no surprise in her voice. Only resignation.

“I know what you are,” Lin Yifan said.

“I know you know.” She looked down at her hands. They were beautiful hands—long fingers, perfect nails. But in the deepening twilight, Lin Yifan could see through them. Just slightly. Just enough.

“Then help me,” he said. “Help me kill it.”

Xiaoqian’s head snapped up. For the first time, something other than sadness moved behind her eyes. Fear. And beneath the fear, the faintest glimmer of something that might have been hope.

“You can’t kill it,” she whispered. “I’ve been here for sixty years. Others have been here longer. The tree’s roots go down into the earth so deep they touch the water table. It will drink us all until there’s nothing left.”

“Then we give it something it can’t digest.”

He showed her the yellow pouch.

They waited until midnight, when the tree-woman’s feeding began. Xiaoqian led him through the gap in the wall into the hidden courtyard. The tree-woman was already there on her root-throne, eyes closed, mouth open, waiting. The other two ghost-girls were already kneeling at her feet, their life force streaming from their palms in thin silver ribbons.

The roots. Lin Yifan had to get to the largest root—the one that connected the small locust tree to the ancient one in the main courtyard. It was as thick as a man’s thigh, breaking through the flagstones like a petrified serpent.

He crept toward it, the pouch clutched in his hand.

The tree-woman’s eyes snapped open.

“XIAOQIAN!”

The scream was not a sound so much as a physical force. It hit Lin Yifan like a wall of wind, knocking him backward. Roots erupted from the ground around him—dozens of them, thin and black and fast as whips. They wrapped around his ankles, his wrists, his throat.

“Did you think cinnabar could hurt me?” The tree-woman’s bark-face split into something that might have been a smile. “I have drunk the souls of seventeen generations. I have roots in the underworld. I am older than this city, older than the dynasty that built it. A pouch of powder is nothing. It is nothing.”

The roots tightened. Lin Yifan felt his bones creak.

Xiaoqian moved.

She was faster than anything human—because she was not human, had not been human for sixty years. She crossed the courtyard in a blur of white and snatched the pouch from Lin Yifan’s hand. Before the tree-woman could react, Xiaoqian drove the pouch directly into the largest root, tearing it open with her bare hands.

The cinnabar and peach-wood ash spilled into the root’s pulsing flesh.

The tree screamed.

It was a sound that Lin Yifan would hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life—a sound that seemed to come from under the earth, from the sky, from inside his own skull. The roots convulsed. The ones around his body went slack and withdrew. The tree-woman’s throne cracked and splintered, and she clawed at the air with her bark-covered hands. Leaves rained down from the canopy above, shriveled and black.

Xiaoqian was burning. The cinnabar was destroying her too—she was spirit-stuff, tied to the tree by the same dark magic that fed it. Her white dress blackened at the edges. Her skin began to flake away like ash.

“Go,” she said. Her voice was calm now. Almost peaceful. “The thread is broken. You’re free.”

Lin Yifan tried to reach for her, but she stepped back, her body already dissolving into motes of pale light that rose toward the dying tree’s branches.

“Sixty years,” she whispered, the last words of a girl who had died long before he was born. “Thank you for seeing me.”

The old compound was demolished the following spring. A developer bought the land and announced plans for a luxury apartment tower. The construction crew who arrived to clear the site found the locust tree dead—its trunk hollow, its branches bare, its roots rotted through from the inside.

They poured concrete over the stump.

Lin Yifan recovered, slowly. His color returned. His strength came back. He stopped dreaming of roots. He deleted the dating app. He got a new phone. He tried to move on.

But sometimes, on summer evenings when the air smelled sweet for no reason, he would find himself walking toward the southern part of the city, toward a construction site where a new tower was rising. And he would stop at the fence and stare at the spot where a three-hundred-year-old tree used to stand.

The concrete had cracked there. Just slightly. Just enough for something small and green to push through.

A locust seedling. Growing toward the light.