The Long Snake Takes A Wife

Bai Zhongtian was a child when his mother died, and the death was never explained. The people of the town said she had been taken by the Elder Immortal, and that was the end of the discussion. He leaves and stays away for years. When he comes back to Baiyun Town he finds the same stories still running the place. There are the phantom weddings of the Long Snake Immortal, held in the mountains where nobody is supposed to see them. There are the paper cuttings used to call the dead. There is the opera troupe that performs for an audience that is not there, and the red paper umbrella nobody will explain. A villager out gathering firewood comes across a wedding procession on the slope and reports what he saw. Bai Zhongtian takes that as a place to start and works through the town's stories one at a time, tracing each back to whoever benefits from it being told, and getting closer to what actually happened to his mother.