In an old house at the edge of the city, children sleep on thefloor and learn to listen.Grandma Yi keeps the balance. She lights incense, shifts furniture by inches, and teaches the children when to speak-and when silence is safer. The house has rules. It breathes. It remembers. And it can hold only so much.Cheung Hon-Yiu counts.He counts footsteps, voices, pauses between breaths. He knows when a room is full before it looks crowded. When the children begin telling ghost stories-urban legends passed as entertainment-something begins to change. Words linger. Pressure gathers. The house listens too closely.What follows is not a haunting, but an accumulation.When the house finally breaks, fire moves faster than it should. In the chaos, Yiu sees a child standing where no one should be. By morning, everyone is accounted for.And yet, something is wrong.As officials arrive and the children are displaced, the city closes around them, indifferent and unchanged. The house is gone-but what passed through it has not finished choosing where it belongs.Trials of the West: The Journey Begins is a quiet horror novel about memory, survival, and the danger of naming what should remain unspoken.The journey does not end here.It only learns how to move.