If you meant a specific Bilibili video or creator from 2020 titled “Deliver Us from Evil,” let me know — I can help track or reconstruct it further.
The danmaku returned, but different—slower, heavier, each line a confession:
“Deliver us from evil — not by removing the dark, but by giving us the courage to name it.”
Lin Wei refreshed. The video was gone. Deleted. But in its place, a new comment thread appeared on a completely unrelated Genshin Impact fan edit. Hundreds of users, all posting the same four words in danmaku:
By June 2020, “The Lantern” had 80,000 followers. Bilibili’s official team noticed and offered server support. The original video—20200401—never resurfaced. But its ghosts found a home.
Deliver us from evil. Deliver us from evil. Deliver us from evil.
“My uncle locked me in the garage for three days.” “She said if I told anyone, they’d take my little brother.” “I haven’t left my room since March. Not because of the virus.”
Lin Wei never learned his real name. But he’d learned something else: that evil doesn’t always wear horns. Sometimes it wears a family photo. And sometimes, deliverance begins with a single person choosing to see .
In the spring of 2020, when the world felt like a held breath, Lin Wei, a 22-year-old college student in Shanghai, found himself scrolling Bilibili at 2 a.m. again. The pandemic had turned his dorm into a gilded cage. His days blurred into livestreams, danmaku scrolling like digital rain, and the hollow comfort of autoplay.
He messaged @OldSoul_2003 again: “What do you need?”
“They told us to stay home to stay safe. But some of us were already trapped. Deliver us from the fathers who shout. From the mothers who drink. From the silence after the slam.”
He traced the usernames. Most were new accounts, created April 2020. But one stood out: , whose upload history was a single, private playlist titled The Quarantine Tapes .
