On a winter night in 1937, the snow on the roof of Shanghai Paramount Theater bent the neon lights. I pretended to be Lin Yanqiu, a down-and-out martial arts student, clutching faded theater tickets. A woman in a moon-white cheongsam suddenly appeared in the mirror. Her earlobe, a silver pendant with a fox head, brushed against my shoulder injury: Zhong Kui married his sister, and after singing, don't walk alone. That night I saw her nine tails burned to death by starvation, and the cinnabar on the back of her neck was the same shape as my birthmark.
In an antique store in 2023, I was rubbing old theater tickets and laughing at the rumors of hauntings, but the milk tea girl revealed that the bronze mirror in the warehouse was hiding a drowned ghost. When she crushed the ghost with her bare hands, the starry birthmark exposed on the collar of her sweater fit perfectly with the cinnabar mark on the back of the theater ticket.
Every night I dream of going back to the ruins of Dunhuang, where the nine-tailed fox fairy dips my blood into the talisman of death. On the seventh night, her fox ear brushed against the tip of my nose: If I don't believe it in this life, I will really become a fool.
On the day when the ghost market was robbed, centuries-old resentment seeped out from the cracks of the bridge across the river. When the green-faced ghost king's sharp claws penetrated her chest, fox fire burned into my pupils - the fire in the theater in my past life and the memory of this life were suddenly connected. Before she turned into a star, the tip of her tail imprinted Sanskrit words on my palm: You will find me next time.
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.
