Fox Bone

My name is Gu Yu. The day I was born, red rain fell from the sky, and every fox on the mountain behind our village howled through the night. Every household in the village kept its doors tightly shut.

Liu the Blind, the village fortune-teller, told my grandmother that from the moment I was born, I had taken the fox immortal’s bewitching bones. Ten thousand foxes had bowed before me. I was born with an alluring nature, and he told my grandmother to strangle me.

On my twentieth birthday, the fox pelt that had hung in my house for twenty years began to speak. It clamored for my bones. Fortunately, my grandmother traded her life for a jade pendant, and I discovered that there was a fox immortal inside it. He said he had come to protect me, but an old Taoist with a bull-like nose said I wouldn’t live past twenty-three. If I wanted to survive, I had to become his disciple…