I was born on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month.
When I came into the world, my grandfather rushed into the room and saw that I was a girl. He threw his head back and laughed with delight, then without hesitation gripped my mother's throat. Immediately afterward, he took his own life.
My grandfather was a yin-yang master who had studied abroad. In his will, he said everything he had done was to keep me alive and protect the family from decline, and to settle a feud between dragon descendants that had lasted five hundred years.
