My name is Chen Wu. I am an orphan and grew up eating the food of hundreds of families. People in the village say that I am a broom star who will kill my children and my parents. Whoever gets involved will be in bad luck. Only the lame old man at the end of the village was willing to take me in. He taught me how to draw talismans and recite mantras, but he never let me call him master. "Baby, there are some things that you can't get rid of if you get them on." He always smokes dry cigarettes with squinting eyes. When he was sixteen years old, the old man died. Before he died, he held my hand tightly and dug his nails into my flesh: "He... Zhenhe..." He died before he finished speaking. The villagers buried him hastily, and no one cared about the last words of a crazy old man. Until seven days later at night, I heard crying by the river.
