The year I was born, my family moved our ancestral graves. They say that when they lifted the coffin, countless dead snakes lay packed beneath it. Though dead, they seemed almost alive, their bodies twisted into every imaginable shape as they hissed and flicked their tongues. The sight was as eerie as it gets.
They said it was the snakes’ grudge: my family must have committed some heinous, unforgivable crime to draw so many snakes.
Some foul Taoist no one knew claimed that smearing the coffin with blood from my unborn heart would suppress the dead snakes. My grandfather believed his nonsense and used my unborn heart’s blood on the coffin. Instead, it summoned evil spirits. I was haunted by countless ghosts from the moment I was born. My grandmother spent her life force and gave up ten years of her lifespan to set a ward, but when I turned eighteen, someone sacrificed me to the Snake Lord. The ward broke, and I became pregnant with a snake. My mother fled with me to Biluo Village, but that caused the gates of the underworld to swing wide open, and evil spirits ran rampant…
