My name is Liang Jingzhe. I was born on the twenty-eighth day of the third lunar month in 1989.
The day I was born coincided with Jingzhe, the Awakening of Insects. Yang energy rises, and spring thunder rumbles. It should have been an auspicious day, but few people know that it was the Year of the Earth Snake.
Those born in a Ji year are mostly wood near fire. Metal is born from this, and does me no harm; what I must avoid is encountering flourishing, vigorous metal.
In the funeral-guarding trade, this day is especially ominous: when the Earth Snake meets Jingzhe, the dead borrow a pig.
Only later did I learn that from that very day, one of my feet had already crossed the gates of hell, and my name was on the King of Hell’s register.
That is the fate of a funeral guardian.
