The Chronicle of the Azure Scales
In the late summer of 1998, when I returned to our old home in Hebei with the brass key my grandmother had pressed into my hand on her deathbed, the cobwebs beneath the eaves were dyed blood red by the slanting sunlight. The moment I inserted the key into the mottled copper lock, the wind chimes at the corner of the roof suddenly rang with no wind to stir them. Startled, I nearly dropped the carved wooden box in my arms, which smelled of mildew.
Inside the box lay three thread-bound notebooks with blue cloth covers. On the title page of the top one, the words "Twenty-third day of the eleventh month, winter, in the year Dingyou: Saw the guardian snake at the Li residence" stood out plainly. I recognized my grandmother's handwriting. She had always liked writing with ink she made herself from locust tree sap, and now those dark brown characters glimmered eerily in the dusk.
The next morning, I followed the notebook's directions to the old home of Grandma Li. Behind the collapsed courtyard wall, wild mugwort had grown waist-high, yet not a blade of grass grew where my eldest aunt had said the woodpile once stood. When I used a branch to brush away the loose soil, my fingertips suddenly touched something cold and slick. It was a whole snakeskin, three fingers wide, with dark red stains of blood still clinging to it.
"You mustn't go into that house."
The hoarse voice behind me startled me into falling onto the ground. I turned and saw an old man in a dark blue cloth jacket. A cloudy white film covered his murky right eye, and three fingers were missing from his left hand. "In '73, when they were building the reservoir, the blasting collapsed the Snake Immortal's cave, so that nest of azure-scaled snakes moved into Grandma Li's home." His remaining fingers pointed to the bloodstain on the shed skin. "See this cinnabar mark? The guardian snake has already claimed its master."
The old man said he had been on the reservoir blasting team back then. He told me Grandma Li's only son had never gone south to work. On the night of the Qingming Festival in 1975, a rainstorm washed away the cemetery on the mountain behind the village. Someone saw the eldest son of the Li family holding a spirit-summoning banner in the mudslide
