On a rain-lashed night in the Year of the Rat, I came into the world wrapped in golden light, filling the delivery room with an exotic fragrance that startled everyone.
The midwife said my mother was carrying twins, but she delivered only a nine-jin lump of snow. When I was six, a bout of black urine and a raging fever nearly killed me. While I lay unconscious, four enormous snakes coiled around my bed: one white as fresh snow, one black as charcoal, one yellow as gold bars, and one red as the setting sun. Beside my pillow, soaked with cold sweat, they flicked their tongues and told me I was the Ziwei Star, fallen from the Northern Dipper Palace.
The day my cousin was possessed, I saw white smoke rising from the old lady’s incantation and recited the long-lost “Soul-Cleansing Spell” without thinking. At twelve, I ran into the Red Snake Immortal Lord in the outhouse. Its scales scraped against the earthen wall with a rustle. “It’s time for you to open your heavenly eye.”
From that night on, I could see mountain spirits and tree demons wandering by the windows. A fragmentary scroll from Medicine King Valley grew hot in my palm. My mother was always nagging that my trouser legs had gotten three inches too short, never knowing that the immortals of the four quarters had already marked her son. All that remained was to wait for the night when the seven stars aligned, and reclaim the Ziwei Star Chart.
