As I placed the phoenix crown on the fox-spirit bride with my own hands, she licked her fangs and chuckled. “The blood of a literary star really is sweeter than a top scholar's.”
At a fortune-telling stall in Luoyang, three copper coins bought my fate.
The old Daoist said I was cursed with the fate of a lone star, yet branded a Big Dipper mark into my palm.
Before my childhood sweetheart fell unconscious, she clutched a red cord and pleaded, “Don't let anyone wearing a tiger-head hat touch you...”
Then, on my wedding night, I lifted the bridal veil and saw the cinnabar mole at the corner of my bride's mouth.
It was unmistakably the death curse the old Daoist had carved for me with a copper coin at his fortune-telling stall!
Fragments of my shattered memories began to return:
Three hundred fox-faced paper offerings from the sunken-ship case on the Bian River, the blood of a star deity where a finger had been severed from the City God statue,
and someone altering my childhood sweetheart's allotted years in the Book of Fate every night as I dreamed...
“Since when was the seventh star of the Big Dipper fit to preside over the imperial examinations?” The old Daoist tore off his human skin, and nine tails pierced the night sky.
The souls of three hundred examinees wailed at the hem of his robe: “We beg the Star Deity to reopen the Literary Star Pavilion!”
I tightened my grip on the bloodstained judge's brush and laughed.
Did that stupid fox really not know that I was the one who burned the Book of Fate thirty years ago?
If Heaven's will has made me a thief who steals from karma, then for the impoverished scholars of the world...
I'll steal a top-scholar scheme that shakes the heavens!
