Carpenter Cui took over the task of repairing the ancestral hall, but dug out half a piece of bloody sandalwood deep in the beam. From that night on, the names on the merit book oozed with ink, corpse-like moss bloomed where the wood shavings fell, and the moonlight always illuminated the newly carved window lattice into the red of a wedding dress. When his crazed grandfather began to carve dolls in his dream forty years ago, when the bird pattern on the mahogany sword swallowed the first drop of fingertip blood, the fragmentary pages of the family tree burned by the old woodcutter before his death suddenly appeared - those names covered by ink stains turned out to be the brides sacrificed to the wood spirit.
