The Tiger Coffin That Keeps the Dead at Bay

At the third quarter of the hour of the Rat, the bronze bell in the Zhu family ancestral hall suddenly rang out with a deafening clang.

Guo Xiuxuan flicked his horsetail whisk, snuffing out the ever-burning lamp. He ran a fingertip along the edge of his peachwood sword, and a bright red bead of blood trickled down the pattern of the Big Dipper.

The three incense sticks on the offering table snapped in unison. In the moonlight, their ashes coalesced into a twisted human face.

“Master!” A young novice burst through the carved wooden door, clutching a compass whose needle spun wildly. “The tiger coffin... The corpse-suppressing nails in the tiger coffin are bleeding!”

In the ancestral hall’s back courtyard, the ancient locust tree swayed without a breeze. Its gnarled roots heaved a slab of bluestone several feet into the air. The five-foot-long black iron tiger coffin was covered in dark red incantations, and dark red liquid was steadily seeping from its nine wrist-thick corpse-suppressing nails. When the drops fell on the stone platform, they sizzled as they ate into the surface.

Guo Xiuxuan’s pupils contracted. The corpse-suppressing nails, forged from century-old black iron, should have been as black as ink. Yet now, beneath the moonlight, they gleamed an eerie blue-gray. Dark patterns flowed over their surfaces. Looking closely, he saw they were densely packed Sanskrit incantations. This was clearly...