Glazed Bones and Ashes

Du Yanqiu's kiln exploded, and in the purple smoke, the outlines of a boy and girl sacrificed at the kiln three hundred years ago emerged. The woman holding an umbrella had three vermilion moles at the corner of her eye. Those were the very same amber eyes that kept appearing in his dreams. That night, the Ink Pool turned to blood, and the words “Millennium Calamity” took shape. Her fingertip brushed the side of his neck. “The piece of ink you shattered broke my seal.” A baby's cry with a white tail erupted from the woodshed, shattering the rainy night. Shards of porcelain covered the ground, reflecting fox shadows everywhere. Seven years later, his daughter could understand the secret language of crickets. They said the new county magistrate had a pair of human-bone dice hanging from his waist. The night Bai Li returned covered in blood, her tail severed, a charred fox shadow smiled in the bronze mirror. “Good girl, help your mother retrieve something...” In a clay jar at the mass grave, a mummified cricket suddenly screamed, “Run! That's not your mother!” The moment the fake fox pelt was torn open, seven centipedes crawled out The mastermind behind the child sacrifices all those years ago was the biological father of the current “Scent Judge.”