At eighteen, I was forced into a pact with my creditor: a greedy fox immortal from the Northeast.
“Girl, your family owes me eighty years’ worth of incense offerings!”
Wearing the copper-coin hat passed down through my family, my spirit-seeing eyes revealed evil spirits throughout the village:
A ghost-wedding dress writhing inside the stove, a corpse ginseng sobbing deep in the old forest, the resentful bones of a boatmen’s guild sinking and surfacing beneath the Songhua River…
Third Master Hu munched on a frozen pear and gave orders: “Bind the coffin with inked carpenter’s line, and offer sticky-bean buns to the ash immortal.”
When merit turned the last copper coin red, I took charge of the Five Immortals’ Registry:
“Third Master, the sow in Zhangjiagou is having a difficult birth. The fee is ten sticky-bean buns!”
