When the Compass Turns, the Lotus Blooms

Shen Qingci's life began at the well. On a rainy night in the year of Guihai, when she was crying in the delivery room, blood beads suddenly oozed from the bluestone slab of the ancient well in her old house, reflecting the shadow of a figure wearing a red coat. Grandfather pinched her horoscope and shook his head repeatedly - Si Gui Pure Water, a body of pure yin, with partial Yin Cheng Ge, a natural "evil star". For as long as I can remember, there have always been calls like silver bells coming from the well. The sister in red smiled at her through the manhole cover and said that she would give her a pair of shoes embroidered with Bingtilian. When girls of the same age were still counting the rouge patterns, she was already forced by her grandfather to recite "Song of the Yanbo Diaosou" and flick the compass with her immature fingertips. "Women are not allowed to practice strange arts." The scolding of the elders of the clan is still in her ears, but the red rope on the well platform is always entangled with her shadow. When I was seven years old, I stole a red rope in a camphor wood box and got a crescent scar on my palm; when I was twelve years old, I bumped into my grandmother's burning paper figurine, and the birth date horoscopes on the back of the paper figurine were exactly the same as hers. When the blood-colored wedding dress appeared on the altar table in the ancestral hall, and when the inverted birth chart revealed the mark of twins, Shen Qingci finally understood: every trembling of the compass pointer pointed to the tampered birth date; every bloody lotus that suddenly bloomed hinted at her fateful entanglement with the red evil in the well. The so-called family guardianship is nothing but a scam paved with the fate of twins. When the door of death in the Qi Men Pan and the evil spirit in the well opened at the same time, she held the red rope wrapped with copper coins - would she become the lotus being sacrificed, or would she be the one who could reverse the course of events? From a puppet controlled by destiny to a female master in charge of a strange sect, Shen Qingci understood in the bloody lotus shadow: the so-called fate is just a situation to be broken; the so-called growth is to turn one's own compass with one's own hands.