I am the fourth coffin boy.
I grew up listening to ghost stories in a town at the southern foot of the Qinling Mountains. My ancestors worked as escorts for a living, leaving some wild ways to recognize Feng Shui and identify bad luck. When I was forty years old, I unearthed some old things from the bottom of the box - half a piece of tattered silk with seven blood stars on it, and a box soaked with patina.
Since that day, corpse moths have chased me through the hem of my clothes, the songs of the sharks have entered the cabin of the ship, and the mirror of the desert has reflected the knife of my previous life. Some of the brothers who walked across the road with me were folded under the Longling sarcophagus, and some were buried in Guixu Haiyan. Alive? There is only a fat man who is greedy for money and afraid of death, an old man who is always cleaning his knife, and a returned girl who is more stable with a compass than a gun.
Someone asked me whether what I wrote was true or false.
I took a sip of dry smoke and knocked on the three bronze fragments on the table:
The "Xu Gate" is about to be opened, and all that can be written is in these three million words.
As for what can't be written... Shh, listen, is that old Luoyang shovel in the corner ringing again?
