Reading the Yin Talisman at Night

After my grandfather died suddenly, strange things began happening in the old house: bowls clattering in the middle of the night, eerie footsteps pacing outside the window, and my grandmother growing more frightened by the day. They all pointed to a secret attic stash my grandfather had vaguely mentioned before he died. At the bottom of a dusty camphorwood chest, I found a book called Folk Methods for Suppressing Evil, sticky as blood. Its pages held distorted characters written in cinnabar, my grandfather's notes on exorcism, and a blood-marked talisman labeled "Do Not Draw," revealing another side of the honest old carpenter.

To protect my grandmother and secure the old house, I ignored the book's warning that it could "summon evil" and clumsily copied a house-protection talisman. I didn't know that every trembling stroke of cinnabar was awakening an even deeper darkness. The moment I stuck the talisman to the wall, something heavy dragged across the attic floor. A blurry black shadow that wasn't mine appeared in the mirror. The words "attract filthy things" in my grandfather's notes were coming true, step by step. My journey of learning Taoist arts to protect my family had become a fight to the death against unknown evil spirits.