The day I was born, my grandfather lined up eighteen red-lacquered coffins outside the delivery room. The village elders said it was the “Eighteen Rites of Ghost Marriage”: they would use my life force to nourish ghost brides and turn our family into a “wealthy clan of the underworld.”
From the age of three, I had to feed the corpse in each coffin drops of blood from my fingertips. When I was ten, the “ghost brides” began slipping bloodstained hairpins under my pillow. On the night of my fifteenth birthday, my grandfather tied me up in the ancestral hall, planning to let all eighteen ghost brides “have their fill” and take my three souls and seven spirits in exchange for his family’s wealth.
What he didn’t know was that I had secretly learned the Reverse Yin Art, left behind by my great-grandmother, a fox spirit who escaped years ago. The night I was bound, I bit my tongue, used the blood to draw a formation, and absorbed seventy percent of the eighteen ghost brides’ Yin power!
When the coffin lids burst open, the fiercest of the red-clad ghost brides knelt before me and called me “Master.” My grandfather had only just raised his tobacco pipe when the ghost bride’s long fingernails pinned him to the wall.
From that day on, I led the eighteen ghost brides back to the village:
- The old woman Wang at the village entrance poisoned my food back then? I had a ghost bride possess her and forced her to eat steamed buns full of maggots for three days.
- A Taoist from the neighboring village came to capture me? I had the ghost brides twist his peachwood sword into a pretzel.
- My grandfather fled to a haunted temple to seek protection? I tore the temple down and had the eighteen ghost brides grind his “underworld connections” into the dirt!
But I never expected that one of the eighteen ghost brides was my own elder sister, whom my grandfather had killed years ago. And behind him, an even more ruthless “underworld clan” was watching and waiting to claim my life…
