> The instant the carved wooden door of Capital City House No. 81 opened, I heard an opera singer's voice from a hundred years ago. > "Come in, the eighty-first guest." The woman in a qipao smiled at me from the mirror. > They said my great-grandmother had been the last owner of this mansion, a sorceress who used living people to raise gu. > At midnight every day, the mansion would change its face on its own: a Ming Dynasty execution ground, a Qing Dynasty opera house, a Republican-era bridal chamber. > It was only when I found the genealogy in the bedroom at the deepest part of the mansion that I realized every guest's name was written in it, > and my name had been circled in red cinnabar three hundred years ago.---Capital City
