My name is Chen Jiusheng. I was born as the blood moon lit the three-hundred-year-old locust tree in Qingwu Village, making it look like the shadow of a bleeding ghost. The coin-sized mark on the sole of my right foot was a ghost-face totem. My cries sounded like air wheezing through a broken bellows, startling the midwife so badly that she dropped her scissors. My grandfather swung a peachwood sword at the white vapor inside the old locust tree, but a deathly pale hand burst from its roots and dragged him underground. With his dying breath, he told me to marry the ghost bride in the unmarked grave on the back hill if I wanted to survive. That night, the red-clad female ghost beneath the blood moon whispered in my ear that she wanted to be my wife. A red cord with a blackened fingernail tied to it had also appeared out of nowhere on my chest. Strange murders kept happening in the village, and beneath the old locust tree, black bloodstains that could never be wiped clean kept forming ghostly faces... From the moment I was born, ghosts and monsters have haunted me. My life is a terrifying nightmare that began beneath the blood moon.
