I am the only descendant of the papermaker in the village. My master warned me before he died: "When you prick a person, you don't need to touch the eyes, and when you prick a ghost, you don't paint the skin." But just yesterday, Ergou, the village bully, forced me to pierce a pair of boys and girls for his dead daughter to be buried with her, and also added "yin and yang eyes". I was forced to break the habit. That night, the baby's cry came from Wang Ergou's house. The next day, all seven members of his family died tragically, and their death conditions were exactly the same as the paper figures I made. From then on, my life was completely out of control. Some people offered me 100,000 yuan to be a "living stand-in", while others begged me to be a "ghost house" for good fortune. I looked at the bamboo strips and colored paper in my hands, and finally understood: What is tied up is not paper, but the greed of the human heart. And I have been sucked into a huge whirlpool from which there is no turning back.
