The summer I was ten, I was dragged, without realizing it, into the thin coffin beneath the cornfield.
For seven days, I burned with fever and babbled nonsense. The fortune-teller who came to save me pressed three copper coins against my brow, then turned to my mother and said, “The door opens onto the ghost road, the window admits the yin wind. Someone has laid the ‘Extinction Curse’ on this house. He survived because half a scrap of food from the Ancestral Master is still written into his fate.”
My family was so poor that even the thin coffin my grandmother had been clamoring for was made from our dismantled bed boards. My mother knelt before the master, beating her forehead until it bled.
From then on, I followed him from one feng shui-trapped home to another. I saw the “White Tiger Carrying a Corpse,” where a dry well swallowed people; the “Yin Debt Calling for a Life,” where a bed faced a mirror; and human hearts, more terrifying than ghosts.
My master never said who had put me in that coffin that night. Not until last month, when Widow Li from the neighboring village died suddenly and we went to collect her bones. My master stared at the three grooves carved into her doorframe, and the compass in his hand suddenly spun wildly. They were the final strokes of the “Three Yin Soul-Locking” spell.
In the coffin, lodged beneath Widow Li's fingernails, were wood shavings identical to those on my family's doorframe.
At last, my master spoke, his voice bitter. “They never targeted just one household...”
