My name is Qin E. Before I was thirteen, my biggest worry was the dirty things that were following behind me—they always came uninvited, lying outside my window and squatting under my bed, and couldn't be driven away. My adoptive parents moved three times because of this, from Zhengzhou to Luoyang, and from the city to the suburbs, but those things seemed to have identified me and they couldn't get rid of them.
In the winter when I was thirteen, some old people came. They didn't come to see me, they came to see my adoptive father. That night, my adoptive father locked me in the house and followed them out the door. The next morning, when I climbed over the wall and went out to look for them, I found that my adoptive father and mother had died under the old locust tree at the entrance of the village, with a large formation painted on them that I had never seen before.
The police said it was an accident, but I don't believe it.
Later, an old man named Lu Yunhe found me and said that he was from the China Taoist Association. He said that the death of my adoptive father and adoptive mother was related to my "fate". He said that if I wanted to survive, I had to follow him and enter the world that I had only been able to peek through the cracks in the door.
I had no idea how big that world was. All I know is that some people are here to pay off debts in this life, and I am here to collect debts.
