My name is Chen Yuan. I was born under the Star of Solitude and was not supposed to live past eighteen.
My grandfather was the last feng shui master in the village. Before he died, he told me to go to the back mountain and take an abandoned old manor as my godmother. A girl had died in that house, nailed to a door with eight coffin nails. Her death had been uncanny. From then on, I had to climb the mountain every month on the sixteenth, burn incense, kowtow, and call that dilapidated house “Mother.”
But the manor’s mistress really was protecting me. Anyone who bullied me would meet with trouble within three days. The shadow following me vanished, and even when I tumbled down the mountain, I never hit a single rock. Then one day, a hunchbacked old woman in a black shroud climbed over the wall into our courtyard. The manor’s mistress said only one thing: “Then let’s see.”
I left the village with the secret feng shui techniques my grandfather had left me and went to study in the provincial capital, thinking I could finally live in peace. But I had no idea that the thing nailed inside the old manor was not just a woman’s corpse. It was also part of a feng shui killing formation spanning a hundred years.
And the manor’s mistress was far more complicated than I had ever imagined.
