The Five Immortals of the Northeast: Gray Bones

By the time Chen Mo turned thirty-eight, he had not left the house in a long time. He believed in the Gray Immortal, because in this family, only the rats could survive. Turn the clock back to the 1970s. Back then, his father, Chen Jianguo, was still a proud railway worker. Disgusted by how “dirty” his rural wife was, he personally abandoned their newborn daughter at a train station. His grandfather used his connections to cover up the scandal, his father used violence to hide his inferiority, and Chen Mo, under his mother’s cold gaze, found a confidant in a rat. This is the chain reaction of abandonment. An older sister thrown away, a skull smashed, a life ground to pieces in a washing machine, and a family scraping by beneath the altar of the immortals. Don’t expect the gods to come save you. In this story, the gods are rats, too.