Blood Ember Immortality

When the children from Qilin Village threw stones at me, the five-color rope on my wrist suddenly broke. That was the only relic left by my mother. People in the village said that I was a disaster - my father disappeared while collecting medicine and my mother died in childbirth. Only the old carpenter secretly gave me a piece of wheat cake: "Changsheng, don't believe those bastard words." The roof he repaired collapsed suddenly the next day. The door of the ancestral hall was closed, and I knelt in the snow and listened to the quarrel inside. "Shentang!" The clan elder's voice penetrated the door panel, "This disaster has killed my parents, and now I won't even let Lao Zhang go!" I clenched the five-color rope tightly, and the broken knot in my palm caused bleeding marks. The blood dripped on the snow, very much like the plum blossoms dyed red on the straw mat on the day I was born.