On the night of the Blood Moon of the Ghost Festival, my son climbed into the “corpse-quelling coffin” while playing. The spirit inside demanded that my wife, whose family had run a coffin shop for generations, make a straw effigy with her own hands as a substitute. Panicking, she immediately picked up her bamboo knife and started gathering materials, but then she got a phone call and disappeared. I listened to my son's faint knocks and cries from inside the coffin, my heart tearing apart. “Dad, it's so dark in here... I'm scared! When will Mom come save me?” Desperate, I called my wife again and again, begging her to come save our son. When she answered, her voice was full of reproach. “You shouldn't have let him run around the shop in the first place!” “Xiao Yan used the old hemp paper you gave him for his design and got cursed by a spirit. If we don't make a ‘groom’ to send it away in time, he'll die!” “The boy will wake up and learn to be scared. Stay there with him. I'll come back tomorrow morning to open the coffin.” She didn't know that under today's twin-snake Blood Moon, with earth capable of breaking evil spells, this coffin was at a place of such extreme yin that no one inside could possibly survive until dawn. By the time she came to open it in the morning, all she would find was a tiny corpse, drained of its life force.
