Fragrant Dragon Bones

I was born with a dragon's tail. The Divine Maiden said I was the Yellow River Dragon Princess reborn. But from the day I was born, one strange event after another took place along the banks of the Yellow River: my mother disappeared, and villagers began pulling gold nuggets and gold dust from the river. The village elders said the river was rewarding them for looking after me. When the villagers all grew rich, my uncle and aunt, who had raised me, were overcome by greed. They stripped the dragon scales from my body and sold them at a high price. After that, no one in the village ever found gold dust or nuggets in the river again...

Then my mother, missing for many years, suddenly returned, carrying nine spirit tablets on her back. She made me tend to them every day. She said that since I'd lost my dragon scales, I had to choose a spirit from among the nine tablets and marry him on the second day of the second lunar month, when I turned twenty-two, or I would die. Whichever one I chose would break his seal and regain his freedom.

But I never expected that four years later, on the day the Yellow River claimed its Jade Maiden, every unmarried girl in the village would have to die. The flood dragon spirit I'd carefully tended for years cruelly betrayed me and married my cousin instead. I thought my end had come, but on the night of the second day of the second lunar month, a jade coffin, bloodred and carved with dragon patterns, washed ashore by the Yellow River.

To save my life, my mother pushed me into the jade coffin and sealed the lid. As I pounded on it, trembling with fear, a warm embrace suddenly wrapped around me from behind. A man's burning breath brushed my earlobe, and his magnetic voice whispered seductively beside it: “Feng Ying, I've found you...”