The Locust Coffin

My name is Chi Yu. The day they nailed me into a locust-wood coffin, I finally understood: when Grandpa said I was “a fish trapped in a pond,” it wasn’t fate. It was a curse. They said I brought bad luck to my husband, so they planned to marry me off alive to the Marquis of Tomb Mountain as his seventh bride, a sacrifice to seal the tomb. A moment before the coffin lid came down, I bit my fingertip and drew a talisman inside the coffin. “Want me dead? I’ll send you down first to scout the way.” When I opened my eyes again, Tu Ling stood outside the coffin, holding the heads of the entire marquis’s household. “A trapped fish? From today on, you’re the only one who can bite back.”