Mr. Feng Shui's Folk Anecdotes

My soul nearly fled my body. 

Hadn't Master Wu sworn this courtyard was ironclad against evil? Yet here this filthy spirit slithered through the shadows! 

My pulse hammered against my ribs like war drums. The urgent shouting faded, replaced by a new horror—a shadowy mass pressing against the window, its form rippling like black oil. I scrambled backward, nearly tumbling off the heated kang. 

"Master Wu!" My scream tore through the night. 

The scene in the ancestral hall froze my blood. 

Master Wu stood half-submerged in the coffin, his arms buried to the elbows in the corpse's abdomen. Rusted scissors, daggers, and a scale lay scattered across the lid. A single candle burned sickly green, its light glinting off the rooster's crimson eyes as it perched sentinel on a chair. 

When Master Wu straightened, his gloves dripped viscous black fluid. His gaze speared me—winter steel honed over centuries. 

I collapsed against the doorframe. 

Suddenly, the candlelight warmed to amber. "Boy," Master Wu rasped, "why aren't you sleeping?" His tone carried the barest thread of concern beneath the frost. 

Trembling, I described the shadow and the dockside alarm. 

"Not until tomorrow's solstice..." Master Wu muttered darkly. "Yet she nearly breached the wards." 

A cough shattered the silence. 

In the doorway stood a villager—mouth crudely stitched shut with coarse thread, fresh blood oozing between the sutures. His clothes hung in tatters, skin mottled with lacerations. 

The rooster dropped dead. 

Recognition struck—this was the man who'd cursed me yesterday. Now he knelt, forehead smashing rhythmically against the threshold. "Forgi...ve..." gurgled through his sealed lips. 

"Enough!" Master Wu's roar shook the rafters. "You'll not claim him prematurely!" 

The villager staggered upright, eyes pools of mute anguish. 

A youth burst in, panting: "Master Wu—Beidou's father... the river..." 

Moonlight silvered the corpse on the bank. Father's face, once warm with life, now mirrored the river's icy flow. I clutched his stiffening hand, nails carving crescents into my palm. 

"I'll make them pay." My vow to the uncaring stars tore from a throat raw with grief. 

That night, I buried him in the hinterland as instructed. Only years later would I learn the truth—that Master Wu had interred him not in hallowed ground, but in a cursed plot seething with resentful energies.