I entered this world beneath an omen. On the night of my birth, every black dog in the village went mad, dashing their skulls against the ancient huai tree at the village entrance until the roots ran crimson.

My name is Li Beidou — a child of premature arrival. My mother bled out birthing me, and my father claimed I emerged with "insufficient Yang essence" — "a Yang body tethered to a Yin fate" destined for calamities. He named me "Beidou" (the Northern Dipper), hoping the celestial might of those seven stars would arm me against destiny's knives.

Li Chengen, my father, was a man of calloused hands and unyielding silence. Alone, he steadied our storm-battered household while tending to the family trade — a funeral attire shop passed down through generations. "Every stitch in these burial robes," he'd tell me, "is respect for the departed and solace for the living." For destitute families, he sewed shrouds without payment, his needlework blurring candlelit nights.

Yet kindness could not thaw the villagers' superstitions. They whispered that our shop lured Death's shadow to linger over the village. Their words cut like shards of ice — "ill-omened," "harbingers of rot" — but we bore them silently. "This is how we accumulate virtue," Father insisted, his hands never ceasing their rhythmic dance over mourning silks.

But virtue, it seemed, held no currency with Heaven. On my fifteenth birthday, corpse patches erupted across my skin — necrotic blooms oozing yellowed pus. Fever cooked my brains to broth. Through delirium's haze, I recall Old Wu — the village's so-called "Madman" — smearing sacred ash over my lesions, binding my wrist with crimson thread. Outside, the wind howled like vengeful spirits rattling our courtyard gates.

All night, Wu clutched ancient spirit coins in one hand and my life-thread in the other, his eyes fixed on unseen terrors. By dawn, the death-marks had vanished.

Madman Wu, they said, was once a famed geomancer who advised wealthy clans on ancestral tombs. But after a misjudged burial site led to three drownings in as many days, enraged patrons broke his bones and sanity. Now he muttered incantations to stray cats and rain puddles.

He never explained that night's horrors. At noon, as Father gathered herbs, Wu pressed a weathered spirit coin into my palm. "Boy," he rasped, "a greater tribulation awaits at twenty-two. Your Eight Characters (八字) show a thread of life not yet severed. Guard this talisman — it will shield you once."

By dusk, Wu had vanished from the village, leaving only crows as witnesses.

My body deteriorated — joints swelling with phantom cold, breath frosting even in summer. Father scoured mountains for medicinal fungi, his beard whitening with despair.

Then, on a night thick with the stench of rotting lotus roots, she arrived.

The crone stood hunched in our doorway, her black leather coat glistening like beetle wings. A death-shroud pallor clung to her face, wrinkles mapping centuries of dealings with things best left unnamed. From her hunched back hung an obsidian wooden chest — its surface carved with glyphs that squirmed when stared at.

"Brother Wu sent me to see the child," she croaked, and the oil lamps guttered as she crossed our threshold.