Our retreat had barely cleared Lujiagou's lichen-crusted boundary stones when the serpentine horde materialized, transforming the nominal five-minute homeward passage into a harrowing traverse through Hades' vestibule. The ancestral archway's shadow still clung to our rear bumper when the first scaled sentinel reared from moonlit undergrowth, its obsidian eyes glimmering with preternatural awareness.
Night's dominion now reigned absolute, the impending Hungry Ghost Festival having driven every villager behind triple-latched doors hours before sunset. Our sedan's trembling headlights painted quivering ellipses across the ancestral compound's time-blurred murals as Father killed the ignition. Three survivors of the ophidian gauntlet sat suspended in the vehicle's sepulchral interior, my own limbs still possessed by post-terror paralysis. The dashboard clock glowed 19:47 - a mocking numerical smile in the darkness.
The windshield had become a mortuary pane - avian and lagomorphic casualties pressed against glass like biological frescoes, their final expressions frozen in rictus grins. Delicate tracery of clotted blood refracted moonlight into cabalistic sigils that seemed to pulse in time with my erratic heartbeat. Behind this carnal mosaic, the memory of scaled jaws dismembering living flesh replayed with cinematic cruelty: the wet crunch of snapping cervid vertebrae, the spray of arterial crimson across frost-rimed bracken. My shuddering exhalations fogged the glass, each transient veil mercifully obscuring the nightmare tableau.
"Lila, fortify your spirit." Father's admonition rasped through the tobacco-saturated atmosphere, his profile etched with stress fractures by the dashboard's lunar glow. "The Serpent Sovereign claims only defiant souls. Obedience begets sanctuary."
Mother's cryogenic fingers closed over mine, her heirloom jade bangle clinking against the gearshift like a temple death-bell. "We'll dismantle this archaic curse, child," she vowed, eyes reflecting my terror yet burning with matriarchal resolve. "Assist her alighting," she commanded Father, the steel in her voice belying her tremor-riddled hands.
Father emerged first, his weathered work boots crunching gravel with unnatural deliberation. My embroidered slippers met permafrost-hardened earth as he guided me from the vehicle's dubious sanctuary, knees buckling like a marionette with severed strings. The ancestral gate loomed ahead - once a symbol of homecoming, now a gaping maw promising unspeakable rites. Mother's antique key protested in the rust-choked lock, its metallic shrieks echoing through the courtyard like a prisoner's chains.
The sitting room's familiarity offered no comfort. Faded family portraits smiled benignly from walls papered in Deng-era floral patterns, their frozen cheer now macabre against unfolding horrors. I collapsed onto the horsehair sofa, its prickling embrace a perverse anchor to reality. Mother pressed a chipped celadon cup into my hands, the steaming water's tremors mirroring my seismic shudders.
"They've always known," I whispered, watching ripples distort my ghostly reflection. "Those veiled glances during Qingming tomb-sweeping... the elders' joss paper offerings left at our threshold..." The epiphany crystallized with terrible clarity. "My existence has been an hourglass draining towards this grotesque culmination."
Father's brass pipe flared like a dying star as he drew deep, the cloying aroma of Yunnan tobacco momentarily overpowering memory's copper stench. "The pact originates from Northern Song magistrates," he began, words curling smoke-rings of confession. "Our forebears pledged firstborn daughters to secure the Serpent's beneficence. For thirty generations, the debt lay dormant... until your birthnight."
Mother's porcelain teacup exploded against terrazzo tiles. "Primitive sacrilege!" Her fury cracked the air like a Manchurian tiger's lash. "My child isn't some Shang Dynasty oracle bone sacrifice!"
The revelation unfolded with methodical cruelty: The serpentine convocation witnessed during my infancy, the elders' coded blessings at coming-of-age ceremonies, the omens dismissed as rustic folklore. My meticulously constructed future - thesis defenses in Tsinghua lecture halls, shared hutong apartments scented with jasmine tea, tentative romance beneath Beijing's neon skies - dissolved before this primeval reality.
"Elucidate the union's parameters," I demanded, surprised by my voice's steadiness. "Am I to bleed out on moss-cushioned dolmen? Serve as broodmother for ophidian spawn? Or perhaps provide eternal warmth to scaled coils?" The gallows humor curdled mid-utterance.
Father's calloused hands described helpless arcs. "The ancestral codices speak solely of 'consecrated joining'. The carnal specifics..." His shrug spoke volumes of patriarchal ignorance.
Mother's protective embrace tightened like a siege engine's torsion. "We'll reduce Lujiagou to smoldering ash before permitting this abomination."
Yet even as rebellion took root, the house itself conspired against us. Drafts carried serpent musk through floorboard fissures. Shadows pooled unnaturally in corners, their edges shimmering with spectral scales. The ancestral shrine's long-dormant censer now emitted jasmine-scented tendrils - an olfactory noose tightening by the hour.
Beyond mullioned windows, the serpentine procession continued its inexorable advance. The mountains loomed like slumbering leviathans, their snow-capped peaks etched against the starless firmament in cuneiform patterns predating human speech. Somewhere in those ink-black valleys, the Serpent Sovereign awaited its reluctant bride with geological patience.
Our defiance hung suspended between medieval terror and modern rationality - a Damoclean sword swaying above the sacrificial altar. The digital clock's numerals bled from 23:59 to 00:00, marking my formal induction into the lunar month of wraiths. From the serpent-choked thoroughfare arose a susurrus of countless scales caressing stone - nature's morbid lullaby underscoring humanity's fragility.
The air itself grew viscous with impending rites, each breath flavored with iron-rich blood-mist and fading hope. Mother's protective talismans - cunningly folded red envelopes and Bagua mirrors - lay shattered beneath the weight of ancient power. Father's tobacco pouch spilled its contents across the kang table, the scattered leaves forming accidental divinations none dared interpret.
As midnight's implications took root, my trembling fingers encountered an anomalous texture within my coat pocket. Withdrawing the object revealed a serpent scale larger than my palm, its iridescent surface etched with minuscule characters from a language that tickled the hindbrain with ancestral recognition. The glyphs pulsed faintly, synchronizing with my quickening pulse - a cryptogramic betrothal contract etched in living keratin.
The realization crystallized with glacial inevitability: This cursed courtship had commenced long before my conscious understanding. Every childhood nightmare of constricting coils, every involuntary shudder at garden ecdysis, every uncanny avoidance of the ancestral archives - these were not mere phobias, but genetic memory awakening.
Mother's gasp fractured the silence as she recognized the scale's significance. "The betrothal gift..." Her whisper carried centuries of subjugated women's anguish. "It chooses."
Outside, the serpentine cavalcade reached crescendo. A hundred thousand ventral scales vibrated in harmonic resonance, the resulting seismic hum resonating through marrow and masonry alike. The courtyard's ancient scholar tree shed its remaining leaves in sympathetic panic, autumnal foliage adhering to blood-smeared windows like funeral crepe.
Father's pipe clattered to the floor, its dying embers painting hellish constellations across the threadbare rug. "The procession halts," he observed with funereal calm. "The Sovereign awaits its audience."
Through warped windowpanes, the nightmare resolved into terrible clarity. The serpent horde had parted like the Red Sea, revealing a path paved with molted skins leading to the village square. Upon the ceremonial marriage stone lay an elaborate sedan chair woven from willow withes and shed viperskin, its curtains embroidered with ouroboros motifs in thread spun from lunar silk.
My bridal procession had arrived.