Chapter 1

Years ago, the villagers called my house "Li's Blockhouse," meaning the walls around my courtyard were as impenetrable as a blockhouse.

While other houses had square courtyards, mine was circular. From a distance, it really did resemble a ring fortress from wartime.

A few years later, the villagers started calling my house "Li's Tomb."

That year, a feng shui master came to the village and for some reason, wanted to see my courtyard. My dad ended up grabbing him by the collar and throwing him out.

The feng shui master stood outside my house, cursing and yelling, saying my dad was pretending to know what he was doing, building a "Qiankun Zhaoyue" (Universe Reflecting the Moon) feng shui arrangement, but enclosing the stone cliff within it. That wasn't a feng shui backing; it was building his own grave and erecting his own tombstone. Sooner or later, it would lead to the extinction of his line.

My dad went out and slapped him twice, nearly getting into a fight with the person who hired the master. After that, the villagers were even less inclined to associate with my family.

But my dad didn't care. He didn't talk to the villagers much anyway and rarely left the house, spending his days raising chickens.

While others raised at most two roosters, my dad raised a whole yard full of them, with not a single hen.

People say that roosters raised for more than five years shouldn't be eaten. The chickens eat too many poisonous insects, and the toxins seep into the meat. Eating a five-year-old chicken is like eating arsenic.

I don't know how many years my dad had been raising those chickens. They were all kept in cages and never let out. My dad even bought insects from outside to feed them.

I saw him several times hiring people to deliver centipedes to the house, pouring the inch-long centipedes directly into the chicken coops. The centipedes crawled along the feeding troughs, and my dad would pick them up with his bare hands like he was picking up twigs and throw them into the chicken nests.

It made my scalp crawl just watching, but my dad never took it seriously.

Those chickens were cooped up in cages year-round, their eyes bloodshot, glaring menacingly at everything. They could tear apart not just centipedes, but even a snake thrown in there.

What was even stranger was that my roosters never crowed. Even when the roosters of other houses crowed, they remained silent.

Once, I heard another house's rooster crowing and glanced into my own chicken coop. I saw my roosters stretching their necks and desperately looking out, their mouths open but unable to make a sound. Some, with more violent tempers, rubbed the feathers off their necks, still struggling to get out.

From that day on, I never dared to go near the chicken coops again.

My dad raised a whole yard full of chickens, but not only did he never cook them for me, he fed them my hair and fingernails.

I never had my hair cut outside; my dad always cut it himself. Each time he cut my hair, he wrapped it carefully in yellow paper and marked it with a cinnabar pen. My dad also wouldn't let me cut my fingernails casually. He had to have the clippings; if even one was missing, he would search for it for half the day.

Every fifteenth day of the lunar month, my dad would mix my hair and fingernails into the chicken feed.

I asked my dad: why do you feed my hair to the chickens? He said: you were born in the year of the Rooster, adding your hair will make them grow faster.

But I always felt that wasn't the whole story. I secretly observed him twice and discovered that every time my dad fed my hair to the chickens, he would catch a rooster and throw it into the water pool in the backyard.

It's true that my courtyard wall was circular, but at the point where the circle closed, it was connected to a bare cliff face. When the feng shui master talked about erecting a tombstone, he was referring to that cliff.

Below the cliff was a square water pool, three meters across. The water in the pool was so green you couldn't see the bottom. Throwing a stone in caused bubbles to rise continuously, and nobody knew how deep the bottom of the pool really was.

My dad never let me go near the water pool, and he never drank the water from it either. We always fetched water from the village.

My dad went to the water pool about two or three times a month, each time throwing a live chicken into it.

My family's chickens were almost driven mad, usually impossible to catch, but as soon as they got near the water pool, they became dispirited, as if resigned to their fate, allowing my dad to throw them into the water.

I don't know what happened to the roosters after they fell into the water.

After my dad threw the chickens in, he would guard the edge of the pool, staring at the water. Sometimes he would stand there for an hour or two, sometimes just for a few minutes before coming back. I don't know what he was looking at.

In my memory, my dad always repeated the two actions of raising chickens and watching the water, doing them for over ten years.

Until I was fifteen, my dad threw chickens into the water pool with increasing frequency. He also stopped buying baby chicks, and seemed more energetic.

But one day, I came home from school and saw my dad pacing around the room with a gloomy face, glancing at the computer every now and then, with a look that suggested he hated the computer and wanted to smash it.

My dad's face was so dark it was frightening. I didn't dare to speak to him, so I quietly glanced at the computer screen. It was a report about a "blood moon" appearing in three days.

My dad had opened many web pages, probably trying to see if the online talk about the "blood moon" was just a rumor.

At that time, my dad was pacing around the room like a madman, completely unaware that I had come in. It wasn't until I called out to him that he turned around, his eyes red.