The Marriage Knot - Chapter 1

My name is Zhaodi. At present, I am a newly deceased ghost, floating above my own wedding hall.

A double coffin stood in the hall. Inside it, he and I lay in our wedding clothes, sharing a pillow.

Mother sat in the place of honor, wiping away tears. My gambling father, meanwhile, secretly patted his bulging money pouch and snickered as he tried to comfort her. “Don’t cry. This is a happy occasion.”

Come to think of it, if I hadn’t fallen off a cliff while gathering medicinal herbs, he would have sold me to a brothel sooner or later anyway.

Even dead, I was too valuable for him to waste. He had hurriedly sold my corpse to the wealthy Wang family for a ghost marriage.

As for my new husband, the one sharing my pillow in that coffin, this was actually the first time I’d seen him.

He was extraordinarily handsome, though deathly pale, lying there like an exquisite, fragile porcelain doll.

I’d heard people say that Young Master Wang was gentle, refined, and a gifted scholar. Unfortunately, he’d been sickly since childhood. Still, I hadn’t expected him to die so young.

A poor girl like me marrying into a rich family after death? I supposed I hadn’t done too badly.

It was Mother I felt sorry for. While Grandmother was alive, she’d despised her for failing to produce a son. Then there was Father, with his gambling, drinking, and habit of beating and berating us. Mother had finally given birth to my little brother, only for me to die in an accident.

The ritual masters shook their spirit-summoning bells until the relentless jingling gave me a headache.

Before long, though, Black and White Impermanence came, clapped me in chains, and led me away from the noisy wedding hall.

When they stopped, an eerie green glow shone all around us. It was a thoroughly sinister, terrifying place.

Black Impermanence opened the Register of Life and Death and performed his routine check. “Xiao Zhaodi. Eighteen. Death by accidental fall from a cliff.”

“Yes, sir,” I answered.

“You’ll stay here in the underworld.”

Stay? Didn’t the storybooks say you drank Granny Meng’s soup, crossed Naihe Bridge, and went off to be reborn?

“That is indeed the procedure,” White Impermanence said, answering my thought. “But you’ll have to wait.”

“Until when?” I asked.

“Once there is no one left in the mortal world who remembers you, you may be reborn.”

Black Impermanence added, “After nightfall, soul-devouring ghosts roam the underworld, preying on mortal souls. If they catch you, your soul will scatter beyond recovery, and you will never reincarnate.”

I wanted Mother and my little brother to live for many years and keep remembering me. Yet I was frightened of being devoured while I waited.

Black Impermanence flipped through his register again and kindly showed me where my grandmother’s straw hut was.

In life, Grandmother had always made things difficult for Mother. Sometimes I couldn’t bear it and talked back.

Sure enough, she drove me out without a scrap of pity, cursing as she went. “Even dead, you’re nothing but a money-losing girl!”

Night was approaching in the underworld. I wandered outside with nowhere to go, growing more frightened by the minute.

Luckily, a kind woman finally offered to let me shelter at her house.

A-Fei told me she’d died in a lovers’ suicide with her sweetheart. But once they reached the underworld, he’d run off with another female ghost, leaving her here alone.

“How could he marry another ghost?” I asked, confused.

A-Fei narrowed her lovely, slightly upturned eyes. “Think of this as another world. Here, souls no longer have to be bound by their mortal identities. Some married couples are still deeply in love. Others part ways and live their own lives.”

That reminded me: I had a brand-new husband too.

“So marriages made in the mortal world don’t count down here?”

“Ordinary mortal marriages don’t,” A-Fei said.

Then I supposed he was under no obligation to take me in.

“However… a ghost marriage performed in the mortal world does count.”

What? I’d only just arrived in the underworld, and now I was being informed I was married?

Following A-Fei’s instructions, I looked at my wrist. Sure enough, a red thread was tied around it. “Why is this here?”

“That’s a marriage knot. The mark of a marriage recognized in the underworld.”

It seemed I really ought to visit the new husband I’d never properly met.

But before I could set out, he followed that red thread and found me first.