The Witch’s Scroll for Suppressing Yin Spirits

In the Year of the Fire Horse, the gates of the underworld open. If it's not a natural disaster, it's a man-made calamity. Otherwise, it means those things are coming back.

I carried corpses in Huilong Town for eighteen years, until I dug an "eye" out of a dismembered corpse's hand.

After that day:

The chill in my dantian came alive, and at night I could hear sobbing beneath the cracks in the ground.

A Miao woman with ankle weights came to my door, calling me the "variable" she'd been waiting sixteen years for.

The mountain god, erased from the county records, began collecting offerings at the mass grave.

And my grandmother, who was always coughing, took something embroidered with talismans from the bottom of a trunk... a Nuo mask.

Grandmother said the Chen family doesn't make coffins.

We're "Wardens of the Yin."

With Nuo masks over our faces and cinnabar tracing our bones, we guard the doors that must never be opened, in places the living cannot see.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any similarities are purely coincidental. Do not imitate.