Night Watcher: I Assign Official Posts to Chinese and Western Spirits

Late at night at the funeral home, a corpse that had been dead for three days suddenly opened its eyes. “You have an official aura about you.” Chen Du never expected that, as someone who applied makeup to the dead, he would be dragged by an untearable boat ticket into supernatural pocket-dimension trials: a paper-figure wedding banquet, St. Mary’s Orphanage, a Chinatown funeral parlor turned church. Chinese vengeful ghosts and Western evil spirits battled in the very same instance. While everyone else relied on supernatural abilities and brute force to survive, Chen Du relied on the golden finger he awakened, the Wansiling. If he uncovered the grievances a ghost had suffered in life, he could grant it an official position: appointing a red-clad bride as the Lady of Joyful Funerals, hiring a down-and-out vampire as a night patrol officer, and even registering an Abyssal Lord as one of his recruits. Zombies versus vampires, fox spirits versus succubi, the City God’s temple up against a cathedral. Chen Du sat in a teahouse by the ferry crossing, handing out numbers to the ghosts waiting in line for official posts. “No need to rush. One at a time. There’ll be a post for everyone.” This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.