Escape from the Anomaly Bureau: From the Start, I Haul Up a Ship Full of Corpses

The boat returned, but it wasn't a fishing boat. It was the paper boat burned for the prince three days ago. The townspeople say a royal boat sails to Heaven's River and must never turn back. But this one did more than turn back: it brought with it a strange plague that made people cough blood. My name is Zhao Wushuang, a master's graduate in folklore and a civilian consultant for the Bureau of Strange Affairs. To find out why my sister, who married far away, had fallen mysteriously ill, I set out for the coast of Fujian and Guangdong with half a Nuo mask. There, I stumbled into a shocking conspiracy called the “Continued Sacrifice Society.” Sending off the royal boat, parading the local deity, the thirty-six Nuo gods, the Flower Cave girl of western Hunan... An ancient grand ritual to suppress evil has been split into ten parts and scattered across ten regions of China. When all ten rites come together and disaster returns, I discover that I am the most crucial human sacrifice of all. Faced with a choice between life and death, should I restart the grand ritual, or let the rites be lost forever? This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.