Chronicles of Strange Rural Customs

At twenty-two, Xiao Lu believes in neither ghosts nor rumors. He ventures alone into Qingshi'ao, an ancient village hidden deep in the mountains. Nine deadly folk taboos have been passed down through generations there, warnings bought at the cost of countless lives by the elders: never look back at dusk, never enter an empty house on a rainy night, and never answer a voice heard at midnight... At first, he takes them for nonsense made up by old people to scare the young. Then he accidentally breaks one of the taboos, and an evil force clings to him. Beneath the village’s old customs lie one eerie legend after another: wild ghosts knocking at doors in the dead of night, ghost children’s rhymes drifting from the back mountain, and sinister red wedding tokens that bring death beneath the moon... One taboo, one strange occurrence. Forced to walk the boundary between the living and the dead, Xiao Lu experiences firsthand the eerie country customs the world has forgotten. Little by little, he learns that the rules of the mountains are no superstition. Break them, and something will come to claim your life. This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.