The Ping'an Pawnshop

The Daoist Canon says: Gather yin, and it becomes a ghost; gather yang, and it becomes a god. Ghosts are all manner of demons and spirits. The Tang Dynasty was rife with strange and supernatural tales. It was said that the celebrated scholar Wei Zheng was a half-immortal who had mastered cultivation, suppressing wandering ghosts and demons across the land and compiling the Records of Spirits. This volume collected illustrations of the demons and monsters of the world, and concealed long-lost divine arts. After the Shenlong reforms, during Princess Taiping's rule, strange beings and demons sprang up everywhere. He founded the Office for Delivering Yin Souls and established the post of Night Patrol Star Official, once known as a “Soul Deliverer.” In a dilapidated old pawnshop, with a dragon-slaying saber at his side, Wei Wuji, a descendant of the renowned Tang scholar Wei Zheng, keeps watch over the world of the living and guides departed souls onward. A cup of tea brings the mortal world to a close; when he looks back, not a speck of dust remains. Deliver spirits, open the road to the underworld. If the Yellow Springs will not ferry you, I will. After the founding of the country, spirits were forbidden from becoming monsters. Many lonely ghosts had nowhere to go, and so grew resentful, clinging to existence as best they could. These were known as “karmic burdens.” The White Bone Inn, painted-skin demons, the Yellow Springs of rebirth, and lonely graves in mass burial grounds: witness the strange tales brought to us by the last Night Wanderer of the modern age.