On the night of their graduation party, Xiao Yu and his roommate left a bar, intending only to buy a couple of bottles of water at a convenience store.
“Are you hidden?”
On the dimly lit street, two plump heads, round as lanterns, searched for someone in children’s voices.
His roommate, who had been laughing and chatting with him just minutes earlier, was forcibly stuffed into a trash can too small to hold him.
Xiao Yu held out until help arrived.
But after that, he began to encounter those things more and more often.
The Chinese Paranormal Headquarters offered him a job: a generous salary and priority placement for his family. In exchange, he would have to return to the places where people had gone missing and died.
There, he gradually learned that real ghosts could not be killed. Those who borrowed paranormal powers to fight them were called Exorcists.
Later, Xiao Yu obtained a sword.
Its hilt was a shriveled human hand. Every time he used it, it tightened and pierced his flesh, gradually replacing his right arm.
The bitterness in his mouth grew stronger. At night, the hand began moving on its own while he slept.
And the places where he needed to draw his sword kept growing in number.
