When the sun became a legend, ghosts and monsters took over the human world.
Three months ago, the entire world was plunged into an eternal white night. Neon lights took the place of sunlight, scorching the cities. Digital Buddhist sutras sent the dead on their way from the cloud. Real estate developers sold feng shui properties where "the living dwell in homes for the dead." In this frenzied age of eternal night, only the morgue at 12:45 a.m. still held a faint warmth of truth.
Shen Ji is the last living underworld constable in the Soul-Pursuit Office. A forbidden spell, inked in qilin blood, wraps around his left hand; in his right pocket are special glasses that scan for resentment. He has seen corpse drivers in western Hunan use 3D printers to make corpse slaves, and watched a thousand-year-old beauty ghost harvest yang energy in a livestream. But this time is different: Han dynasty tomb coins in the mouth of a drowned woman, Wei-Jin smart wristbands under a construction site, and a "package for the afterlife" marked on a SF Express waybill all point to a mysterious organization tampering with the Book of Life and Death: the Jade Burial Pavilion.
When a clone with his own face pulls the trigger, and the half-jade token passed on by his dying master opens a blood-red eye, Shen Ji realizes that this "reincarnation experiment," spanning the ancient and modern worlds, began twenty years ago. The white night is merely the last fig leaf the King of Hell has thrown over humanity.
Tonight at midnight, the bronze bell in the Zhen position will ring again.
Forty-nine hours remain. The seventh empty coffin is about to devour the dawn.
