Lu Lian, a newcomer at a funeral home, discovers that whenever he touches a corpse, he gets dragged into the scene of a crime.
A victim’s eyeball becomes a surveillance camera, a severed windpipe turns into a recorder, and every memory he unlocks shaves time off the countdown to his death on his phone.
When a headless woman’s palm is found clutching a Nightwalker badge, and the killer’s reflection on a livestream looks exactly like him,
the psychiatrist who keeps jabbing him with silver needles tears open his white coat, revealing a pocket watch from 122 years ago. “It’s not your life span you’re burning. It’s the seal holding back an evil god.”
[Unsolved Cases and Their Price]
★ As he draws eyebrows on a decapitated corpse, the funeral home’s freezer pings with a WeChat message: “181 days left.”
★ The price of stopping time to save someone is having his left ear permanently filled with a victim’s dying scream.
★ Under the forensic lab’s ultraviolet lights, his own face is reflected in the pupils of the killer’s portrait.
[Forbidden Deals]
“Trade three years of your life for the killer’s real-time location.”
“Pay five years of your life to hear the victim’s last words.”
When the app asks, “Would you like to mortgage your soul to unlock the ultimate skill?” Chen Zhou finally realizes that every victim in these cases is another version of himself from a different point in time.
[Dead Ends and a Way Out]
Yan Shanbai, chief physician of the Nightwalkers, never goes anywhere without two things:
a meteorite silver needle that can erase memories when driven into his spine,
and a gilt pocket watch containing the air of Shanghai in 1890.
She saves him thirteen times, and the watch gains thirteen more cracks,
until Chen Zhou spots a yellowed “Employee Registration Form” in the morgue.
