When Li Shaoan, a folk-culture streamer, receives an anonymously delivered bronze Nuo mask, his life begins counting down.
The dazzling special effects in his livestream look like writhing flesh and blood through the mask's vision. Headless ghost soldiers march to viral Douyin songs as they pass through the streets. A delivery rider draws talismans on waybills with a cinnabar brush. The thunderstruck wood sold for 9.9 yuan with free shipping on Pinduoduo seals the vengeful spirits of a Republican-era opera troupe.
"Folks, today I'm taking you on an immersive night watch at a funeral home!"
Holding up a rugged GoPro, Li Shaoan looks on with a bitter smile as the comments fill with viewers tipping him hell banknotes. When beauty filters can distort the laws of physics, and livestream likes can give birth to flesh-and-blood monsters, he finally understands the true meaning of his grandmother's dying words: "Stay away from the internet. Guard your human qi." In this cyber age steeped in the Five Turbidities, every internet celebrity is a vessel of incense offerings waiting to be harvested.
**In this uncanny world where the living and the dead are hard to tell apart:**
- Use Nuo dances to break the feng shui formations of haunted houses, and battle the Old Ones in a sea of the collective unconscious
- Deliver packages from the Yellow Springs to unlock the underworld map, and use a pirated Spring and Autumn Brush to alter the Book of Life and Death
- Join forces with a mechanical drought demon agent to seal away sources of cognitive contamination through a brain-computer interface
**When an electronic wooden fish can't deliver digital ghosts from suffering**
**When an AI language model deduces forbidden Nuo rites**
**He steps out the Seven-Star Big Dipper stance in a livestream watched by millions**
**On both sides of the screen, the arena belongs to demons and monsters**
