“Miss Cui, this talisman of yours... Is it a prayer for the dead or a death warrant?”
As I dipped my brush in corpse oil and finished the final stroke on the coffin, the entire Sunken River suddenly began flowing backward. Across the river, the warlord shouted curses while holding up a German-made mirror-box camera, unaware that river ghosts were dragging his shadow down to the riverbed, where three Western Zhou corpse immortals I had personally sealed lay in wait.
People only know me as King Cui of the Underworld, the youngest corpse driver in western Hunan. They don't know that I died violently in all ten of my past lives because of the King of Hell Talisman. In this life, I hold a judge's brush carved from Chiyou's bone in my left hand, and on my right shoulder is tattooed a map of the Kingdom of Wuxian that feeds on lifespan. In the corpse market of Chenzhou, I tattoo the living with diagrams to guide ghost soldiers across their path, and inscribe the dead with prayers to send their souls across to the afterlife.
Then one day, as I pressed cinnabar onto the brow of a dead actor from Changsha, the corpse suddenly opened its golden eyes. “Three thousand years have passed, and Wuxian's tomb guardian has fallen so low as to prepare an actor's corpse?” The tiger tally at his waist shattered twelve eternal lamps. A sudden pain shot through my left Netherworld Eye. The notch in that tally matched the fatal wound in my master's skull exactly...
