As I put makeup on an unidentified female corpse on a stormy night, the character "three" tattooed below her collarbone suddenly came alive.
Twenty-three bodies in the freezer all rose from the dead, the same bloody characters crawling out across the backs of their necks.
The night the developer smashed the spirit-sealing pillar, I was forced to swallow the woman's heart.
The memories of a Tang Dynasty princess who drowned in concrete eight hundred years ago took root in my flesh alongside my birthmark.
They say I was born to be a "living spirit pillar," and that my birth date is linked to the ledgers of life and death in the Underworld's Three Halls.
The tattoo is a mark of debt collection. The seventy-two corpses in the ice coffin, all identical to me, are the bodies of my sacrificial past lives.
When the bronze divination needle beneath the spirit-sealing pillar began to turn backward, I discovered the truth:
My mother, missing for ten years, was the last person to drive in a spirit-sealing stake, and the developer has tattooed on his chest the date of my death across a thousand cycles of reincarnation.
The day a Tang Dynasty underground palace split open beneath the funeral home, the blood moon illuminated the ledger.
The Three Halls are coming to collect more than human lives. They are also coming for the vengeful spirits trapped in the rebirth pillars for thousands of years.
This time, it's our turn to collect.
Female protagonist: Lin Hanxing
