Deep in a dark alley untouched by neon light lies a sinister pawnshop that accepts only cursed objects.
The living pawn their debts of love, the dead pawn their bones. Behind promotions, wealth, and defying fate lies the insatiable human heart.
Li Fei, a runaway apprentice of a corpse-driving shaman from western Hunan, has had the palm lines on his left hand burned away, but his greed for cursed objects remains;
Xie Yaoyao, ninth-generation owner of the Burning Passion Inn, can see the most painful memories of the dead when the tattoo on her back, The Ledger of Cursed Pawns, begins to bleed.
A blood contract binds them both in a fatal cycle of reincarnation:
She burns rhinoceros-horn incense to reach the underworld; he spills yang blood to suppress evil. She carves out her heart to feed the Kunlun Fetus; he devours souls to nourish the Netherworld.
The most poisonous cursed object is an obsession you cannot let go of.
The coins stuffed into the mouths of the dead: those who borrow yin wealth die suddenly, their bodies bursting into fountains of rot;
A ghostly beheading sword wielded by an executioner from Republican-era China: at midnight, its dragging chain crawls toward the execution ground to claim lives;
The humanoid meat lingzhi of the snowy mountains, the Kunlun Fetus: when it stirs in its womb, it devours the fates of the bidders, yet a third eye splits open in Li Fei's chest
revealing that Xie Yaoyao's past life was a Miao shamaness from the Ming dynasty, whose husband pulled out her bones to forge a bell.
When the beams of the Burning Passion Inn crumble into ash, and the corpse-driving copper bell melts into a wedding ring branded into their finger bones,
new shopkeeper Ajiu kneels among the ruins, fungal threads burrowing into her palm:
“Pawn a handful of ashes from an old love, and redeem the loneliness of eternal reincarnation.”
And the bronze bellflower hanging from the rafters is already producing a fresh pawn ticket
In this game, will it be a poison that eats to the bone, or a sweetness that cuts out the heart?
