In the deepest hours of night in Bianjing, someone always knocks on the door of the Worryless Tea House, tucked away on a corner of Vermilion Bird Street.
The owner, Wen Buyan, wears a blue robe. Beneath the white silk covering his eyes lie crimson-gold pupils that can see the boundary between yin and yang. For one pot of tea, three coins’ worth of rootless water, and two taels of snow from the past, he helps ghosts and spirits let go of their obsessions, never asking whether his customers are human or ghost. Until the corpse of a suddenly deceased princess arrives at his door, clutching a bloodstained ginkgo leaf. Only then does he learn that the tragedy from twenty years ago, when his entire family was turned into ghost lanterns, was never truly over. The tea he has brewed for half his life was nothing more than a discarded pawn on his enemy’s chessboard.
