When beads of blood seeped from an urn in the funeral home, Jiang Wan knew she had returned to the starting point of her death.
As a funeral director who could read the memories of the dead, she had witnessed too many sordid secrets, but never imagined she would become the offering at her own funeral. Scales behind an unknown male corpse’s ear, a photograph of a mourner screaming as it burned, oracle-bone script writhing across a bronze key. When the seventh loop began, Jiang Wan saw her own corpse smiling at her through the security monitor.
“Team up? Try surviving tonight first.” Gu Lin, the sharp-tongued paper-crafted black cat, always snatched away her chance at survival at the worst possible moment. He called himself a folklorist, yet could command the dead and knew every forbidden funerary rite. Only when a blood-red emblem appeared in Jiang Wan’s right eye did she realize that this haughty spirit was bound to her by the same threads of karma: the massacre that wiped out a clan a hundred years ago, an umbilical cord soaking in a clay urn, and a god-slaying funeral rite that required them to sacrifice each other.
Seven days of reincarnation, seven funerals.
The Society of the Afterlife wants her spirit-medium blood, her biological father yearns for her undying soul,
while Gu Lin teaches her to grip the blood-bone needle: “Fool. Once I bury this cycle, I can finally die in peace.”
How many deaths must you believe in before you dare entrust your final affairs to your sworn enemy?
