The Inn of Returning Souls in Fengdu has three rules about whom it will not take in:
No black coffins delivered during the hour of the Pig.
No drowned corpses with coins covering their eyes.
No corpses that sing the songs they knew in life.
Bai Ye, the reincarnation of Meng Po, broke the rules. The female corpse hauled from the River of Forgetfulness not only hummed the forbidden ancient song “Ballad of the Bone Bells,” but spat out half a page from the Book of Life and Death the moment Bai Ye touched her. Even stranger, the sword of Lu Chen, judge of the Soul-Quelling Office, resonated with the jade pendant in the corpse's hand. It should have been buried in the underworld with her husband three hundred years ago.
When bloody handprints belonging to children who vanished thirty years ago seeped through the inn's beams, and the face beneath her nemesis Red Scorpion's mask turned out to be identical to Lu Chen's, Bai Ye finally realized that the Meng Po soup she had been brewing for a thousand years was meant only to imprison a memory erased by the underworld.
This time, through the cracks in her glazed heart, her own rotting bones came crawling out.
