A delivery order sent to the wrong address on a stormy night turned me into a wandering underworld bailiff.
When my phone’s navigation started showing addresses belonging to the dead, when human teeth floated in the beef soup at a noodle shop, when blood seeped from the bricks of an old alley with a countdown
that was when I learned the gluttonous beast tattoo on my right arm wasn’t a burn scar. It was a license to eat ghosts.
“This order is mine.”
I swallowed the Candle Yin chef from the midnight noodle shop, devoured the 996 vengeful spirit haunting an office tower, and tore open the corpse ledger in a hospital morgue.
Each kind of yin corruption I consumed increased the risk of the gluttonous beast tattoo running wild.
A beautiful researcher from the Folklore Society called it the curse of the Yin Wardens, while a retired detective aimed his demon-slaying gun at my forehead.
Only after I pieced together the fragments of a bronze cauldron at an antiques black market did I discover:
The road to the Yellow Springs had long been blocked by the so-called blessings of 996,
Meng Po’s Soup had been spiked with short-video additives,
and the great furnace of heaven and earth that had suppressed the Gloom River for a thousand years
was burning the anxiety growing madly in people’s hearts.
As the seventh dark-moon cycle arrived,
I stood at the furnace ruins clutching my last delivery order.
Its note was blood-red and blinding:
“Today’s fortune: Extremely ill-omened. Best to feed yourself to the cauldron.”
