At midnight, I was making the final stroke of a yin-yang embroidery on a mortuary slab, using corpse oil as ink, when nine ice coffins suddenly burst open at once.
A headless corpse hanging upside down from the ceiling opened a third eye. A blood-soaked windpipe let out a hoarse cry: "The Ghost Immortal has appeared! The pact of the Three Realms is broken..."
My name is Chen Du. I'm the youngest mortician at the funeral home, and the last inheritor of yin-yang embroidery in the world.
They don't know that I use thousand-year-old cinnabar mixed with mermaid tears to make up the dead, or that I fasten burial clothes according to the positions of the Twenty-Eight Lunar Mansions. On the backs of the necks of clients hunted by vengeful ghosts, I embroider Taotie patterns that suppress wandering souls.
That is, until I found a dead woman who had jumped to her death, with her birth date written in livor mortis on the soles of her feet. It was unmistakably my own destiny.
That night, the blue-black birthmark on my chest, present since childhood, suddenly began to burn. The legacy of the Ghost Immortal, severed three hundred years ago, emerged along my spine in the form of the complete Heavenly Book of Yin Talismans.
From then on, I could make the bones of someone who drowned thirty years ago speak and identify the true culprit. I could cross the River of Forgetfulness by walking on the lanterns of the ferryman of the Yellow Springs. The head of a feng shui clan knelt in the mortuary and begged me to break the "Nine Sons Contesting the Throne" formation in his ancestral tomb. When the Celestial Master of Mount Longhu fought me with spells, the brush that flew from my sleeve was none other than the Underworld Judge's brush.
But when I reversed yin and yang and uncovered the blood curse talisman that had suppressed China for six hundred years atop the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City, the jade chimes of the Hall of Lingxiao rang out. Beyond the thirty-third heaven, the heavenly net of a hundred thousand celestial soldiers had long been waiting.
"Chen Du, you whelp," came the Jade Emperor's decree from the clouds, his voice betraying an almost imperceptible tremor. "Hand over the Ghost Immortal's bones, and I'll let you keep your whole corpse when you enter the Execution Platform for Immortals."
