The Afterlife Inn Is Open for Business

Devour the Nine Supernatural Forbidden Zones and rewrite the rules of life and death in the mortal realm

Chen Wangsheng inherits a bizarre inn adrift in the rift between yin and yang. Its ledger says he has only seven days left to live. In an empty room, a paper figure transforms into a bride in embroidered shoes, coming to claim his life. Zhang Ya, a bloodstained female ghost from the Republic of China era, awakens from her seal, while from the blood-seeping Room of Rebirth on the third floor comes the sound of a nine-headed bird pecking at departed souls...

◇ Rules Are Weapons ◇

This inn is a living arsenal of supernatural weapons:

Devour the Nine-Headed Bird Apartment and gain an elevator shaft that turns time and space upside down.

Control the Yellow Springs train, using its wheels to carve tracks into the Book of Life and Death.

The ghost infant's cries in the hospital ward turn out to be the key to breaking a century-old curse.

Every contained object is a bargaining chip in a wager against the apocalypse.

◇ The Bloody Loop ◇

When Chen Wangsheng discovers that:

Every previous innkeeper died on a blood moon night at the age of forty-nine.

The blood on Zhang Ya's qipao comes from the same source as the massacre of the living human stakes during the Republic of China era.

The heartbeats of the twins at his birth were carved into the inn's foundations long ago.

A god-slaying chess game spanning time and space suddenly reveals itself. He is both the player and the offering.

◇ Reconstruction at the End ◇

The Nine Forbidden Zones become cages, and the countdown to the collapse of the rules begins:

A hundred thousand cleavers hang over the mortal realm from the pawnshop, while faces sprout from the library shelves.

Black blood from the Room of Rebirth spills across dimensions, and the inn's surveillance screens show how Chen Wangsheng will die in the future.

With the Scales of Karma in hand and the inn as his weight, Chen Wangsheng weighs the boundary between life and death for the Nine-Headed Bird and humanity.

“When the sign on the Room of Rebirth changes to the character ‘Nine’

every living person will hear the sound of their own gravestone being pecked through.”