The Hall of the Departed

Synopsis of The Rebirth Funeral Parlor

In the seventeenth year of the Republic, the Rebirth Funeral Parlor at the foot of Qingwu Mountain got a new owner.

Seventeen-year-old Zhou Changsheng clutched half of the Yin-Yang Bone-Burial Manual his master had left behind, staring blankly at the deserted mountain road. Three days earlier, the usually indolent old Taoist had suddenly thrust the funeral parlor's wooden sign into his hands, saying, “It's time for a living person to keep watch over the dead in the town below.” Then he had slung his peachwood sword over his back and vanished into the mist overnight. From then on, the only “mediator between yin and yang” within a hundred li was this boy who always wandered around with candied hawthorns in his pocket.

The characters for “Rebirth” on the funeral parlor's gray-brick wall had been worn and mottled by wind and rain, but that didn't stop special “guests” from arriving every night: a widow carrying an urn of ashes and begging for a rite of passage; a warlord's adjutant who covered his face with banknotes and wanted a golden-thread nanmu coffin for his dead wife; even a procession of paper figures carrying an empty sedan chair and claiming they had come to “take the funeral parlor's young master to his ghost wedding.” Following his master's example, Zhou Changsheng set three soul-guiding lamps outside the parlor, holding a soul-summoning banner in his left hand and a bone flute engraved with a birth date in his right. Yet whenever he opened his spiritual eyes, he would see beads of blood seep from coffin seams or claw marks suddenly appear on the walls of the morgue.

Then, one stormy night, a corpse arrived at the parlor, her face as lifelike as if she were still alive. The balsam flowers on her fingertips were blood-red, and her nails were visibly growing beneath the moonlight. Stranger still, bloody tears seeped from beneath her eyelids. She clearly bore the ominous look of someone who had “died with her eyes open.” On a silk handkerchief tucked against her body, Zhou Changsheng found half a verse, the very tune his master used to hum.

The “karmic entanglements down the mountain” the old man had spoken of gradually began to surface