[Mystery and Spirit Hunting + Identity Puzzles + Deliverance Through Karma]
Meng Po was demoted for a thousand years, guarding nine generations of Soul Wardens.
In this life, he became the gentle owner of Shen Zhou Antiques, watching the internet cafe’s manager crash and bleed in the “Yin-Yang Rift.” But when she was heart-torn by a vengeful spirit in a blood mirror and hellfire burned her eyes until they wept pus, he crushed his teacup and revealed a red cord around his wrist. “Su Wangyan, you’re the reincarnation of Ksitigarbha. And I... am I supposed to save you, or deliver this city from its resentment?” From a faceless bus to an abandoned hospital, every time they solved a murder, another cinnabar mark appeared on her forehead. They were the sign that a Soul Warden was awakening.
As the black mist of the Netherworld Lord of the Nine Hells spilled across the city skyline, he took her hand and pressed it against the Soul-Summoning Bell of the Yellow Springs. “Choose: the laws of Heaven that suppress the dead, or humanity’s ability to free people from their obsessions.” Bound together for a thousand years, what are they meant to subdue in this life: ghosts, or fate?
An internet cafe manager moonlighting as an exorcist?
Su Wangyan stood before a haunted house slated for demolition, clutching a shoddy peachwood sword, only for the wandering spirit of a woman with a severed finger to grab her by the throat. Her eyes suddenly throbbed with pain, and she saw what the spirit had stuffed between her fingers: a demolition agreement from twenty years ago!
From the passengers in white on the faceless bus to the old woman combing her hair on the blood-mirror campus, the karmic threads behind every supernatural case formed a vast web in her “Yellow Springs Eye.”
Then Gu Chenzhou, the antiques shop owner, grabbed her wrist in the haunted house. “Stop using the Yellow Springs Eye. You’re showing the Netherworld Lord of the Nine Hells the way here.” It turned out the Soul Warden’s destruction of his spiritual meridians a hundred years ago was a lie, the weakening seal was part of a scheme, and she was the “modern-day Soul Warden” who could break it!
