The Strange Case Records Office

[Rules-based horror, folk horror, suspenseful imaginings, shocking twists, supernatural resurgence, Chinese-style horror, underworld office worker, death game, supernatural entities descend, Cthulhu] Lu Li, a graduate student in folklore, inherits his ancestral home and unexpectedly becomes the 27th head of the Bureau of Strange Records, forced to take on the duty of keeping the worlds of yin and yang in balance. A copy of the Register of a Hundred Ghosts and a lantern that reveals spirits drag him into the decaying rules of the Underworld Bureau. Xie Qi, a ghostly bailiff, exploits the dead with KPIs, twisting the laws of the underworld to raise evil spirits and boost his numbers. The paper spirit “Paper Auntie” is sharp-tongued and greedy, yet willing to tear apart her own spiritual body to take a fatal blow for him. Zhong Kui, an inheritor of the Xiangxi corpse-driving tradition, possesses a corpse king’s bell that conceals a secret capable of overturning the balance of yin and yang...

Can Lu Li unravel the entanglements of his past life and redefine the rules governing yin and yang? Find all the answers in the book!

When Lu Li discovers that the darkness of the Underworld Bureau is far worse than he imagined, memories of his past life gradually return. He was actually a Ming dynasty Imperial Guard, forged into a ghostly bailiff after a massacre destroyed his family. Meanwhile, a fragment of the Scripture of the Hidden Talisman, held by the mastermind Zhao Qingyang, is turning words into instruments of torture as it waits for its chance to exact revenge...

On the day the Bureau of Strange Records officially opens, the white figure carrying a lantern appears once more. This time, it lifts its hood and reveals a face identical to Lu Li’s.

“Time to pay your debt.”