Lin Yan has had two strange things happen in his life.
When he was twelve, he went to burn incense before the Patriarch’s shrine. After he came home, he never got sick again, and grew strong enough to carry a refrigerator up six flights of stairs. But his grandmother died six months later. Her last words were, “Don’t answer the knocking at midnight.”
Ten years passed, and he had almost forgotten about it, until the day he turned twenty-two. People in the neighboring building started jumping out of windows like lunatics, shouting, “The red shoes want to comb their hair.”
When he went to take a look, scraps of paper figures caught fire as soon as they saw him. A bone-chilling wind that could freeze a person solid blew past him as if he were unaffected.
Then a group of people calling themselves “Night Watchers” showed up and said this was a “supernatural phenomenon” that had been happening for ten years. The government had known all along, and even encouraged some people to “merge” with these things in exchange for the strength to fight and endure. They just had to keep them in check with sheer willpower, or they would turn into monsters.
The Night Watchers said his constitution was a once-in-a-century rarity and the key to fighting the supernatural. But as Lin Yan ran his fingers over the old talisman his grandmother left behind, he couldn’t shake the feeling that things weren’t so simple. What had happened ten years ago, when the incense burner exploded and tears streamed from the Patriarch’s statue?
And the rules hidden in spirit money, old houses, and ancestral halls: were they safeguards for survival, or traps laid long ago?
