In the twenty-third year of the Republic of China, warlords carved up the land, epidemics raged, the dead returned to life, and ghosts roamed everywhere.
The government secretly established the Nightwatch Bureau to handle supernatural incidents.
Zhou Muyun is a detective in Shanghai's French Concession. By day, he is a hapless investigator; by night, he becomes a hunter of strange tales.
He has dissociative identity disorder, with multiple personalities taking turns in control. Each personality has mastered a different way to break the rules of supernatural cases.
While investigating a case, he unexpectedly acquires a mysterious tiger tally, uncovering a chapter of human history that had been erased.
The tally contains twenty volumes of Records of the Night Walkers, each with fifty chapters, documenting the truth behind the rituals that resurrect the dead.
He navigates a bizarre reality where trams lead to the underworld and teahouses tell people's fates, matching wits and battling with the dead.
As his personalities pull him in different directions, he gradually learns how to decipher the rules of supernatural tales.
He was once the sinner behind a failed ritual. Now, he is the only person who can end the cycle of rebirth.
As he gathers all the fragments of the tiger tally, the truth comes to light: he is the sacrificial offering reincarnated for the twentieth time.
When three suns hang in the sky and the Nine Gates open, he must sever his own karmic ties and restart the Heavenly Way.
In the end, he merges his personalities, reverses the course of the Republic of China, and stops the underworld from swallowing the human world.
