By day, I'm Jiang Xiaochuan, an ordinary craftsman who makes paper effigies and wreaths, scraping by in the village with my half-baked feng shui skills. By night, I'm a "madman" in everyone else's eyes, because I've opened the side door to "them."
When night falls, the side door creaks open. Is the next "person" to step inside a rule-abiding buyer from the underworld, a vengeful ghost still clinging to an old grudge, or... an errand from my Judge father that will cost me my life?
The incense from the day has yet to burn out, but the night's strange happenings have only just begun. Welcome to Fushouzhai, the paper shop at the third watch, its door open in the seam between yin and yang.
Soaking wet, pale-faced "customers" arrive in the icy midnight air, handing me crumpled renminbi to buy old objects that vanished decades ago. The things they ask for mysteriously appear on the shelves, and I have to find the ghost money that circulates in the underworld. Think that's strange enough?
What truly overturned everything I thought I knew was the female ghost who wept and begged me to clear her name. After I nearly sent myself off with a half-learned spell, my family's traditional paper-crafting skills saved the day by sheer accident, and drew the chains of the Black and White Impermanence. After a chaotic ordeal, I thought I was done for, but instead I got a pitch-black, icy token: the "Yang Realm Patrol Command."
From then on, my "side job" got even more outrageous: making paper effigies by day, suppressing evil at the third watch. I bind fiends with ghost-catching chains and offer incense and cigarettes to wronged souls. The Road to the Yellow Springs has become my "business corridor." I can chat with Ox-Head and Horse-Face, lend a hand beside Meng Po's soup, and even visit the halls of the Ten Yama Kings...
