When people gave their fear names like "Vengeful Shadow" and "Fierce Evil," they were destined never to see the unsent rose on a ghost's chest.
Zhao Qingyuan is the most dangerous cleaner in the Soul-Sealing Bureau, and the human prison for the ferocious beast Qiongqi. Whenever he reads a ghost's memories with his eyes, a third of himself sinks into their cries of anguish: the drowned girl clutching her exam admission ticket, the charred arm repeatedly pushing at a window during a fire.
"Don't let your heart soften. They've eaten people." His master, Zhuge Ming, wiped blood from his compass.
"But haven't people eaten people too?" His good friend Zhang Yunke said with a smile, handing him an experimental report from 1953. At the edges of the pages lingered fingerprints like ice crystals.
When Zhao Qingyuan seized the last fragment of the contract atop the bell tower, black flames and golden light tore through the night sky at once. He suddenly understood: he was neither kindling to ignite the yang flame nor a jar to hold yin resentment, but a wisp of smoke between the two,
not yet extinguished, but almost gone.
