[Republican-era ghost ferrying + equally matched leads + tragic romance and redemption]
On a rainy night in Republican-era Shanghai, the spirit of my best friend Ye Ting drifts outside a pawnshop. Not only did that scumbag kill her, he refined her into a puppet demon!
My name is Su Qing. By day, I’m the beautiful proprietress of Tongbao Pawnshop. At night, the shop transforms into Tongbao Demon House: both a spirit bank for demons and my secret base for guiding their souls onward. To save Ye Ting, I reveal that I’m a demon guide, only to run into Wen Nan, a young Daoist who has just come down from the mountain.
He points his sword at my nose. “All demons deserve to die! You wicked cultivator! Don’t use them as an excuse!”
I sneer and crush his talisman. “Can you be sure the people you save are any less wicked than the demons you kill?”
To guide Ye Ting’s spirit onward, we’re forced to work together, but our efforts draw out Bai Qimeng, a great puppet demon, and uncover the truth behind the tragic romance hidden by Ye Ting’s parents for twenty years. It turns out her tragedy was already fated in the previous generation!
But no one knows that I’m not really from the Republican era. I’m just a passerby in this time, here to weather a tribulation. Guiding demons is only one part of my own cultivation trials, while Wen Nan is the tribulation written in my fate that I can’t escape. As more demons come knocking, each burdened by an unresolved obsession, the pawnshop’s copper bell rings night after night: a purple fox seeking revenge, a paper demon bound by a promise, and a thousand-year-old tree spirit concealing the secrets of Wen Nan’s sect... Wen Nan and I become more and more entangled. He goes from killing every demon he sees to shielding me from their blades; I go from wanting only to overcome my tribulation to being unable to stop protecting him. It turns out love is the hardest tribulation for me to overcome, and the one I can least escape.
