My name is Zhang Yuan. I was just a reckless young punk scraping by in a village in Northeast China, until the day I ran my mouth at a mahjong table and said, “I’ll open a funeral shop.” That very night, Old Lady Wang’s living corpse blocked the village road and demanded a burial shroud. If a paper chain hadn’t fallen from the sky and strangled her, I’d probably have ended up reporting to the King of Hell.
Uncle Liu, the village guardian, said my big mouth had opened the gates of the underworld, and that the only way to save my life was to set up a funeral stall in the ruined temple at the village entrance. Who could’ve guessed that barely had I cleaned the coffin lid when, in the middle of the night, a dripping wet water ghost came to buy a paper boat, while a hanged ghost stood on tiptoe and asked me to alter the collar of his burial shroud?
From being an easy target for ghosts to helping them fulfill their last wishes, I’ve seen more than my share of death and injustice in this ruined temple on the border between the living and the dead. Then one day, after I snatched Old Lady Wang’s head back from the Earth God’s temple, I discovered that her wrinkled corpse-face bore a striking resemblance to my aunt, who had been missing for twenty years...
