“When I collapsed from hunger on a street in Republican-era China, I thought my years as a corporate drone had finally earned me a reward. Then the campus belle who rescued me turned around and splashed talisman water on my hand. ‘Chen Yanzhou, you can’t escape.’”
After dying from overwork in the 21st century, Chen Yanzhou is reborn as an unlucky scholar in Republican-era China, poisoned and caught up from the start in a string of bizarre cases involving the living performing opera in a theater at midnight.
The “Old K” System in his head offers only warnings: touch the costumes and die, hear crying and die, reveal the secret and die. Xie Zhaoning, at his side, seems to be a frosty top student at St. John’s College, but is actually a master of the occult arts carrying the blood feud of her murdered family.
When a scheming corporate drone meets a black-lotus campus belle, the two use rules to break curses and schemes to turn the tables on schemes, caught in a deadly struggle involving warlords, foreigners, and the Night Patrol.
“You want revenge, I want to stay alive. Why don’t we join forces and turn this whole yin-yang game upside down?”
