On the third day after my grandfather disappeared, I was forced to take over the rusty corpse-retrieval boat by the river.
As the last corpse retriever on the Yangtze, I was terrified of water. Yet at the bottom of the river, in the Ghost-Spinning Bend, I felt my way to a bronze coffin carved with water-god totems. The instant the coffin cut my fingertip, the “Underworld System” suddenly bound itself to me. A cold mechanical voice rang in my mind: “Mission: Retrieve the soul of a student who fell into the river. Fulfill their final wish to obtain the ‘Soul-Discerning Ear.’”
From then on, I used the System to listen to the river and locate the dead, and swam through the depths using water-dividing techniques. I helped lay to rest a student searching for their exam admission ticket, cleared out a Republic-era shipwreck hiding a soul-sucking bronze mirror, and fought a gang of evil spirits trying to steal the coffin...
But as a second and then a third bronze coffin appeared, I realized my grandfather’s disappearance hadn’t been an accident. Liu Kun, the villain in a bamboo hat, was watching all three coffins, hoping to awaken the water god and wreak havoc on the Yangtze.
The System’s prompt rang out again: “Final mission: Protect the Soul-Suppressing Pillars of the Yangtze and prevent the water god from awakening.”
I gripped the old compass my grandfather had left behind and looked at the rushing river. So what if I was afraid of water? This time, I would retrieve more than just the dead. I would uncover the truth behind my grandfather’s disappearance and bring peace to the entire Yangtze!
