In the autumn of the twenty-third year of the Wanli era, relentless rain fell across Jiangnan. Outside Suzhou, the scholar Shen Yan took shelter in an abandoned post station. Spiderwebs covered the interior, and only one oil lamp remained lit, its flickering flame like a ghostly shadow. He rummaged through a broken box in the corner and found a fragmentary manuscript titled Tales of the Night. Its pages were yellowed, and the writing looked as though it had been done in blood.
