"If this world is a register of life and death, then I am the page that was torn out."
The supernatural has returned. Ghosts roam the night, and an "Underworld Register" has appeared among the living, recalculating everyone's remaining lifespan.
At the old station in Nancheng, the last train brings an ordinary man, Lu Jing, whose life has been miscounted by one year and seven days.
To make up for this nonexistent "mortal lifespan," he is forcibly appointed a "living ghost constable" and put in charge of an abandoned ghost constable shrine:
When the soul-guiding lantern shines, the living must stay away. When it goes dark, ghosts roam the night.
For every vengeful ghost he collects, he earns another day of life in the Underworld Register. For every living person he mistakenly collects, he loses a year of his own lifespan.
More absurdly, the shrine's clay statue is his future corpse: headless, with a split heart and limbs bent backward, its skin slowly growing to look just like his.
To stay alive, Lu Jing has no choice but to move between the Yellow Springs and the mortal world:
He must bless a paper bride with a blood wedding, cut the tongue from a hanged ghost, help a headless school beauty find her head, and deal with a chaste livestreamer who loves crawling out of the TV to ask him, "Do I look human?"
But when he opens the final page of the Underworld Register, he discovers...
He is neither the first living ghost constable nor the last.
He is merely the substitute death chosen by "that being":
At the third watch, his lifespan is replenished. At the fifth, his head is replaced. When dawn breaks at the seventh watch, a new clay statue will grow in the ghost constable shrine, while the old one...
Will bury itself in the ground with its own hands, smiling as it welcomes its successor.
"My name is Lu Jing. I have seven nights of mortal life left."
