My Contract Reaches the Underworld

[The whole village called me a jinx who brought misfortune to my family, until I mourned a girl who had died a violent death that night and the candles in the funeral hall turned a ghostly green.]

The night I was forced to become a professional mourner, I rang the soul-quelling bell passed down through my family with my own hands. The wet footprints of a murdered bride clung to me. A corpse wept blood from the walls of a century-old haunted house, while a pair of eyes in the darkness followed me like a shadow.

It was only when my grandfather tore open my collar on his deathbed that I saw the mark of a pact connecting the worlds of the living and the dead. “Child, you’re not mourning the dead. You’re raising the banner for a million ghost soldiers waiting to march.”

Now all those things kneel before me and call me…

Keeper of the Seal of the Underworld.