My name is Li Mufan, and I’m a philosophy graduate from the Northeast who firmly believes in materialism. My life plan was to teach, until my grandmother died and left me a heavy burden: my family has been spirit mediums for generations.
I thought it was just an old woman’s rambling, but then the consequences caught up with me. While helping our neighbor, Grandma Wang, look for her corgi, I ran into my “immortal patron,” Hu San Taiye, at an abandoned factory.
But this master doesn’t wear a long robe and ride the winds of immortality. He wears a suit and tie, slicks back his hair, and talks to me about KPIs and merit assessments! My entire edifice of science came crashing down at that moment.
From then on, I was forced into the job and became the most unconventional spirit medium in history. My aloof snake spirit partner is obsessed with candied hawthorn, while the brash weasel spirit is so love-struck it causes trouble. Our cases are just as varied: demanding afterlife overtime pay for an earthbound spirit who died from working too hard, clearing the name of a centuries-old immortal who was bullied online, and outwitting a fraud who uses livestreams to scam people...
As I travel between the everyday warmth of the Northeast and its eerie mists, I realize that the hardest part has never been vanquishing demons. It’s dealing with the tangled human feelings and relationships behind each case. And that KPI-obsessed Manager Hu seems to have quite a past of his own...
This path is getting more and more “criminal.”
