Jiang Che, a 26-year-old discharged combat instructor, returns to his hometown to take over the old curios shop, Shouyi Antiques, left to him by his grandfather, Jiang Shouyi. But at midnight, a woman in a Republican-era qipao appears, demanding a hairpin. This is how he first encounters the uncanny.
His grandfather didn’t disappear. He was taken by members of the Bone-Eclipsing Society, a group wearing bronze masks, leaving behind only an ancestral compass, an ink line, and a book called The Handbook of Objects of Suppression, which records three arts: discerning qi, sealing and suppressing, and dispelling calamity.
Beneath Jiangcheng’s glittering surface lurk secrets that devour people: the rules of an abandoned brick kiln, a curse of echoes in an old alley, shadowy remnants on a subterranean path in the subway tunnels, a midnight elevator in a campus laboratory building... Every bizarre incident is linked to clues left by his grandfather, as well as to the polluted underground Yin Vein.
Jiang Che uses military combat skills to take on the uncanny head-on and the folk knowledge in the handbook to unravel its rules. With Su Wanqing, a graduate student in folklore, and Lu Zheng, an agent with the Bureau of Anomalous Phenomena Control, at his side, he inches toward the truth: his grandfather was a hidden master of object suppression, the Bone-Eclipsing Society wants to use the power of the Yin Vein to overthrow the human world, and the Jiang family has always been the city’s last line of defense.
From searching for his grandfather to protecting Jiangcheng, Jiang Che uses ink lines to bind evil spirits, a compass to find the way, and his fists to break through conspiracies. In the end, he must take up his grandfather’s mission: suppress the uncanny, and the evil in people’s hearts.
