When midnight knocks no longer come from the neighbors, when reflections in the mirror start to blink, and when the last words of the missing are 'Don't trust your shadow,' Team 614 of the Special Incident Response Center is closing in from the shadows of this city.
Lin Qiu is a forensic pathologist who can read the past from traces left behind by spirits. After accidentally getting caught up in a string of 'shadow disappearance cases,' she is forced to join Team 614, a unit said to exist only in internal files. Every member is 'a little unusual': team leader Zhou Ye is always talking to thin air, technician Su Rui can converse with electronic devices, and the mysterious man who always wears a black trench coat is rumored to be able to summon the lingering obsessions of the dead at midnight.
The cases they handle are never reported, and their files all begin with the label 'Supernatural': a bride in red repeatedly tries on wedding gowns in a bridal shop, though she is actually reliving the wedding she never got to finish five years ago; a grandfather clock in an old clock shop runs backward at three every morning, with a watchmaker trapped inside who refuses to leave; and the shadow case that drew Lin Qiu into the unit, in which the final image of every missing person shows an identical shadow standing behind them.
'We don't handle cases. We handle obsessions that never got the chance to say goodbye.' Zhou Ye lit a cigarette and gazed through the window at the neon-blue night sky. 'But Team 614 has one rule: don't look back, don't get attached, and don't let yourself become the name on the next file.'
What Lin Qiu doesn't know is that every trace of a spirit she has touched is quietly piecing together a past of her own that has been erased. And the obsessions she has saved will eventually become blades turned against her, or armor to protect her.
