The Strange Tales of Liaozhai's IOUs

To raise money for his grandfather’s life-saving surgery, impoverished student Wei Lai accidentally unlocked the astonishing secret of his family’s ancestral book. This seemingly ordinary thread-bound volume was actually the “Ledger of Underworld Debts,” which governed the balance between yin and yang. Bound by blood ties, he was forced to inherit the fate of a “Yang-Realm Debt Collector” and step into the gray territory where the worlds of the living and the dead intertwined. Every yellowed IOU listed the years of life a ghost had borrowed, and his collection methods were downright fantastical: he could temporarily seize control of a debtor ghost’s body and force it to work in both realms to repay its debt.

From a stubborn old woman in a mansion from the Republican era to a ghost bound by obsession who haunted a school; from a ghost market in an unfinished building full of secrets to the Underworld Bank, which controlled the wealth of both realms, Wei Lai’s collection work was fraught with danger at every turn. Along the way, he gradually uncovered his family’s long-buried past: his grandfather had been a top debt collector who completed 99 assignments, but out of a moment of compassion, he set aside the hundredth debt. And the debtor was none other than his grandfather himself.

As the National Security Special Events Response Department, a fox-spirit pawnshop that controlled the underworld’s collateral business, and multinational corporations seeking immortality by manipulating people’s lifespans entered the fray, Wei Lai discovered that behind this seemingly simple business of collecting years of life lay a vast conspiracy. It threatened the order of both realms, the expansion of the rifts in Hell, and even the survival of human civilization.