My name is Chen Wanxing, and my grandmother is a renowned spirit medium throughout the surrounding villages.
As her life neared its end, she did two things:
First, she passed the Lady of the Green Lamp, whom she had worshipped for fifty years, on to me.
Second, she taught me to recognize all the “unclean things” she'd spent her life collecting knowledge about.
“When the pendant turns hot, a guest is coming. If its glow turns bloodred, it's a death-seeking ghost. If you feel it starting to freeze... Xing'er, run. Don't look back.”
From high school through university, I used this “supernatural dashboard” to deal with countless bizarre events beyond human understanding:
The person combing their hair in the dorm who never turns around, the midnight tune on repeat in the piano room, the shadow sealed beneath the well in the old house...
I help people, and the immortals help me. But the price I pay is that my hair turns green and falls out, one strand at a time.
Grandmother says it's “an increase in spiritual power.”
Until I found an illustration of the “Green Lamp Ritual” in an old book in the university library:
On the altar, a young girl's hair has been braided into a lampwick, burning with a green flame.
A small note beside it reads: “Choose someone pure in body and mind to serve as the lamp. Use their obsession as oil, and it will burn forever.”
I touched a new strand of green hair that had grown in.
For the first time, the pendant beneath my collarbone gave me a searing warning.
This novel gets better and better the more I read it, I want to finish it in one sitting