My name is Chen Wuyang, a young man at the bottom of the ladder who delivers food in a big city. The two defining labels of my life are “broke” and “unlucky.” Then, on a rainy night, I ran into a ghost. Literally: it was stuck in the elevator doors, complaining that after dying from overwork, it still had to float off to work.
That was when I learned that the city was packed with more dead than living: poor ghosts worked on “underworld projects” on the midnight subway after being worked to death under the 996 schedule; unlucky spirits driven to leap from buildings by housing prices repeatedly bungee-jumped from the roof of an unfinished tower; traffic-accident ghosts were forever stuck at intersections, searching for the organs they’d lost; and there were foreign ghosts, too. Thai Kuman Thong haunted the gates of kindergartens, Japan’s Slit-Mouthed Woman fretted over her mask being sold out, and vampires went malnourished because blood banks required real-name registration.
As for me, I unexpectedly inherited my grandfather’s brick-thick Practical Handbook of the Ten Thousand Laws and became an “unofficial yin-yang liaison.” No health insurance, no housing fund, and no regular pay, just a bunch of oddball coworkers: a Maoshan descendant who pauses for breath every few words, a carpenter ghost who uses Luban sorcery to invent things, and a female ghost roommate who keeps trying to drain my yang energy, only to be interrupted by my mortgage bills.
In this age, when people have it even harder than ghosts, I navigate among all kinds of demons and monsters, and the even more terrifying human heart, armed with a battered book and a secondhand electric scooter. Then one day, I discover that all these seemingly accidental encounters point to a shocking secret stretching back a century...
