The People Who Borrow Lives

My name is Chen San, and I deal in objects associated with the dead.

When I was eighteen, I acquired a paper effigy from the Republican era. Ever since, I’ve dreamed of the same woman every night.

In every dream, she asks me, “When are you coming to join me?”

To stay alive, I set out on a strange quest to uncover the truth.

The century-old corpse king at the corpse-driving inn, the bronze coffin beneath the Yellow River, the secret paper effigy craft of western Hunan...

Only when I opened my grandfather’s notebook did I discover that every generation of the Chen family had been doing the same thing:

Borrowing lives.

And my life is nearly used up.