No. 13, Jiuquan Lane

I put makeup on corpses in a funeral parlor and followed the rules for three years: I don't accept jobs at midnight, I don't draw ownerless corpses, I don't touch ghosts who died in vain, and I don't touch red ones. That rainy night, the curator handed over three times the reward and pointed to the red rope tied to the ankle of the female corpse. "The painting looks better, and the family asked... To disembowel it and take out the contents." I cut open the centipede scar on her abdomen and put my hand in. What I felt was not the internal organs. It's a brass key with a bloody note on it: "No. 13, Jiuquan Lane, Qinghe Town." "Go and open the door. It's time to pay your grandfather's debt." I returned to my hometown after an absence of twenty years, and no one in the town remembered me. Until I pushed open the creaking wooden door—— In the middle of the main room, there are three bowls of dumplings with chopsticks inserted straight into the center. There are seven black and white portraits hanging on the wall. The sixth picture is of the woman I sewed with my own hands yesterday. The position for the seventh picture is empty. On the glass of the photo frame, a handprint with my birth date was slowly seeping out. Only then did I realize that what my grandfather left to me was not the ancestral home, but the "arbitration office" of the local yin and yang industry. Creditors come to your door every night: There is a living person lying in the coffin of a bride destined for a yin marriage, an ancient corpse similar to mine is locked in an underwater shipwreck, and a train in an abandoned mine is filled with silent "passengers"... And I have to rely on half a book of "The Map of Earth Veins" and my funeral skills to survive among countless strange demands. Until I discovered that it all stems from the "Feast of One Hundred Ghosts" that was covered up twenty years ago. The seven portraits correspond to the heirs of seven eccentric professions, all of whom died unexpectedly. And I am the eighth. He is also the only one who can rewrite the rules. ——Please light the lamp when it gets dark. No. 13, Jiuquan Lane, we will not close tonight.