My name is Zhang Zifan. I’m a criminal investigator.
That is, until I personally handled a “suicide case.”
The dead man had a smile on his face, and his phone was playing on repeat a nursery rhyme my grandmother used to scare me with when I was little.
While investigating, a shadow pinned me down at the crime scene, and blood poured from my eyes.
When I opened them again, the world had changed. I could see “those things.”
A white figure floating in the hallway, bloody words counting down in the elevator mirror, a deceased colleague who kept calling in the middle of the night...
My boss said I was under too much stress and suspended me.
Then a folklorist named Li Xueer showed up at my door. Holding my grandmother’s battered copy of the Folk Ritual Manual, she stared into my eyes and asked, “What you saw, was it wearing red and had no face?”
We were forced to join forces.
That was when we discovered that beneath the city’s glossy surface lay an ancient, bloody system of “folk rules”:
Those who died unjustly need a substitute; spirits bound by obsession must have their wishes fulfilled; evil objects fear copper coins.
And this tattered book of mine turned out to be a “survival guide” bought with the lives of countless people who came before us.
To stay alive, and to uncover the truth, I teamed up with my childhood friend Wang Pangzi, who runs a funeral parlor and handles the screaming and money-making. Along with a scruffy Taoist who does nothing but drink and can’t be trusted, and a fussy nun who keeps preaching “compassion,” we formed a ragtag team: the Folk Supernatural Affairs Bureau.
Our cases grew stranger and stranger:
In an ancient town, we found the whole population complicit in offering living sacrifices to the river god.
In Miao territory, we suffered a backlash from love curses, and the entire village surrounded us at midnight, dancing like the dead.
The most terrifying case was an auction at the ghost market, where someone actually wanted to buy my “yin-yang eyes”...
