A bankrupt Taoist master turns his luck around with a “starving ghost”? Could the chipped bowl propping up his table really be an ancient divine artifact?
Chen Xian is the poorest Taoist master around, and his landlord has chased him onto the roof. So broke he uses his family's “Five Thunder Talisman” to set fire to his trousers, he learns that someone is willing to pay 100,000 yuan in cash for the chipped bowl that has propped up his table for years!
The moment he gets his hands on it, the bowl binds itself to him and issues an absurd task: solve the “starving ghost” case at a popular restaurant, or suffer thirty years of bad luck! He's forced to team up with a socially anxious tech geek who can draw talismans using a game controller, and a muscle-bound guy with so much yang energy that he believes in “exorcising ghosts through fitness.”
Their target turns out to be the restaurant owner's late grandmother, a tender but stubborn spirit who sneaks in overpriced ingredients night after night because she's afraid her granddaughter isn't getting enough to eat. The monster-hunting team's first mission is pure chaos: a talisman accidentally sets off the fire sprinklers, the muscleman gets stuck trying to block the delivery counter, and Chen Xian's chipped bowl sucks in the “starving ghost,” then spits out a rice ball that actually fills you up...
And so the city's most eccentric supernatural investigation agency opens for business. Its services include, but aren't limited to, delivering takeout by flying sword, using a magic formation to create a “no leaving work” barrier at an influencer agency, and settling livestream contract disputes for a thousand-year-old fox spirit. Chen Xian gradually discovers that his rice-ball-spitting bowl is tied to an ancient mystery. When the slumbering “Spirit Devourers” begin harvesting the city's emotions, this most unreliable team has no choice but to shoulder the burden of saving the world, in the most ridiculous way possible.
This is an urban legend about a bunch of good-for-nothings banding together, warming one another's hearts, and laughing their way through ghost hunts, only to discover that every tender, stubborn devotion deserves to be protected.
This is a delightfully surprising urban fantasy masterpiece. The author cleverly blends monster-hunting, comedy, and heartwarming moments with the fantastical premise of "being fed by a broken bowl." On the surface, it's a hilarious daily life of a hapless exorcist with eccentric teammates, but beneath lies a grand scheme involving a centuries-old seal.