In the twenty-sixth year of the Guangxu reign, corpse disasters erupt one after another.
Chen Sanwen is born with the gift of “questioning the dead”: he can hear the last words of departed souls, yet is treated with contempt wherever he goes. The Maoshan Daoist priest Mao Xiaofang takes him to Guangdong, where he hopes to have him accepted as a disciple by his senior fellow, Lin Jiu, a legendary priest who bears the “Three Corpse Veins” and can suppress outbreaks of the undead across the land, but is fated to live no longer than forty-nine years.
On their journey south, cases of a mute corpse, a vicious mother-and-child corpse, and refugees fleeing disaster all lead back to a conspiracy a thousand years in the making: the “Seven Corpses Suppressing the Dragon Diagram.” Seven sites of extreme Yin, seven outbreaks of the undead, and behind them a web of dark forces linking cults, foreigners, and warlords.
Chen Sanwen gradually realizes that his meeting with Lin Jiu was no coincidence. The day the two fated roles of Questioner of the Dead and Suppressor of Corpses meet is the day catastrophe begins…
Amid the chaos and smoke of war, the balance between Yin and Yang is broken. Watch a young man question the dead and a Daoist priest suppress evil as they forge a path to the Dao in an age when the living and the dead can hardly be told apart.
(Core elements: late Qing and early Republican history, Maoshan Daoist arts, mystery and investigation, a master-disciple bond, and patriotism.)
