Don't touch the rules. Touch them, and you die.
But the ghosts' rules are never written on paper. They lurk in the bloodstained gears of clocks, hide in the cracks between shadows in the stairwells, and gnaw at the bones of spirit-fused people. They are called spirit laws: irreversible, never random, and all it takes to kill you is one unconscious movement.
I'm Chen Yan, the third survivor of the Thirteen Chimes Clock Shop in Qingchuan City, and a half-human, half-ghost who fused with a time-rule ghost.
Gears grow in my bones, clock faces are carved into my palms, and the spiritual corruption worsens by the day. The suppressants are made from scraps of other ghosts. Drinking them is like quenching your thirst with poison: the more you drink, the crazier you get.
The Spirit Investigation Bureau treats the spirit-fused as vessels for raising ghosts. The rulekeepers among the people risk their lives testing spirit laws. The most powerful supernatural entities gnaw through the walls of the spirit realm to evolve. Everyone in the world is gambling: betting they can decipher the spirit laws first, betting they won't be the first to turn into a ghost.
There is no way to kill a ghost. The only thing that can counter a rule is another rule.
I solved the clock shop's deadly puzzle, broke the hospital's cycle of reincarnation, and braved the domain laws of the Demon City. But the more spirit laws I decipher, the more I realize this mess may be impossible to solve.
Under the spirit laws, you either go mad, die, or become a new rule yourself.
My name is Chen Yan. I'm still alive, and I'm on the verge of madness.
Now it's my turn to risk my life and find out whether the spirit laws of this world can be changed, even by a single stroke.
(No golden finger, no saintly heroine, just pure brain-burning puzzle solving. The spirit-fused teeter between madness and survival throughout, and every spirit law is carefully foreshadowed. One wrong move, and the whole game falls apart.)
