Beneath the Water Abyss

My family has made a living retrieving bodies for generations, but what we fish out of the water has never been the dead.

It's "debts."

Debts of civilization, ill-fated love, and karma, sunk beneath rivers, lakes, and seas, belonging to those who refuse to be forgotten.

My name is Chen Du, an ordinary man who makes ends meet by livestreaming body retrievals.

Then, at the bottom of the Tuo River, I fished up a bizarre circular formation made of nine women in red dresses, and my world fell apart.

The protective charm I'd worn for twenty-three years was made from their ribs.

The twenty-three years I'd lived were stolen goods.

And the grandfather I revered was the architect of it all: a life thief who stole the bones and blood of the dead to defy heaven and change his grandson's fate.

I was forcibly recruited into the Nine Dragons Bureau, which oversees all supernatural water-related affairs in China.

There, I learned the other side of the world:

Beneath every great river, from the Yangtze to the Yellow River to the Pearl River, lie gates leading to the "Water Abyss."

Human history is built upon the ruins of a civilization that was submerged.

And we body retrievers have a true duty: to be "civilization's cleanup crew," ensuring that the remains and memories lying in the deep never rise to the surface.

My first mission is to investigate myself.

My final mission is to make a choice when the gates of the seven great river systems open at once and two civilizations face their ultimate collision:

Will I protect the lights on the shore, or embrace the truth of the abyss?

I will retrieve that answer with my own hands, from the deepest waters.