The Spirit Keeper Turned Around at Midnight, and a Red-Clad Ghost Clung to Me

The spirit-keeper ancestral rules of Qingxi Town are etched in stone: Keep watch over the dead at the third watch. If a ghost taps your shoulder, don't look back!

My grandfather was the town's last spirit-keeper. As he lay dying, he left behind only this ironclad rule, but never got the chance to explain that a century-old blood curse lay beneath Qingxi Town.

My name is Lin Qi, a penniless rascal. To pay off a two-thousand-yuan gambling debt, I took a reckless job keeping watch over the corpse of an old woman who had died a violent death.

At midnight on the third night, a cold wind swept through the mourning hall and snuffed out the candles. A woman in red drifted up behind me, her icy fingertips tapping my shoulder as she softly lured me in:

"Young man, turn around and admire my bridal procession, stretching ten li."

Terrified out of my wits, I broke the taboo and turned around. From that moment, I fell into an endless tribulation.

A dark mark burned itself into my collarbone, and a century-old pact with the dead locked itself around me. She was the wronged spirit of a bride buried alive a hundred years ago. Her soul was imprisoned in a heartbroken locust tree, her corpse sunk in a soul-locking well, and the overwhelming evil my grandfather had suppressed all his life was now transferred to me.

If I clear her name, all ghosts will flee and evil spirits will be unable to harm me;

But if I abandon the pact halfway, the red bridal robes will trap me in nightmares night after night, leaving me unable to escape, whether in life or death.

Keep watch over the dead and never look back, or the red bridal robes will imprison you in your dreams.

The moment I turned around, my path as Qingxi's spirit-keeper had no way back.