The Yellow River twists and bends eighteen times, but nowhere is more treacherous than Longmen Shoal.
The old saying passed down through generations has been carved into the wooden beams of the Chen family's corpse-retrieval shop for nearly a hundred years:
Don't retrieve corpses at the third watch, and don't pull in your hooks before the rooster crows.
Never look back while retrieving a corpse, or a ghost will hook you and drag you away.
My name is Chen Jiuhe. I'm twenty-two years old, the seventeenth-generation corpse retriever of the Chen family, and the last.
