The year 2000 arrives, bringing the new millennium. The old textile mill shuts down, laid-off workers set up stalls outside, and the video parlor plays Stephen Chow films.
No one notices that some things never left, even as the new age arrived.
Chen Gui is nineteen, the last yin-yang master. His grandfather forced this gift on him before he died. When that bowl of incense ash was poured into his palm, Chen Gui didn’t pull away. From then on, he could see ghosts. But he was afraid to use his power. Each time he did, it cost him ten years of his life.
Then a woman moved in across the hall.
A drenched child followed behind her, wearing a blue school uniform, water seeping from his ears. The boy, Xiao Kai, was seven. He had drowned in a wild pond three months ago. He didn’t remember dying. He only remembered being cold, and wanting to go home to his mother.
Chen Gui wanted to run. But there was something about Xiao Kai’s eyes that seemed familiar.
Nineteen years earlier, in 1981, a child drowned in a dry well at the textile mill’s kindergarten. No one mentioned the child’s name again, but every year on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, people in the old factory district heard the sound of water coming from the well.
Now, whatever was in that well had come out.
One by one, people in the old district met with misfortune. Lame Sun, Widow Zhou, Old Wu, and Zhou Yan, Chen Gui’s elementary school classmate, who had just returned from the south for the New Year.
Holding the bowl of incense ash, now nearly cold, Chen Gui stood in the middle of the ruins.
Someone behind him asked, “Sir, can you see me?”
He turned around. There was more than one of them.
It was time to settle the score from nineteen years ago.
