The Haunted Book of Western Hunan: Paper Figures and Bone Swaps

In the final years of the Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China, the mountains of western Hunan loomed like ghosts, shrouded in miasma. A sinister art circulated through the town: paper figures could die in your place, and the living could trade bones. Lu Yanqiu, a bone reader, carried a bone ruler in her left hand and a cinnabar brush in her right. She specialized in treating “misaligned bones.” She never dug up the bones of the living or extended anyone’s life. She only stepped in when bones were stolen or souls were switched. Then, one stormy night, seven paper figures wearing human skin knocked on the door of the funeral home. A male corpse suddenly sat upright. His eyes were two pieces of white bone. He opened his mouth and spat blood: “My bones... they’ve been stolen...” From that moment on, Lu Yanqiu was forced into a catastrophe where bones were the price of life. She broke into hidden kilns lined with human skin, stumbled into a village without bones, and encountered the breathing Cave of Ten Thousand Bones, bone coffins in the Underworld River, a spirit child guarding bones, and a bone boat pieced together from countless skeletons. The Bone Elder, an outcast from the talisman sect and a century-old practitioner of dark arts, was trading seven people’s bones for a single life, forging a boat from a hundred bones and opening the gates of the underworld with ten thousand. Once the gates of the underworld took shape, western Hunan would become a world without bones, and a million living people would be reduced to paper puppets. Bone-eating parasites devoured bones, paper figures exchanged souls, bone curses clung to their victims, and death marks crawled across their bones. Lu Yanqiu swore by broken bones, wielded her ruler as a weapon, and used her soul as a shield. The last thing she had to do was this: Return every bone in the world to its rightful place.