Shen Baiye, a physics PhD who studied in Germany, returned to his hometown with a box of scientific instruments, intending to use an electromagnetic detector to prove that ghosts did not exist.
But when he opened the ancestral hall, he found that what stood on the altar wasn’t an ancestral tablet…
It was a dried corpse in a suit.
There was even a nail driven into its chest.
And its eyes opened.
“Has the Qing Dynasty fallen?” the corpse asked.
“It… it fell over a hundred years ago.”
“Oh.” The corpse closed its eyes again.
The butler told him: “That’s your great-grandfather. He’s not quite dead, and he wakes up at night.”
His great-grandmother floated out: “I’m a paper doll who became a spirit. Your great-grandfather’s ‘Chinese-Western hybrid immortality technique’ did this to me.”
The second concubine swung from a roof beam: “Want to hear me sing?”
Old Zhong the hopping vampire pulled out an abacus: “Young master, it’s time to pay this month’s ghost tax.”
Shen Baiye was on the verge of a breakdown.
He used a spectrometer to analyze the components of a ghost, and his great-grandmother scolded him for being “ill-mannered.”
He used a quantum detector to track paranormal fluctuations, and the second concubine complained that he was “unprofessional.”
His great-grandfather woke up in the middle of the night. His first order of business was to practice speaking Mandarin, only to be mistaken by the neighbors for a foreign spy.
“I’m Chinese!”
“Then why are you speaking English?”
“…”
Even more terrifying, that “immortality technique” seemed to have attracted things that should never have existed…
A vampire duke, a traitor from Maoshan, a paper-doll cult, and an indescribable ancient being from the depths of the sea.
Everyone wanted the Shen family’s secret.
And the only weapons Shen Baiye had were a box of unreliable scientific instruments and a houseful of unreliable ghost relatives.
