Her grandfather worked the night shift at a funeral home for thirty years. Before he died, he left behind only a book titled The Corpse-Watcher’s Handbook of Taboos.
Twenty-four-year-old Chen Yang took over the job. On his first night, the handbook opened to the first page: “After midnight, never look at a corpse’s face.”
He thought it was just superstition.
Until the intern who unzipped a body bag saw himself start laughing in the mirror.
At three in the morning, the reflection in the mirror developed a mind of its own.
Three knocks came from the freezer: “Find a replacement.”
The hands on his watch began turning backward: “Steal years from your life.”
A second pair of feet grew from his shadow in the corridor: “Never look back.”
The funeral home’s night shift is a pact between the living and the dead. Nine taboos, nine ways to survive. Break one, and you gain a breath of yin energy. Make it through another night, and you become a little less human.
Chen Yang gradually discovers that an even greater secret lies behind these rules:
Why did his grandfather suddenly die?
What is sealed beneath the funeral home?
Was the Corpse Watcher’s legacy meant to keep the corpses in check, or to turn its inheritors into one of them?
When his reflection begins to blink,
when the corpse in the freezer sits up to thank him,
when the seal weakens and a hundred ghosts roam the night,
Chen Yang finally understands: some jobs leave you no way back once you take them.
Because everyone who looks back becomes one of them.
