Qiantang River: The Corpse Retriever

Beneath the tides of the Qiantang River sleeps an ancient Tide Lord. Its breath is the tide, and its fury is the flood.

For generations, the Shen family has guarded the Qiantang River. A black “tide bone” grows along the spine of every corpse diver in the family, allowing them to hear the voices of the dead in the river. Three hundred years ago, the Shen family's ancestor used a tide-bone spear to pierce the Tide Lord's heart and force it into slumber. The price was that his own soul was forever pinned to the riverbed.

The seventeenth day of the eighth month, the night before the spring tide. Shen Jiangliu spotted a woman in red floating on the river. His father had told him: the one thing you must never fish out of the Qiantang River is a woman in red. It doesn't mean someone fell into the river. It means the river wants that person. He resisted the urge to retrieve her, but the corpse came looking for him instead.

Her name was Hong Gu, a fragment of the Tide Lord's scattered soul. For three hundred years she had neither lived nor died on the riverbed. All she wanted was a body of her own and the chance to come ashore and see the sun. Meanwhile, soulless corpses began appearing in the Qiantang River, the tides fell into chaos, and the water flowed backward. The sleeping Tide Lord was beginning to wake. Once it did, the entire city would be swallowed.

Shen Jiangliu must descend sixty meters into the heart of the tide and find his great-grandfather's tide bone, then pull it from the Tide Lord's heart. Su Chaoyin will play a path open from the shore with the Tide Song. Iron Monk will chant sutras in the temple to hold the line. Hong Gu will sit in the main room knitting a sweater and waiting for him to return.

This is a contest between a man and a river, and a struggle between the Shen family and fate. The debt of three hundred years must finally be repaid.