Zhang Chulan, 23, assistant cremator at a funeral home, monthly salary: 3,800 yuan. Part-time Douyin Taoist (1,347 followers, half of them bought by himself).
To save on rent, he moved into a haunted house that cost just 500 yuan a month. That night, a stranger appeared in the mirror. Someone in his dream told him, “You’ll die here.” Then his livestream received a 2,000-yuan gift. The sender’s profile picture was an old photograph from the Qing dynasty.
An old man who raised weasels told him: “Your fate is called ‘Yin-Yang Misalignment.’ It comes along once in a hundred years. Zhao Tieshan, the corpse driver who slaughtered an entire Miao village thirty years ago, needs just one more soul like yours to complete his Banner of Ten Thousand Souls and evolve from a Corpse Emperor into a Corpse Emperor PLUS.”
The good news: A Maoshan sect disciple was willing to help.
The bad news: He was an influencer with four million followers, the king of livestream shopping. He fought zombies with a frying pan, drew talismans with a marker, and chanted spells as rap.
The worse news: He decided to livestream the whole thing.
And so, a bargain-bin Taoist, a sneakerhead Taoist, a peanut connoisseur, a Gu-world Li Jiaqi, and a surly inheritor of intangible cultural heritage set off for the heart of the Xiangxi Miao frontier in a rented Coaster minibus.
Up ahead were an army of sixty-three vengeful spirits, a chatterbox demon Taoist from the Ming dynasty trapped at the bottom of a well for four hundred years, an underworld bureaucracy more troublesome than zombies, and the Corpse Emperor himself, who had been waiting for thirty years.
The whole trip is livestreamed. No results, no refund.
Of course, there’s nothing we can do about refunds anyway, because...
You might not make it back.
A bunch that can still be funny