Making Paper Offerings in Strange Tales of Liaozhai, and the Underworld Is Fighting Over Me

Jiang Ruanruan was the timid daughter of a paper effigy maker.

To repay her dead father's debts, she was forced to live in a gloomy, dilapidated City God temple, making paper horses and paper figures for the dead every night.

She didn't know she had a pair of Yin-Yang Eyes, which let her see ghosts, or that her body carried pure yin energy that drove every spirit in the underworld wild with desire.

Every midnight, the temple's clay statues would roll their eyes and stare fixedly at her.

The cold scholar ghost, the soul-reaping Black and White Impermanence, even the City God seated high on his shrine, all watched in secret this delicate girl who burst into tears if a paper figure so much as toppled over.

Then, on the night of the Ghost Festival, the gates of hell swung wide and a hundred ghosts roamed the night. Terrified, Jiang Ruanruan hid beneath the shrine, only for a length of icy soul-binding chain to coil around her slender waist. A red-robed Judge tore through the void and appeared. His cold fingers brushed her pale little face as he spoke in a chilling, tender voice: "Ruanruan, the paper bride you made is much too ugly. Why don't you... come down here and keep me company yourself?"