Strange Tales of Mysterious China

After graduating from college, I inherited my parents’ “delivery company,” which delivers packages between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Lin Yu returns to his village to look for his parents. In the basement of their old house, he finds a leather ledger: “Yellow Springs Express, Huaian Village Branch.” It turns out his parents were couriers between the living and the dead. Every delivery cost them one point of yang energy, and after ninety-nine deliveries, they would be cast into the underworld forever. Worse still, his parents are dead. When their bodies were dredged up from a well, one of them was clutching half of a “shopkeeper’s seal,” and the killer used the Su family’s secret arts.

Su Yao is a member of the Su family. She approached him at first to get the seal. But when they were in the mother-and-child coffin, she really did shield him.

From using each other to becoming partners who would risk their lives for one another, the two team up with tech geek A Gui and paper effigy maker Granny Liu. Together, they investigate the truth, only to uncover an even more terrifying secret: Yellow Springs Express exists to “feed” the Nine Yin Fetus, a thousand-year-old spirit formed from the yin energy of nine dragon veins. When it matures, it will give birth to an emperor of the underworld who will command ten thousand ghosts to invade the world of the living.

And Lin Yu is the ninth person born with a pure yang fate, the food the Nine Yin Fetus craves most.

Nine ancient tombs, nine paths to the underworld, nine fragments. Paper effigies holding wedding ceremonies, an inn at the Yellow Springs, ghost soldiers marching across a road, a tower of ten thousand bones, the Mother of the Mother-Child River, a fox spirit wearing a painted human face, Zhong Kui’s broken sword, Meng Po of reincarnation...

His parents traded their lives for the truth. Su Yao’s father traded his life for a fragment. The ferryman traded thirty years spent maintaining a seal for intelligence. Every clue points to the same answer:

Not delivery confirmation. Not sacrifice. A “return.”

“The living and the dead may be worlds apart, but longing can still reach across. This time, though, we’re not delivering a package. We’re delivering hope.”