The Two Fiends of the Pear Garden: Ashes Stain the Soul of the Land

[Folk Horror] [Passionate Resistance Against the Japanese] [Infinite Flow] [Two Powerful Leads, Saving Each Other] [Decisive and Ruthless]

When the Japanese invaders forced my fiancée to perform a victory opera, I agreed on the spot and personally made 108 paper figures.

Everyone thought I was a spineless collaborator. Only I knew that once the crimes were written on the paper figures’ backs and the singing began, the wicked would die!

After the opera stage burned down, Gu Wanxiang and I became paper figures in a ghost-opera troupe. From then on, we traveled through endless haunted realms, hunting down beasts beyond the reach of mortal law!

Xu Zhiqiao, the most useless paper effigy maker in Nanqiao Town.

Gu Wanxiang, a famed opera singer who would rather die than perform for the Japanese invaders.

As the opera A Vengeful Ghost’s Bloody Lament began, the paper figures came alive, the Japanese army was blown apart, and the street filled with evil ghosts kneeling to hear the trial!

But death wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of joining the troupe.

The No. 0 ticket appeared, leading to places like Kowloon Walled City, the Ghost Train, the Skinning Hospital, the Mass-Burial Opera House, and the Dragon King Temple Under the Sea... Every ticket opened a strange new instance, and every instance hid a horde of evil ghosts wearing human skin!

The Xu family’s paper-figure soul-substitution art:

Draw a soul in blood, and a paper figure can become a soldier.

Write a crime on its back, and the dead can claim a life.

Turn an opera into a prison, and the wicked will be bound into paper dolls, forced to sit beneath the stage and listen for all eternity!

But ghost operas don’t come without a price.

Every wicked person killed adds another measure of karma; every wronged soul saved cracks the paper body a little more.

When Gu Wanxiang’s singing becomes the key to opening the Underworld, and Xu Zhiqiao discovers that his father once received a No. 0 ticket too, the true secret of the ghost-opera troupe is only just beginning to unfold.

Do the wicked fear the law? No. They fear the stage.

Because as long as Gu Wanxiang begins to sing and Xu Zhiqiao puts pen to paper, another paper figure is sure to appear beneath the stage!