Carrying My Corpse Bride Through the Underworld

My name is Chen Du, and I'm a corpse bearer. I thought that all my life I'd carry other people's stories, until on my wedding night I carried my own bride, Shen Tangyin, as though she were a corpse.

She died far too quietly. She didn't seem like someone from the world of the living. The villagers were afraid she'd bring misfortune, so they urged me to hold her funeral. Only my grandfather, Luo Sandeng, held everyone back. He told me to keep her coffin sealed for three days and laid down a few ironclad rules: don't look in a mirror at midnight, don't answer when someone calls your name in the dead of night, and never let the corpse touch the ground.

But the corpse opened her eyes inside the coffin. She wasn't looking at me, but at the well behind the ancestral hall, the one that should have been sealed long ago. When everyone wanted to bury her, I finally understood that I hadn't just carried back a dead bride. I had also brought back a secret the village had forgotten for a hundred years. Now, to keep her from becoming a sacrifice for old debts, I must carry her along a path between yin and yang that no living person can walk.