Painting eyes on a paper effigy can give it spiritual power. It is the greatest taboo in the paper effigy trade.
When Shen Ye was eighteen, his grandfather, a paper effigy craftsman, suddenly dropped dead in his shop. Before he died, he left Shen Ye with one last instruction: "You can close the shop, but you must not let the craft die." Shen Ye didn't understand what his grandfather meant until a woman named Su Wan knocked on the shop's door late one night.
She had no shadow.
Su Wan wants to buy a "paper effigy that can take her place in death," made in her likeness to shield her from a great calamity. The trade's rules strictly forbid such work, but the payment is enough to cover his grandfather's funeral expenses, along with a secret Shen Ye cannot refuse: his grandfather's death is tied to a curse laid by an ancestor of the Shen family three hundred years ago.
With the arrival of Zhao Qingshan, a renegade of the Maoshan sect, brides begin disappearing one after another in the town. Shen Ye discovers that the craft of paper effigy making is far more than a way to earn a living: "The paper effigy maker shapes ghostly paper, making it to offer to yin and yang." Paper effigy makers ferry the living and the dead between worlds, and Shen Ye himself is the curse's only cure in three hundred years.
A battle between yin and yang, born of a father's love, fate, and the desire to protect, quietly unfolds in the endless night.
