Shen Guan, an art student, inherits a shabby paper-effigy shop. He has no money and is saddled with 500,000 yuan in loan-shark debt.
When a gang of debt collectors kicks in the door and smashes up the shop, they pin him down and grind his face against the cremation furnace.
Blood stains the paper effigies. The flames turn a sickly green, and two shadowy figures, one black and one white, crawl out of the furnace.
Shen Guan thinks they’ve come to take him away. Instead, Black Impermanence clutches the handmade yellow paper on the ground and eagerly sucks it up, while White Impermanence takes his hand with great ceremony.
“Boss Shen, the underworld has been suffering from inflation for three hundred years. We’re desperately poor! Just supply us with goods, and the underworld throughout South City will keep you safe!”
Well, well. Other people run into ghosts and lose their lives. Shen Guan runs into ghosts and gets a job!
He cuts a hundred sheets of official paper overnight, and the underworld promptly rewards him with top-grade “Soul-Returning Grass.” He sells it in the mortal realm for a cool 200,000 yuan!
By day, he’s the hot new “young inheritor of intangible cultural heritage” in the mortal realm, selling miniature paper effigies for a fortune and taking the internet by storm.
By night, he’s the underworld’s only “key supplier.” Even Black and White Impermanence have to wear the bulletproof paper armor he designed!
Then one day, a secret order arrives from the Ten Halls of the Underworld’s Kings of Hell, while the forces of “East City” in both the world of the living and the world of the dead reach out to kill him…
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