Chen Mo spent five years as a hotel front desk manager. He knew every step of the service process and hated dealing with people. The night he was laid off, he opened a door in the corridor of his rented apartment that shouldn't have existed. Beyond it was an inn called Ashen Ruins. Its guests weren't human: a hungry fog, a shedding, many-faced merchant, the thirteenth step with no feet... They came carrying obsessions and loneliness, expressing their incomprehensible needs in murmurs. And Chen Mo had to serve them as if they were VIPs.
Because Ashen Ruins had one ironclad rule: its approval rating could never fall below 90 percent. If it dipped below the red line, the proprietor would be forcibly reassigned as a “doorman.” The previous proprietor was standing beneath a withered tree at that very moment, wearing a shabby uniform, head bowed and completely motionless.
No supernatural abilities. No fighting skills.
The only things Chen Mo could rely on were the professional instincts honed over five years in the hotel industry: emotional detachment, breaking down customer needs, and a pot of rice porridge with coarse salt.
When a clay pot trapped the wandering fog, when a “Do Not Disturb” sign blocked a pair of peering eyes, when half a bowl of cold porridge held a century of loneliness... he discovered that something even more terrifying than the strange beings was hidden in the inn.
The face of his neighbor, who had been missing for three months, appeared in a guest's mist.
And the final page of the Ashen Ruins Service Agreement contained a secret worse than death.
“S-sorry,” Chen Mo said, forcing a professional smile at the spherical guest covered in mouths. “Our inn only serves light meals right now. Would you like to ‘eat’ or be ‘packed away’?”
Welcome to Ashen Ruins Inn.
We don't do business here. We offer salvation.
