On the night he failed his graduate school entrance exams, Lin Yan wandered into an abandoned coaching center. Suddenly, the loudspeaker called his name.
“Candidate Lin Yan, please enter Exam Room Seven.”
He thought it was just a prank, until he saw rows of “people” in the empty classroom with their heads bowed over their papers, saw Exam Room Seven in a mirror where it shouldn't have existed, and found two blood-red characters on the back of his hand after escaping the building:
Absent.
The makeup exam was seven days away, but the ghost had already followed him back to the real world.
From then on, one folk horror story after another came after him: his name called in the dead of night, a paper figure added to the roll, a substitute at a reservoir, an old house where people borrowed years of life, and a mountain village demanding that someone accept a supernatural title. Only then did Lin Yan realize he hadn't simply encountered a ghost. There was a flaw in his fate. He was meant to earn his living in the underworld, not walk the roads of the living.
To survive, he had no choice but to learn folk Taoist arts while figuring out the rules of the underworld. But the closer he got to the truth, the more he realized that someone had stolen him from the underworld's ledger years ago. Now, the ledger was coming to collect its debts, one by one.
Having read the first dozen or so chapters, the details are currently very well written. Some of the advice given by the older generation is quite similar to what we've heard before. Keep up the good work, author! I'll wait until it's more complete before reading further.
It's so good! Author, you have to keep writing! 🥰