Shen Du is a good-for-nothing college graduate with a funeral services major. For a monthly salary of 8,000 yuan, he takes a job as a night watchman at Yong'an Funeral Home.
On his first night, the director gives him three rules: Never count the morgue drawers after midnight. If someone knocks from inside one, don't answer. And never, under any circumstances, open the coffin in Storage Room Three.
But then the woman in Drawer Two speaks.
“Xiaoyu, Mom doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Only then does Shen Du learn that the funeral home sends off the dead by day and seals away evil spirits by night. It has embalmers who can stitch souls, receptionists who can see memories, veteran craftsmen who make paper offerings to reach the underworld, and a coffin inhabited by the legendary Zhong Kui.
Other people fear ghosts on the night shift. Shen Du slays them.
Pale Wraiths, Azure Fiends, Crimson Demons, evil gods, colorless Old Gods: he sends off those who refuse to leave, and slays those who dare to harm the living.
But as he grows stronger, he discovers that his father, missing for thirty years, was an underworld emissary whose name had been erased by the entire world.
Clutching the cremation certificate his father left behind, Shen Du steps into the depths of the rift.
“I’m not here to send off the dead.”
“I’m here to bring back, one by one, those who have been forgotten.”
