My name is Long Zhiqiang. I'm a Tujia criminal police captain from western Hunan. Three things fill my days: solving cases, driving corpses (it's a family tradition), and pretending I'm not afraid of ghosts.
Every year during the Ghost Festival, someone dies in Luodong Village. Seven years, seven cases: sealed rooms, green mold, security cameras failing. The whole team is stumped. The provincial department sends over Su Xiao, a PhD in psychology. She's more like a terminator than I am: on her first day, she photographs my tattoo and files it away, saying she wants to "study the specimen."
Old Zhang, our forensic examiner, believes science is all that matters, until he sees a corpse stand up and walk with his own eyes. He sticks his scalpel into his thigh to snap himself back to his senses. Xiao Ma, our technician, somehow manages to make his drone precisely crash into and kill a key witness's chicken every single time. And then there's Granny Tan, our unofficial consultant. She's half blind, but always produces a pickled radish soaked with a snake at the critical moment: "Eat it. It'll give you courage."
I thought the killer was some psychopath, but after digging into the case, I discovered that the killer might be a mushroom. Worse, it lives in the tattoo on my left hand and comes out to kill every Ghost Festival. The most outrageous part is that the mushroom is my little sister.
This year, the eighth name on the Ghost Festival's list of predicted victims is mine.
The whole team has made a decision: either we catch the real killer, or my sister's mycelium wipes us all out.
Anyway, western Hunan isn't just about driving corpses. It's also full of endless bad luck.
