The Midnight Curio Shop

[Mystery and wild speculation + urban supernatural powers + paranormal investigations + timed rescues + ensemble character growth + no System]

Ying Ye runs an antique restoration shop. Just before midnight, whenever the black cabinet in the back wall starts rattling, it delivers a “keepsake from tomorrow”: a stopped watch, a burnt ticket, a bloodstained key.

Their owners will all die before the next midnight.

When Ying Ye touches a keepsake, he can hear the echoes left behind before the death occurred, revealing an accident, a killer, or a way to survive. The price is that every time he forces himself to listen, he loses a piece of his own memory.

Over the past twelve years, he has saved many people, but he has nearly forgotten why he keeps the shop open.

Then the black cabinet delivers a black train ticket bearing his dead younger sister’s name, and a K0 train that appears on no route map pulls up behind the shop. The death records aboard say that the person who died in the fire twelve years ago was not his sister, but him.

From that day on, living people’s identities begin to disappear. Surveillance footage develops gaps, friends and family remember different lives, and even two different outcomes of the same accident can both become reality.

Before people are completely forgotten, Ying Ye, photographer Lin Jianlu, and the fellow investigators they meet must use photos, testimony, and keepsakes to rescue the living from their incorrect deaths, one by one.

But if every record proves you’re already dead, what can you use to prove you’re alive?