On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, at minus twenty-eight degrees, I ran into a weasel wearing a vest beneath an old elm tree.
It asked me, "Young man, do I look like a human or a god?"
I said, "You look like a damn fool."
After that, frost formed on my windowsill in the shape of a weasel, and a tuft of foul-smelling yellow fur appeared beneath my pillow.
Liu the Lame, the village's resident wise man, took one look at my birth chart and dropped his pipe. "Nine lifetimes reincarnated, ten lifetimes short of a fate. In your first nine lives, you were a scapegoat. This is your last chance. If you die an unnatural death again, your soul will be annihilated."
To save my life, I went up Phoenix Mountain, stole and drank three hundred years' worth of clear liquor from Grandfather Hu the Third, took a grudge-holding weasel as my messenger, and brought home a two-meter-tall serpent warrior spirit who needs a heated bed in winter.
Ma Laoliu, a soul-reaping official from the underworld, came looking for me on a rickety old bicycle. My name in the Book of Life and Death was such a mess that he didn't dare claim me, so he could only issue me a pass that had to be renewed every seven days. It was worse than being a temp.
From then on, I read fortunes, settle hauntings, battle ghosts, and summon spirits in the old forests of Northeast China.
Weasel revenge, a frozen ghost looking for a stand-in, paper figures used as substitutes for the living, heretical cults of the underworld... With every case I solve, I come one step closer to the secret:
Who changed the fate of my nine past lives?
Who's waiting for my soul to be annihilated?
When I went from a "fate-short ghost" to a "player moving the pieces," I realized that even Heaven itself was on the board.
