Folk Customs Record: Chen the Paper Effigy Maker

Name: Folk Customs Record: Chen the Paper Effigy Maker
Author: Perfected Lord Xuan Zhen, Manifest Sage

民俗录：纸扎陈

by Perfected Lord Xuan Zhen, Manifest Sage (玄真显圣真君)

Status: Completed
Length: 262k Words
Genre: Mystery
Subgenre: Mystery & Supernatural
Updated: 23d ago
Source: Fanqie

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Refreshed 47m ago

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Stats

112Chapters

32Reads

5.8Score

2Listens

499Reads · all time

Synopsis

There's an old saying in western Hunan: “Better to walk through a mass grave at night than cross the Paper Effigy Chen family.” When Chen Ming woke up, he found himself lying in a thin-walled coffin. Paper figures all around the room were smiling at him. He was the last living member of the Paper Effigy Chen family. For three generations, his ancestors had made paper effigies for a living, but the Chen family didn't just make paper people and horses... They shaped souls. They shaped rules. They shaped the paper-thin boundary between yin and yang. Twenty years ago, the Chen family was wiped out overnight. A fire burned for three days and three nights, and every elder vanished without a trace. All that remained was a five-year-old simpleton, keeping watch over a half-ruined house and a room full of motionless paper figures. For twenty years, the townsfolk had called him “Paper Fool.” Until tonight, when Chen Ming woke up. His fingers could draw talisman patterns on paper all by themselves. A dusty secret manual was hidden beneath his pillow. A slip of paper was tied to his ankle, bearing words written last night, even though he hadn't woken up yet. A pair of shoes hung beneath the old locust tree at the entrance to town, their toes pointing inward, three inches above the ground. “Descendant of the Chen family, you must go burn those shoes.” Chen Ming pushed open the door of his ancestral home. Thick fog and ghastly white lanterns lay beyond it. The entire Yinhuai Town was waiting for him. And he had no idea that what the fire had failed to consume twenty years ago was coming back to knock on his door tonight. Make paper into bone, seal gods within it. With my life, I shall suppress every evil under heaven. The Paper Effigy Chen: The Divine Investiture of the Filthy Earth, a century-long elegy of a paper-effigy-making family in western Hunan, an epic of strange folk customs running to millions of words.

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