I Shelter Ancient Gods at the Anomaly Bureau

On the night the college entrance exams ended, Xu Ran saw the statue in an abandoned City God temple open its eyes.

A classmate was hoisted up to the rafters by a red cord. A teacher knelt in the incense ash, calling out the names of the dead. Security cameras across the city all captured the same sight: a faceless divine figure. The official Anomaly Bureau sealed off the scene that very night and labeled Xu Ran, the only person to walk out alive, a “suspected source of divine contamination.”

But they didn’t know that Xu Ran’s eyes could see the contamination levels, fragments of rules, and paths to death associated with every anomaly.

From an incense-eating ghost in the City God temple to a paper bride on a bus in the rain; from a life-borrowing scheme in a hospital morgue to an unnamed ancient god sleeping in an underground dragon vein, with every containment, Xu Ran can seize one divine authority from the remains of an ancient god.

The Anomaly Bureau wants to keep him under surveillance. The ancient gods want to call him back. Meanwhile, the human world crumbles amid one catastrophe after another. Only when Xu Ran opens the highest-classified file does he discover that he already died once, eighteen years ago.