The uncanny descends, and a hundred ghosts roam the night.
They aren’t ghosts. They’re gods the world has forgotten.
If you can’t speak their names, you can’t kill them. And the only ones left in this world who can call them by their true names are the Nuo.
My name is Lin Su. I studied funeral services and know how to perform cosmetic restoration. All my family left me was a night watch ledger I couldn’t understand.
On my first day of school, the campus belle knelt before me and begged me to put on a mask.
Only after I put it on did I realize:
What Grandpa left me wasn’t an inheritance. It was a mountain of debt.
All thirty-six divine masks had been pledged under Grandpa’s name. Seven years after he went missing, his name was still on the Night Watchers’ roster, marked: pledged on someone else’s behalf.
A creditor comes to collect? I open Clause Thirty-One of the night watch ledger and ask first: If the witness is absent, does the interest still accrue?
The three divisions of the Bureau for Suppressing the Uncanny can’t find a place for me? Then I’ll take the seat of the Nuo Court’s Chief Seal, which has stood empty for three hundred years.
The balance has been compounding for three hundred years? “Trust me. I’ll negotiate it down.”
From being begged to put on a mask to taking charge of the Nuo Court and carrying on its legacy, I, Lin Su, live by one principle:
Every debt owed gets settled, one account at a time, face to face!
The Nuo selection, the removal from the clan records, and my mother’s death: three accounts, each settled one by one, with interest.
Very beautiful very beautiful