The Zhongyuan Festival Sacrificer

On the night of the Ghost Festival, the gates of the underworld refuse to close. Two thousand years of order begin to crumble tonight.

The night I presided over the Ghost Festival rites, the gates of the underworld would not shut.

My master said nothing like this had happened in two thousand years. His face deathly pale, he looked at me. "Because your father... left something behind inside the gates."

My name is Shen Yexing, the twenty-seventh-generation heir to the Shen family priesthood. Our duty is to preside over the Ghost Festival rites every year, guide the souls of the dead, and maintain the order between yin and yang. These rules are called the Laws of Yin and Yang, and it is said that Qin Shi Huang personally established them after unifying the six states: the same tracks for all carriages, the same script for all writing, and the same laws for both the realms of yin and yang.

How perfect.

But my father's last words before he died were: "The Laws of Yin and Yang aren't meant to be obeyed. They're meant to be broken."

I began to investigate. The vanished souls, the sudden surge in vengeful ghosts, the character for "Silence" branded on my master's tongue. In the end, my search led deep into Mount Li, to an altar fueled by the souls of the living.

Qin Shi Huang never died. His soul was sealed there, waiting to be awakened once more. And for two thousand years, the priests who performed the rites, us, were nothing but his watchdogs.

He said, "My order has kept the realms of yin and yang from falling into chaos for two thousand years. Without me, what would the human world become?"

I looked at the souls behind me, condemned to serve as fuel, and said one thing:

"Rules can unify all things, but they can't unify people's hearts."

This isn't a story about slaying demons and exorcising evil. It's a story about rules: when the rules themselves are the biggest lie, do you choose to preserve order, or choose to be human?