My name is Peng Ke, the hottest guy in the capital’s underground city, known to everyone as Brother Ke. My dream is to collect protection money until my hands go numb. Then one day, a bronze steam engine fell from the sky and smashed me into a gutter. What I pulled out wasn’t a fuse, but the gate to the Six Paths of Reincarnation.
The machine called itself the “Wheel Core.” Once bound to it, I could open the Six Paths and draw on the incense offerings, karma, and divine powers from my past lives. The problem was, in one past life, Peng Ke had stuck one foot into the Hell Path, as they called it, “preloading.” So while other people’s card draws were just a warm-up, his were like digging up his ancestors’ graves. His first job in the Hell Path brought him Judge Zhou, a temp from the Palace of the Underworld, along with a crowd of vengeful ghosts lining up in the middle of the night to be reborn.
The city is carrying out “steam salvation”: after nobles die, their souls are locked in brass boxes and reborn at great expense as precision-engineered mechanical bodies. It’s called immortality, but it’s really a monopoly on reincarnation. Brother Ke’s “wild reincarnation machine” threatens the capitalists’ profits, and has also attracted the attention of antiques bureau bigwigs from below, the strange shopkeepers of the Yellow Springs Merchant Guild, and an underworld spokesperson named Chu Qianye, who claims to be “the protagonist of a modern fantasy novel.”
Chu Qianye says he’s a reincarnation reformer from the Myriad Worlds, but in truth he wants to blow up the Underworld and carve out a new divine realm in the human world. He stole Peng Ke’s keys to the first three trials, and even shoved Peng Ke’s old flame into the Beast Path, disguised as a puppet.
Peng Ke was furious. “You can steal my business, but you don’t touch my people.”
So he climbed onto a steam rickshaw, gripped a bronze cleaver from the Ten Courts of the Underworld, and fought his way from the ruined capital to the Cloudtop Hell, ready to tear down Chu Qianye’s fake god-king throne. Then he realized that sitting on it himself wouldn’t be so bad.
