The Cheng troupe's shadow-puppet plays entertain the living by day and fulfill the dead's wishes by night. Twenty-five-year-old troupe leader Cheng Weiliaoshou guards three ancestral rules: Never look back after a performance, never count the puppets, and never face the shadow screen north. But after one play meant to fulfill a spirit's wish, a fourteenth puppet appears in the box, and he realizes his own shadow is growing shorter.
After being recruited by the Folk Affairs Investigation Bureau, Cheng Weiliaoshou takes his uncanny Yin Eyes and a box of puppets to investigate strange events science cannot explain: shadows that turn around to face their owners, painted faces that borrow the living's features to perform, and old attendance registers that keep growing new names even after being sealed away. Every time he performs a shadow play for the dead, he gets one step closer to the truth, and his shadow shrinks by another inch.
None of the Cheng family's troupe leaders across ten generations met a good end. Why has Bai Yan, white-haired and shadowless, guarded the Cheng family for a hundred years? And who is the erased name in the Shadow Manual demanding repayment from? The old shadow pact is tightening once more. Before his shadow is gone, Cheng Weiliaoshou must find out what the Cheng family owes, and who he must pay with his life.
