Guixu: Thirteen Days

Chen Sanliang is a mortuary makeup artist. He's been at it for five years, and has handled more dead people than living ones. One night, he was doing the makeup for an unidentified woman pulled from a river when he pried open her tightly clenched fist. A copper coin fell from her palm, its square hole rimmed with green patina, with the character “Longevity” engraved on the front.

He touched the coin. The corpse opened her eyes and said, “Thirteen days.” Then he died.

When he woke up, he was on a Nuo opera stage. Gray fog stretched in every direction, and there was no sun or moon in the sky. Eight corpses surrounded him, making nine with him. A bronze Nuo mask hung in the mist and announced the rules: Feel the bones to tell the living from the dead. The loser falls into the abyss. Some screamed, some broke down, while one person squatted at the edge of the stage, calmly taking puff after puff from a dry tobacco pipe.

Chen Sanliang survived by relying on his funeral trade skills. He could tell that the hand bones of someone who had just died still had a sheen to their fingernails. But survival was only the beginning. This place was called Guixu, and it had seven levels below. The farther down you went, the deeper it got. The dead lingered for thirteen days. Only by resolving their obsessions could they rest in peace. Those who failed became mindless, possessed spirits, doomed to wander forever. In the mist, people bartered with copper coins engraved with the character “Longevity.” Some had survived dozens of cycles. And then there was a man named Shen Yan, refined and courteous, who had founded an organization called the Eternal Life Society in the ghost market. He was polite to everyone.

Chen Sanliang trusted no one. Because on the wall backstage, he had seen a line of writing:

“Don't trust Shen Yan., The previous Chen Sanliang.”

All he wanted was to make it out alive. Until he heard a voice at the edge of the maze forest, as if it had risen from underwater after ten years: “Brother, I'm here.” His younger sister's soul was sealed beneath the eight hundred and tenth Soul-Suppressing Nail, and the only way he could save her,