The Canghuang Realm has issued a ban on funerals.
The dead may not be given tombstones. All bodies must be burned into incense offerings and sent to the top of the tower.
Yet Nan Yu found forty-seven death notices inside the clay statue of a headless City God.
Every one bore the steel seal of Heavenly Court Heavy Industries.
Every one read: Tomorrow, 3 a.m.
Why were the notices hidden inside a god’s statue?
Why had their dates of death been set three months in advance?
Three years ago, a shop that only he could see appeared on his retina.
Its sign bore four cinnabar-red characters: The Funeral Shop Between Heaven and Earth.
For three years, all he had buried were scraps.
Until this time, the moment he cut open the City God,
he saw the night this deity’s followers gouged out his heart.
That heart was offered to someone in a golden robe.
Stranger still, his mute cousin had no body heat.
The hellfire burned through his cousin’s arm, but Nan Yu was the one who felt the pain.
At three in the morning, a monster burst from the ground.
As it died, hundreds of tongues spoke a title in unison:
“Nan… Judge…”
Nan Yu had never heard that name,
yet it felt as though someone had been calling him by it for years.
A new grave had quietly appeared in the graveyard of his mind.
And his true identity was…
