In a world where gods are made from the incense offerings of the faithful, a god whose body is not interred within three days of death will become a defiled god. The only funeral parlor in the land willing to handle divine funerals is Everlasting Lamp, beside the West City charity cemetery. Lu Wujiu, the seventeenth-generation pallbearer, discovers divine blood while examining a corpse that should never have appeared in the city. He carries coffins all the way to the top of the Incense Office, and ultimately extinguishes the incense offerings at a shrine with his own hands, sending the last god into the earth.
