[Landlord of the Streets + Hard-Nosed Debt Settlement + Folk Horror + Maximum Satisfaction]
"A murder house where a family of five died inside. A comparable unit costs four million, but this one's half off at two million. Interested?"
Lin Ye, whose pockets were emptier than his face was clean and who had just twenty days left to live, spat out his cigarette butt and sneered in his slippers:
"I'll take it."
He thought he'd found a bargain and could wait for the place to be demolished. But when he opened the door, he discovered that "1302" was actually the yin-yang eye of the Dragon-Locking Well in the capital!
Beneath his feet lay the veins of the underworld. In his arms was the life-demanding Book of Taiyin Deliverance. And the house was packed with ruthless souls who refused to be reincarnated:
A century-old water ghost drowned at the bottom of a river, a death-doomed corpse-sewing craftsman from Babaoshan who had come to fulfill a vow, and three charred fiends forged in the fires beneath the earth... Even the higher-ups of the prestigious Sword Pavilion had blocked his doorway on flying swords, intent on taking his life!
Anyone else would have been scared witless. But Lin Ye was so broke he didn't care if he lived or died. He grabbed a rusty iron chain and welded the security door shut.
He planted one foot on the coffee table, drove a folding knife through the ledger of unpaid debts, and roared at the sinister gods and fiends crowding the room:
"Don't give me that nonsense about the Daoist order, karma, or the divide between yin and yang!"
"The deed has my name on it! Gods who come down to earth pay their own utility bills, and ghosts who want to stay have to pay three months' rent upfront!"
"Anyone who comes up short on rent this month, even by a single day, is getting shoved into the toilet and flushed straight to the underworld, even if it costs me my rotten life!"
