The Great Zhou has stood for three hundred years. The immortals have all gone west, leaving behind mountains full of immortal husks.
When a cultivator dies, if no one buries the body or speaks their name, the corpse will not decay and the soul will not disperse. On the seventh night, they will become an "Unnamed Xiao" and slaughter everything within ten li. This is called a corpse calamity.
That's why Great Zhou has a profession called corpse collector. It's a despised trade, lower even than an executioner's. The pay is decent, but no one dares marry into the family.
Wen Jibai is sixteen. He follows his old, lame master around Qingzhou Ferry, collecting bodies just to get by. He doesn't know he was born with a gift called "Bone Remembrance": touch a dead person's bones, and he can read the obsession they held onto most tightly in their final moments.
Bury one person, and gain a thread of their legacy.
Bury one person, and feel their pain in turn.
From a corpse floating at the ferry to the Recording Office's inescapable web; from the secret of why the immortals abandoned the world three hundred years ago to the question of why the entire lineage of "tomb guardians" died out, Wen Jibai collects bodies as he goes, picking up other people's stories along the way. And as he gathers them, he gradually becomes the story itself.
This is a story about remembering.
The immortals are gone, but their names remain.
