The Seventh Crossing of the Nether River

The rusty iron railings at the old pier were always steeped in the salty stench of seawater that would never wash away.

Tang Weijie, an auto mechanic who had lost his job just as rents skyrocketed, found a metal box wrapped in vine patterns in a drainage ditch. Inside was a ticket to the Nether River, a ghost ship that sank thirty years ago. According to legend, it needed three hundred scarred souls aboard before it could sail back to the world of the living.

Chen Hehai, dressed in a navy-blue trench coat, was always watching from the shadows. Beneath the scar on his left brow lay the secret of reincarnation. A headless woman in a white dress wandered through mirrors, humming the soul-snaring “Ballad for the Departed.” A hundred thousand yuan appeared out of nowhere in Tang Weijie's bank account, dangling before him like bait, while the crescent-shaped scar on his left wrist had long since been branded with the mark of the “seventh reincarnator.”

It was only on the night he boarded the Nether River that Tang Weijie realized every scarred passenger on deck carried a cursed memory. One was hiding the truth about his older brother's death; another was haunted by the ghost of the boss he'd accidentally killed. And the brass mirror in Tang Weijie's pocket never reflected the present. It showed the captain being pushed overboard in 1993, the cries of despair before the Wangchuan Ferry sank in 1923, and countless versions of himself aboard the same ship, repeating the same fate: board, die, reincarnate...