Madam Marshal, Your Underworld Performance Has Exceeded the Limits Again

[Alternate-history Republican era + Chinese occult traditions + ten-year age gap, with the male lead older] Shen Mingyuan is a spirit medium who moonlights for the Underworld: recovering bodies, guiding souls, summoning immortals, and catching ghosts. After eighteen years of training, she is ready to avenge her mother. On the day her stepsister gets engaged, Shen Mingyuan presents her with a coffin as a congratulatory gift. She makes a corpse speak, frightens her grandmother to death, takes back her birth mother's dowry, and sends her father's beloved son to prison. But a thug has been watching her from the shadows! That thug holds a high position and looks down on everyone. He keeps ruining her chances to make money and sabotaging her romances, making her miss her targets and work overtime every day. Shen Mingyuan decides to stake all her cultivation on erasing him from the Book of Life and Death. But the man clings to her shamelessly, as if he's eaten poisonous mushrooms. “A Yuan, wouldn't it be nicer to hold me while you sleep than to spend the night with corpses?” * Lu Xingzhou has a secret he can hardly bring himself to admit: he's fallen for his future nephew's wife. That girl knows the secrets of the heavens. She once saved his life in battle and brought every fallen soldier's soul back to life. His nephew is no good, and people are always eyeing her. He's afraid she'll go astray. He wants to carry her off to his room and hold her every night. Afraid of scaring her away, he secretly sabotages every one of her “romantic encounters.” The prime minister's younger son asks her to inspect a tomb? The young master of the Sky Wolf Gang hires her to escort a shipment? A new-school foreign doctor wants to become her apprentice? Lu Xingzhou draws his gun and sneers. “A Yuan is young and naive. Anyone who dares to pester her, I'll shoot dead!”