Soul Lamp: Soul Calling

During the Taizhao period, Ningbu was a treaty port along the river. Half of it was the electric lamps of foreign-style buildings in the concession, and the other half was the paper lamps and oil lamps of the Chinese boundary. Qiao Yun works as a clerk at Xiangtai Foreign Company. He only believes in getting the accounts right one stroke at a time and does not believe in ghosts and gods. After the fire, my sister Qiao Tang became an empty shell that could breathe and blink, but could not be called anything. The Western doctor shined a flashlight on his pupils and shook his head; the old Chinese doctor put down his pen and said only four words: It's not in the Fang pulse. An old scavenger who left no footprints in the snow showed him the way: further inside the mass graves in the west of the city, there was a "soul-caller." That was the Qingxuan sect—a declining branch of the Taoist sect that specialized in doing idle things and traveling to the countryside to survive: they may not seem popular, but they have the most upright roots. Mr. Nie, who was guarding the gate and attracting the soul, only said that the soul had gone astray, and someone knowledgeable had to shout for her as soon as possible; she could only come back if she could shout back. But the more Qiao Yun walked in, the more he understood: his sister's soul was not lost, but was "intercepted" by someone. On this road leading to life and death, some people rely on cutting off souls to survive and exorcise the silent souls of the dead; some people are thinking about the gateway that has been sealed for generations and cannot be opened. And the extra corpse in the fire scene was just the first settlement of the injustice. He just wanted to call his sister back, but he was dragged step by step into an old debt that had weighed down generations. Someone had to pay the debt: if you take a ray of soul, it will be shortened elsewhere; if you change one place of life or death, the world must pay for it with the same amount of death.