Zhao Gu Tang

In July and a half of the twelfth year of Tongzhi, there were only sixty-three memorial tablets in the Shen family ancestral hall, but sixty-four offering bowls were placed in the kitchen. Eight-year-old Shen Yanqiu followed his cry into the back garden. In an old well that had been sealed for twelve years, he saw eleven corpses waiting to borrow his name to go home. Xu Xuanwei, a wandering Taoist, rescued him and only taught him three sentences: ghosts can make mistakes, ghosts can forget, and ghosts can also lie; remember what you have seen with your own eyes, trust only what you have found evidence, and leave undecided things blank. A few years later, war engulfed the Shen family and burned down Baihe Temple. Young Shen Yanqiu followed his master on his journey to the west. While making a living by begging alchemy, he also supplemented the Taoist teachings from fragments of scrolls, old seals and near-death encounters. He met the shadow of the house who returned from borrowing a house, the faceless ghost who swallowed names, the forbidden magic of Luban hidden in the wooden beams, and also met Taoists from Maoshan, Buddhist practitioners, successors of Gu magic, and folk strangers who guarded the remaining meanings of "Lianshan" and "Gui Zang". From the chaotic times of the late Qing Dynasty to the end of the Anti-Japanese War, the world has been ups and downs for more than sixty years. There are more and more dead souls, but the old rules of the underworld are gradually failing. Why can't the victim find the real murderer? If a ghost dies again, where will it go? There are more and more living people in the world, where will the new souls come from? Shen Yanqiu finally discovered that what he was tracking down throughout his life was never a certain evil ghost, but an old account that spanned several generations and was filled with the names of missing persons. Five shortcomings and three shortcomings, life is burdened with debts. A lamp shines on the bones, and a hall asks for names. Debts that the living refuse to acknowledge will one day have to be collected by the dead themselves. This work is a fictional literary creation. Except for some geographical names and historical and cultural backgrounds, it is all fictional.