Relieve One's Life

In the 17th year of the Republic of China, Nanling compiled an annals, and the government ordered that all absurd old customs be deleted. From then on, people started to die everywhere. When the dead person calls out his name, he should not look back after three calls; when the coffin lands, one of the coffin bearers must take his place; when the bride crosses the bridge and turns around, she will be taken away by "herself" outside the sedan chair... Everyone remembers these fatal rules, but no one knows that each rule originally had a way to survive if one sentence was deleted. Chen Zhao is a field collaborator at the Nanling Tongzhi Museum, specializing in correcting past events from broken tablets, genealogies, and the few words left by the dead. Ten years ago, his father died in a funeral without a head, leaving only a copy of "Baishu Mingjie" with the last half of the sentence blacked out with blank paper and ink. Ten years later, Chen Zhao heard his late father call out his nickname again outside Wutong County. In order to survive and to find out the cause of his father's death, he began to enter the "original night" when the taboo was born, re-investigate the first tragedy and find the deleted sentence. Others follow the rules in order to avoid death. Chen Zhao checked the rules to see who was using them to kill people. But when all the ways to survive were re-completed, he gradually discovered that someone might have deleted more than just words, and his name had already appeared in a local chronicle that had not yet been written.