Corpse Drivers on the Silk Road

Chen Shen is the last heir of the Gui Ke Sect, the sect that watches over the corpse ditch.

Born night-blind, he can hear souls, sense evil spirits, communicate with the dead, and guide spirits.

Others escort corpses along the sunlit roads. He escorts them along the paths of the underworld.

He guards not treasure, but the road home.

One year, among his grandfather's belongings, he found a diary and half of a tattered map.

The diary said that fifty years ago, his grandfather had taken the remains of eight people who died far from home in the Western Regions, along with a guide named Zhao Laogen, and journeyed to Lop Nur. None of them ever returned.

The fragment of the map marked eight relay stations.

Each station concealed a set of remains.

Following the map, he found Zhao Laogen's grandson, Zhao Yue.

A doctoral student in history at the university in the capital, Zhao Yue studied archaeology in the Western Regions. Refined and fair-skinned, he was utterly out of place in these remote mountain valleys.

A night-blind corpse escort and a refined doctoral student set out together to retrace the Silk Road corpse route.

From western Hunan to Chang'an, from Dunhuang to Lop Nur: eight thousand li, eight sets of remains, and eight stories buried beneath the yellow sands.

Ancient tombs, sinister spirits, pursuits, and mysteries.

And the fabled City of Returning Souls, which holds the two-thousand-year-old secret of the Gui Ke Sect.

The Gui Ke Sect's rule: Every wandering soul must be taken in, and every dead person's bones must be brought home.

This journey will be a brush with death at every turn.

But those who died far from home deserve to return.