The Mountains and Seas Descend: I Bury the Gods

Twenty-one years after the Great Wilderness Day, Lin Que, a night-shift corpse transporter at a funeral home, received a black coffin. There was no death certificate, no seal from the Boundary Guard Bureau, and only four words written on the coffin lid: DO NOT OPEN. Yet someone inside the coffin was knocking. When Lin Que opened it, he found another version of himself lying inside. The same face, the same scars. No heartbeat, yet it could say his sister's name. From that night on, he became the black coffin's sole chief mourner, forced to travel through nine city domains to lay to rest the ancient mountain-and-sea gods who had died in the human world. But the farther he went, the stranger things became. Some tried to steal divine corpses. Others stopped funerals. And some offered incense to new gods using entire cities. Only when Lin Que reached Kunlun did he realize that every coffin he had sent off was paving the way for a grand funeral twenty-one years in the making. And his name was written on the first line of the sacrificial register.