The Colorless Face

Have you ever seen the urban villages at four in the morning? Neon tubes flicker and groan. Beneath a crooked old locust tree at the mouth of an alley, a masked man crouches, burning paper money. The mask’s blue-green face and fangs flare and fade in the firelight, as if it were alive. A passing delivery rider glances over and mutters, “More superstition,” before twisting the throttle and riding off. No one knows that just three minutes earlier, the masked man had used a bamboo pole to beat away a water demon that crawled out of the sewer. This is the story I want to tell: beneath the Nuo mask, what looks like superstition is the truth they risk their lives to protect. The hook in a nutshell: When a “fallen inheritor of an intangible cultural heritage” who only knows how to perform Nuo opera discovers that the ritual sword in his hands can slay vampires and the mask on his face can subdue thousand-year-old zombies, practitioners from every school around the world are thrown into turmoil.