Strange Tales of the Unseen

Shen Mo, a restorer of ancient books, transmigrates into the body of an “Unrecorded Man” in front of the City God Temple in Chengdu Prefecture at the end of the Ming dynasty. Here, **your name only counts if it's written in the county gazetteer**. Anyone who hasn't been recorded is erased from the registers within ten days, vanishing from everyone's memories without even leaving a shadow. And he is precisely the one who doesn't exist in the records: asking for directions makes the person who answers forget their own name, the roll call never counts him, and his shadow grows fainter by the day. His only chance of survival is the modern gazetteer index in his arms, a book that turns its pages by itself. He can see entries that have been deleted: when someone erases the name of a village by the Huanhua Brook, the brook changes course and flows around it; when an entire page about the Strange Gate disappears, the face-peeling demon starts stripping people's faces at dusk. He restores a village's name, and the brook reverses course and returns to its proper place. The villagers weep as they remember one another. The price is that he forgets who he is for three days. He changes one character, turning “demon” into “beast,” and the monster retreats into the night fog. The price is that his presence fades another shade from the register. “Every character you restore becomes a footnote in someone else's story.” That's what the final page of the index says. But he refuses to believe it. The old records clerk at the Gazetteer Bureau, nearly blind, tells him: **When the words survive, the people survive; when the words burn, the people vanish.** On the night the city falls, the old clerk presses a worn-out brush into his hand, then turns and walks into the flames. Those who erase and revise want to burn every account of the strange and supernatural, making the world “normal.” Shen Mo is determined to protect the things that should not exist: the Black Lord of the Zhang Huanhou Temple, the Zeshui God of Kuimen, and the spirit of Ba Manzi, who slit his own throat at the bottom of a well. With a brush of the people's chronicles, he pits himself against an entire age. Protect the written word, or protect the people? His final choice is