Book of Taboos in the Mortal World

Something unclean lies beneath the water. The canal runs with blood debts that can never be washed away.

Twenty years ago, three official canal boats tasked with suppressing the flow of ill fortune met their end in a hidden channel. Twelve living souls were buried beneath the water, without even a bubble rising to the surface. When Shen Shiqi was three, his parents died in these black waters. All they left him were a pair of shears, a coin, and a stack of death contracts sealed away for twenty years.

Twenty years later, evil forces stirred beneath the Grand Canal. Nine pools bound flesh, and a blood furnace reached for the sky. The authorities brought out the “Water-Subduing Iron Plow” to seal the river and suppress the evil. All manner of unclean things and foreign curse-masters tore into one another in the dark waters of the hidden channels, fighting for their lives.

Those who wanted to survive and those who wanted to claim lives alike were crammed aboard a battered skiff that could fall apart at any moment

A pair of shears severed life and death; a coin subdued yin and yang. He crossed through iron-locked forests of flesh and broke into the deadly depths of the Nine Pools.

“The lives you owed back then have accrued interest upon interest. Today, you’ll spit it all out for me, right down to the last scrap of bone.”