The Eerie Ways of the Underworld

The suona's wailing notes mingled with the cries of mourning. When Shen Yan opened his eyes, he was lying in a coffin in a mass grave, with half a marriage contract resting on his chest. Written on it was the date of his death. In the Book of Life and Death, the Judge had personally marked him as a dead man, and in three days his soul would return to the Yellow Springs. Desperate to survive, he followed a paper effigy's directions into the City God Temple, only to learn that he had been caught up in a marriage pact meant to substitute one life for another. The ghost courier who had come to claim his soul was using the bride's vengeful spirit to refine a Pill of Obsession. A wedding and a funeral collided: Yin soldiers marched through the streets and carried off the living, while the ghost market hawked years of life and merit. Forced to take on his first supernatural case, Shen Yan used the rules of the underworld to turn the tables on the ghost courier and seize proof that the Judge's brush had changed his name. In exchange, he gained a new lease on life, while stepping into the path of the occult.

But the deeper he investigated, the more disturbing the truth became: the Judge fed on obsession, and the ghost couriers claimed souls to satisfy their own desires. With every case he solved, he came one step closer to rewriting his date of death, and one step closer to the entire underworld's murderous schemes. A living man in the underworld, a paper effigy shielding him from evil, yin energy eating away at his lifespan, and the reclusive old Judge waiting to make him the next victim in a century-old injustice.