Paper Figures Call the Roll: A Record of a Netherworld Worker's Trials

His name is Chen Jiujin, a washed-up streamer who makes a living telling folk tales about the supernatural. He has eighty thousand followers, earns three thousand a month, and still owes money on Huabei.

During a late-night livestream exploring a haunted house, a paper effigy smacks him in the face, and he is "scared to death" on the spot.

After death, there's no Granny Meng's soup, just a text message welcoming him to a job: Welcome to the Folk Horror Challenge Game.

This isn't the Eighteenth Level of Hell. It's the Underworld Group.

The scenarios include a paper effigy's wedding dress, a mountain village's river god sacrifice, and a corpse-driving inn. Every one is a deadly folk ritual.

The rules: sacrifice the living, light lamps with corpses, carve names on coffins. Get it wrong, and your soul will be scattered.

Points earn you the right to be reborn. A permanent position is a worker's dignity. The boss is the King of Hell, whose hairline is receding.

Others rely on brute force to clear the challenges. Chen Jiujin relies on his mouth.

He's glib, scared of dying, and greedy, but he has inherited a full set of yin-yang skills.

What others consider folk taboos are, to him, the key to breaking the game.

One line, "False rumors can get people killed," can save lives and expose the truth at the heart of an entire scenario.

After escaping the paper effigy's wedding, he is specially recruited by the King of Hell and becomes a temp in the Underworld.

His first assignment: find his grandfather.

His grandfather has been missing for ten years, yet his file says "on the job."

Half of the notebook he left behind is missing. Only four words remain: Don't go into the inn.

Chen Jiujin grins. "I've already died once. What have I got to fear?"

But he doesn't know that his grandfather left behind more than a notebook.

There's also a key to the Hall of Reincarnation, an old acquaintance in red, and a debt from forty years ago.

The Hall of Reincarnation is about to open. He has to finish this shift.