From the Start, I Was a Funeral Mourner at a Crying Coffin

Among the folk practitioners of the occult, there are six schools: the upper three make moves and read the signs, while the lower three risk their lives to make a living. Chen Wuliang is the last spirit-wailer of the Mourning School, one of the lower three. A tycoon’s butler offers him eight hundred thousand in cash to wail for the old master, who has just passed away. Just as Chen Wuliang lets out his first heart-rending cry in the mourning hall, a woman’s voice answers him in exactly the same tune from inside the bright red coffin before him, which has been nailed shut with nine soul-suppressing spikes. The guests collapse in terror, but Chen Wuliang kicks over the brazier and pulls out the half-length copper mourning staff passed down through his family. “If my voice breaks here today, you can forget about ever closing that coffin lid.” From the alleys of the capital to the dark rivers of western Hunan, from the halls of the northeast to the ancestral shrines of southern Fujian. A down-to-earth spirit-wailer who follows the old rules to the letter uses his iron voice and copper staff to overturn the upper three schools’ game, one move at a time. The Mourning School has an ancestral saying: when the voice breaks, the person dies. But he intends to trade his final cry for a world that no longer needs spirit-wailers.