In the autumn of 1928, Ma Ning stepped through the gates of Fengdu City with a brass talisman case on his back and took over Ning Funeral Services, a shop that had been abandoned for six months. Right across from it was the Yangtze River wharf, where warlord supplies and refugees passed through every day. Ma Ning hung out a wooden sign that read, "Ghosts caught here, fixed prices." His first job was to clear out the morgue for a wharf gang. At midnight, the bodies of seven drowned river bandits sat up, their fingernails growing three inches in a frenzy. He used a Fire Talisman to set their burial shrouds alight, then smashed their spines with his Lightning Thunder Fist and collected five hundred silver dollars from Zhao. That night, under a moonless sky, the sound of a suona drifted across the river, and the prelude to the Ghost Soldiers' Passage began to unfold.
