The Paper Effigy Maker

Before Grandpa passed away, he shoved an old tobacco pipe into my hand. "There are a few old things beneath the shop. Don't look through them until I'm gone!"

Three months later, he was gone.

I opened the cellar, and the paper figure in the corner started talking: "Hey, brother, you made this funeral paper offering wrong."

I'm not crazy.

My grandfather, Chen Fuhai, was the master craftsman behind Fuhai Funeral Services, the best-known funeral business in Wangdu Town and the surrounding area thirty years ago. What he left me wasn't some precious inheritance, just a craft: the skill of making paper offerings that can "commune with spirits."

Scissors, a carving knife, a brush, a copper tobacco pipe, and a handwritten manual: five items, five gateways.

I took over Fuhai Paper Offerings.

Around southern Hebei, funeral business isn't just about paper offerings. There's Zhao the Yin-Yang Master on North Street, Liu the Lame's spirit-medium hall in the west, sunken timber from the old Yellow River channel, and "them"... Every funeral has more to it than meets the eye.

I have to use this craft to give the dead proper funerals. And I have to find out what really happened thirty years ago.

I need to figure out what that smile on Grandpa's face meant before he died…