Records of the Yin Pact

On the hidden side of this neon-lit city, there is a business that opens only after dark.

Shen Ci, the fortune-teller of Fu An Li in the old city, goes by the sign "Shen's Half Reading." He doesn't tell fortunes or predict marriages. The reason lies in the strange patterns crawling over his left forearm: the Yin Contract.

When the living borrow luck from the King of Hell, he acts as guarantor. Borrow a little wealth, and lose ten years of your life. Change your fate once, and after death you'll have to do a dirty job for the underworld enforcers.

Then one day, a forensic doctor drags a "corpse" into his stall.

A longevity-stealing clasp is tied around the corpse's wrist, and a six-line hexagram is drawn on its chest. Yet the cause of death is listed as: none.

Even more terrifying, forensic doctor Lin Wan, a staunch atheist, has a scar on her wrist from a fate-changing ritual, one she herself has forgotten.

As a string of murders by hexagram unfolds across the city, Shen Ci discovers that the tattered Book of Yin Contracts left behind by his grandfather records not only the taboos of changing one's fate, but also a long "death list."

And his own name is right there on it.

When the underworld enforcers call the roll and ghosts roam the night, Shen Ci finally understands:

The most terrifying thing in this world is not ghosts, but the people willing to deal with them at any cost just to stay alive.