The Remnant Scrolls of the Yin Pact and Muye

The Yin Contract: Lost Scrolls of Muye

An account of folk-horror adventures, free from the usual "second-generation tomb raider" tropes

Synopsis

On an old stretch of the Yellow River, there is a trade called "weighing the scales": these men settle the accounts of "craftsmen" who feel guilty after robbing ancient tombs. They never ask where the burial goods went. They take only a pound of yellow earth and a three-inch yin contract, then cross out the client's "debt to the things beneath the earth" in their ledger.

Young Gou Ya is the last scale-settler in the Muye region. He was born blind in his left eye, but his right eye can see the color of the final breath a dead person took. Before dying, his master gave him half of a ruined scroll. Its title page bore just one line: "In the Battle of Muye, the defeated were not crowned kings, but entombed."

In the spring of 1927, the water in the silt-choked river ran low, and a crack opened in its bed, revealing an "inverted tomb": the inscription faced downward, the coffin pointed skyward, and every burial offering existed as a "mirror image": shoes belonging to the living, rice belonging to the dead, and clay figures that breathed.

Three "guests," each with their own ulterior motives, came calling on Gou Ya:

- Ma Sanniang, the last surviving daughter of the Ma family and the sole descendant of the tomb robbers who had once "read the mountains and located tombs for Lord Ma." Her family had fallen into ruin, and her left arm was covered in a curse like red threads;

- Xiao Deng, an apprentice to a master of hidden mechanisms, skilled with traps but hunted by fellow disciples for learning forbidden arts;

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