On his twenty-second birthday, Chen Yan received a prediction of his grandfather's death, along with a registered letter and a brass key. The letter told him to return to the old streets of Zhenyuan on the fifteenth day of the seventh month.
When he opened the back courtyard, sealed off for more than twenty years, a wall of Nuo masks containing restless spirits stared silently at him. The red mask at the front had split, and light shone through the crack. For six generations, the Chen family had been Nuo mask masters. They made pacts through masks, neither killing nor exorcising spirits, but seeking justice for ghosts and repaying the debts of the living to the dead. His grandfather left him the key not to force him to inherit the role, but to give him the freedom to choose.
A century ago, the three branches of Nuo mask practitioners split apart: the Chen family ferried ghosts onward, the Zheng family sealed them away, and the Zhan family summoned them. The central red mask shattered into three pieces. Since then, a human-faced tree, contract-eating venomous insects, and a fierce ghost sealed away for two hundred years have appeared one after another, forcing the descendants of all three branches to reunite.
Chen Yan didn't agonize over whether to become a Nuo mask master. Instead, he questioned the rules themselves: did ghosts want to be sent on to the afterlife? By returning the right to choose to the spirits, he broke a century-old tradition.
Everyone on the old street tended to their own trade between the worlds of the living and the dead, living alongside the spirit realm through their craft. Nuo masks were never weapons; at first, they were simply a way to give fear a place to rest. The price of their pacts gradually stole people's sight, and the entire old street shared the burden. Only when the living let go of their urgency could the dead find peace.
