The Nine Hells Register

Introduction to The Nine Nether Household Register In a nutshell A contemporary fantasy epic built on five thousand years of Chinese death records and told through the eyes of soul collectors. The more people die, the more ghosts there are. A soul collector's duty is to help every ghost reclaim its name. Core Setting There are 13.5 billion spirits accumulated across China. They have not vanished, but exist as "spiritual matter" in a dimension that overlaps with reality: the Nine Nether Realm. Every corpse, every plague, every war, and everyone who has died on every inch of land has left an "echo" in the Nine Nether Realm. These echoes must be recorded, acknowledged, and laid to rest. Otherwise, the spirits will grow resentful, transform into "plague ghosts," and return to the world of the living. The people entrusted with this duty are soul collectors, whose lineage has been passed down since ancient times. Only one person inherits the role in each generation. They possess "yin-yang blood" and carry The Nine Nether Household Register. Their duty is to record every dead person's name, cause of death, and last words, so the dead know they "have been recorded" and can then depart in peace. The Main Story Guilin, 2026. The last soul collector of the modern era, Lu Jiuzhang, works the night shift as an undertaker at a funeral home. While handling the registration of various spirits in his daily work, he unexpectedly activates a chapter in The Nine Nether Household Register that has been sealed for more than seven hundred years: The Great Rat Plague of Bianjing at the end of the Jin dynasty (1232), which killed around 13.57 million people. This page is burning. More than ten million spirits have waited in the depths of the Nine Nether Realm for 794 years. The words they cry out are: