The Yin Walker

My name's Chen Jiu. I'm twenty-four, and I run a coffin shop in a tiny, backwater village called Yin Village, deep in the mountains of western Hunan. The shop was left to me by my grandpa. He said the Chen family has been walking the yin for three generations, and I'm the fourth. Walking the yin? It means a living person does business for the underworld. If someone dies and their soul can't find its way back, I go down to fetch it. If a house is haunted by some evil thing, I go negotiate. If talks break down, I send it packing. Sounds mystical, right? Truth is, I'm just a middleman—except the currency I trade in isn't profit. It's my life. Grandpa always said no one in this line of work lives past sixty. He was fifty-nine this year. The day he died, I was out back varnishing a new coffin. The village chief called and said, "Your grandpa's gone." By the time I rushed home, the whole yard was packed with people. Grandpa lay on a bamboo bed, his face a livid purple, eyes bulging wide, pupils crisscrossed with blood. That wasn't the face of someone who died a natural death. What was even more cursed was the bronze coffin in the corner. It had sat in the shop as long as I could remember, and Grandpa never let me touch it. Now, it was propped open a crack. I stepped over to shut the lid, and the second my hand hit the metal, I heard it: fingernails scraping against iron. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. Slow, steady, one after another. Grandpa had told me once, before he died: "Jiu'er, if I'm gone and you hear something from that coffin, don't you dare open it. Whatever's locked inside, it's not me anymore." But I never got the chance to open it. Grandpa, on the bamboo bed, sat up on his own. His face was blank, his mouth split wide to his ears, and the voice that came out wasn't his at all. "Chen Jiu," it said, "your grandpa guarded me for thirty years. Finally, he let me out." It said I was more useful alive than dead. It said it was waiting for me at Ghost Cry Ridge. Then it left, taking Grandpa's body with it, walking straight into the most cursed mountain in all of western Hunan. I stayed behind in the coffin shop, and that's when I saw it: a line of blood-red words carved into the coffin lid. Don't come. It's been waiting for you. It was Grandpa's handwriting. Was he telling me to go, or to stay away? I didn't know. All I knew was that he was still trapped in that coffin. And the thing that stole his body? It said its name was Chen Yuandao—the first of the Chen family to walk the yin, an ancestor who'd lived over two hundred years. It had drunk from the waters of the River of Forgetfulness, its soul shattered into a thousand pieces, each one latching onto a Chen descendant. There's a piece of it inside me, too. It said it'd waited two hundred years for this soul seed to ripen. And now, it's here.