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.

I strapped the Seven-Coin Sword to my waist, tucked talismans and coins into my clothes, and hung the jade tablet around my neck, cold against my chest.


When night fell, I set off again, taking a back path behind the shop that cut the journey in half.


Two hours later, I reached the fork at the Mountain God Temple. This time, I took the left upward path.


The trail was covered in pine needles, silent beneath my feet. The scent was thick and choking. Vines bore white flowers whose scent dizzied me after a while. I covered my nose with cloth and kept going.At the top of the steps lay a small platform. In the center was the Yin-Walking Well: three feet wide, its rim carved with runes identical to those on the bronze coffin.


I leaned over. No ordinary water filled it—only black liquid trickling down the walls, pooling at the bottom as still as a mirror. But the reflection was not my face.


I looked up sharply. Nothing above. Only the reflection below, deeply unsettling.


I followed the Records: placed seven coins on the rim, bit my finger, smeared blood on the runes, and began chanting the ancestral incantation.


The moment I finished, the black water churned, forming a massive whirlpool. At its center, a pitch-black opening appeared. Cold, sharp wind blasted upward, stinging my face.


I gripped the coin sword tightly. A blurry glow rose from the depths, as if something climbed toward me.


I stepped back, ready to fight. The light halted ten feet below. Then a hoarse, tired male voice echoed from within.


My body froze. Blood turned to ice. I had never heard this voice before. Yet I knew exactly who it belonged to.


The light flickered. The voice spoke again, urgent and panicked.


"Don't come down! Run! It's coming out!"


The light vanished at once. In its place, a huge vertical pupil—identical to the runes on the bronze coffin—slowly opened in the darkness of the well.


I stared at that eye. And I realized, to my horror:


The figure reflected in its gaze… had no face.


Chapter 10 - Chapter 10: Return to Ghost Howl Ridge