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The Opera Soul
Old opera player He Qi sings yin operas for the dead, taking on their unfinished burdens. Beneath the stage lies his senior brother, silenced and killed by a forbidden play Qi once goaded him to sing. For forty years the stage sounds by night, demanding Qi finish the brother's last line—and when he does, he must go down to keep him company.
The Water Script
Qin Shouzhuo, the Water-Script Master, unravels others' nightmares by writing away his own memories into a black ink jar, believing he bears their fright. After he soothes a man's recurring drowning dream, the water stirs. On the eve of First Frost he finds, on the surface, his own hand erasing his life stroke by stroke—the hand of He Jiu, the villager he once drowned to hide a sin. Water hides nothing; it returns everything.
The Lantern-Maker
A lantern-maker spends his life crafting soul-lanterns for the dead, and with each one his own shadow shortens a notch-which he blames on the wear of his craft. Only at seventy-one does he learn the lanterns never held light, only the shadow he surrendered year by year; and that the dead soul waiting at the bridge, lantern in hand, is the one he himself burned inside it long ago.
The Bone Granny
Old Granny Qin gathers the nameless bones of the river shoal and listens, night after night, to the injustices they whisper. For forty years she has spoken for the dead — until one autumn night every bone speaks at once and names her the murderer she covered up with a single line: 'it was all just to get by.' They point her to the empty coffin she readied long ago.
The Grave-Master
Old grave-master Zhou Shen reads the 'earth-eye' to lay the dead to rest; every family he buries stays at peace. Only one cenotaph on the west slope pushes up fresh soil each Qingming. He has always said it holds a nameless traveler's clothes—until his granddaughter asks, and digging down he remembers it holds his wife's miscarried, unborn child, and the new earth each year is the child's hand reaching for the surface.
The Yin-Walker
Old Gou is a yin-walker who descends to fetch the last words of the drowned and the lost for the living, but each trip costs him a sliver of his life-warmth, leaving his face younger year by year. Sent to ask a drowned child his final words, he wanders into a yin-house he cannot leave—behind every door waits a ghost he once failed to bring back, and its master is his own son, dead at three, whom he never knew.
The Seal-Craftsman
Yu Jiu, a seal-crafter who wards households against evil, bears a vermillion mark for every evil he seals. In old age the marks on his back join into a face—the Liu family of three he sealed to death for a rich patron in his youth. He tries to seal the face as he once sealed them, and finds he has become the evil to be sealed in another’s house. A folk-horror dread.
Crossing the Blood River
The Red Abyss River floods only in years of drowning. Old ferryman Uncle Gou carries only those who should cross. When A-Yan returns for his grandfather's funeral, he boards Gou's boat and learns the far shore is the Water Market of the drowned, and this year's last crossing takes a whole village of the living. Gou himself drowned a century ago and never crossed, repaying a debt that cannot end. As the boat leaves, whether A-Yan is aboard no one can prove.