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The Tima's Scroll
In a Tujia mountain village, the old shaman Peng keeps a living spirit-scroll that traps the souls of the violently dead and ferries them toward the gods. When the student Xiang returns home, he finds his father's ghost enslaved inside the painting — and learns the scroll now wants his own untarnished soul as its next hand.
The Paper Horse
Jian Jiu is the last paper-horse printer of Baiguo Ferry. For forty years he has stamped spirit-horses from pearwood blocks, dotting each eye with his own blood so the dead may ride to the underworld. As the Ghost Festival nears, he prints a forbidden soul-summoning horse—and finds every block now bears his own face. The ferry's drowned have been riding his breath all along, and an empty saddle waits at the river.
The Talisman Debt
In the fog-bound southern town of Qingtang, the last talisman-painter Xuan Yi draws paper charms that carry the dead's unanswered petitions to the underworld. When the townsfolk stop burning them at the crossroads, the debt returns to his brush-red hands — and he quietly writes a living name into the margin as the one who must pay. A long folk-horror tale of a debt that passes from hand to hand, and a stain that will not wash out.
The Bamboo Bone
In the southern river town of Qingmie Ferry, the last bamboo weaver fashions life-sized effigies for the drowned who never surface — a custom called 'filling the river.' Yet the supple grove behind the hill was planted upon a mass grave, and the souls locked in its joints have quietly become the bones of every basket in town. When the effigies rise, the old debt comes due at last.
The Clay-Figure Maker
In the riverside town of Qingyi, drowned souls are bound into clay figures by the aged craftsman Cui Jiu to keep them from claiming living substitutes. When Zhou Yan returns for his dying mother, he finds a clay likeness of his drowned sister weeping by night, and learns the figures are fed by the lifespans of the living. The water, it turns out, wants not the dead but the living as its replacement.
The Pot-Mender
He Jiu takes up his late master's bellows and comes to Qingtang Village, where every iron vessel has begun to crack. The village sits atop a sunken field long sealed by a river of molten iron; each crack leaks the dead back into the living. To mend the pots, the mender must pour his master's bone—and at last himself—into the seam.
Someone Beneath the Umbrella
In the rainy river town of Qingshi, old Zhou the umbrella-maker has secretly crafted 'life-borrowing umbrellas' for decades, opening them on rainy nights to draw the surplus breath from passing strangers and pass it to the dying. Now in his sixties, a forty-day plum rain wakes the borrowed breaths coiled inside his wares. The umbrellas open on their own, and the souls he indebted come to collect — with interest.
The Name-Carver
In Qingshi Ferry, the last stone-tablet carver finds his chisel cutting names of its own accord. When a widow commissions a grave tablet for her drowned husband Shen Que, the name begins to appear on other stones—and the river's nameless dead, denied their tablets, borrow his hand to climb back ashore.