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Midnight Records: The Soul-Nailing Iron
In the riverside town of Tiexi, the last blacksmith Fu Jiu forges 'soul-nails' to pin wandering ghosts, hammering a breath of his own life into each. The wealthy miller Qian commissions nails for his 'haunted' father; Fu, tempted by the fee, forges without learning the truth. The nails trap not the old man but the ghost of A-Liu, a porter Qian murdered and buried in secret. To free the boy, Fu must melt the nails in his own blood — and take the boy's place beneath the anvil.
Midnight Records: The Bell's Guide
At Luo-Zhong Ferry hangs a mute bell that has stilled the flood for a century. When it cracks, a girl's lullaby drifts out at midnight. The last bell-founder, Xian Jiu, is summoned home and learns his father once drowned his five-year-old sister in molten bronze to be the bell's 'guide.' Now the bell hunts a living replacement — and Xian Jiu must offer his own soul to set his sister free.
The Cotton Fluffer
In the river town of Wuhuang, the old cotton-fliffer Tang Jiu makes burial quilts that keep the dead warm on their long journey, using a bowstring twisted from seven generations of widows' hair to lull wandering souls. When his grandson returns to lay his dying grandmother to rest, tainted cotton grown on a mass grave wakes hundreds of starving ghosts that trap her as a 'warmth-ghost.' At midnight Tang plays the souls back into his string and pays the price himself.
Midnight Records: The Soul-Leading Incense
In riverside Yanxi Town, the incense blender Shen He guards a forbidden recipe: the soul-leading incense, whose smoke shows the dead their final moments yet wakes the Incense Fiend born of drowned grudges. A stranger's quest to learn her brother's fate unwinds a local headman's murders and frees a three-year sleep of wrath.
The Tide-Stilling Drum
In riverside Mist Creek, the last drum-maker, Old Peng, breaks his master's taboo by patching a cracked tide-stilling drum with a strand of his drowned daughter's hair in its ash. For thirty years the drum's sound has tethered the river's dead to the living. On the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival, the gray ash rises and reaches for home—until Peng wades into the water to seal the net shut, leaving only a drumbeat that returns each year.
Midnight Records: The Coins That Ask Fate
By the bridge of Luoyan Ford sits a diviner who reads only death, never life. A drowned-child sacrifice reaches through his stall to claim the living by name. The fate-book writes itself; the reader is at last read — his own name penned at the book's end.
The Silver Lock
In the riverside town of Nanshui, the aged silversmith Shen Zan — known as Old Silver — has kept one rule for forty years: never forge a 'summoning' lock to call a drowned soul home. When a grieving widow begs him to make one for her lost son, he breaks it. The silver draws not one spirit but every child the river has taken, into his furnace. To keep them from shattering back into the water, he must tend the fire forever.
The Beam-Charm
In the south, carpenters hide a peach-wood figure in the central beam to bind a house—or a soul. Shen Yan returns to settle his grandfather's estate and lodges in the old listening-rain house, where a wooden-fish tapping sounds from the beam at midnight. Removing the charm frees the drowned carpenter Xun Jiu's grudge; the house wakes. Years later, a tiny wooden figure of Shen Yan himself lies waiting in the chest he carried away.