One Night with a Ghost Wife

One Night with a Ghost Wife is a long supernatural suspense novel by the online author Qin Shou Chi Bai Cai, serialized on Heiyan Reading Network starting September 2016 and completed in June 2017 with "Dust Settles (Grand Finale)," totaling about 3.35 million Chinese characters. The story begins with the childhood of Zhou Yuan, a boy from a mountain village. His grandfather, the village chief, indulges almost every request except one: the dilapidated house at the village edge, which neither Zhou Yuan nor any villager may approach. At twenty, while his grandfather is away, Zhou Yuan and his friend Pang Dun break open the door and find in the darkness a woman named Shirui who has been imprisoned there for years. He frees her, which leads to a break with his grandfather; the old man leaves a note and disappears. Soon after, young newcomers in the village die mysteriously, and the villagers blame the Zhou family. Shirui reappears, claiming to be Zhou Yuan's girlfriend, and Zhou Yuan gradually realizes she is not human. To save people and to unravel the mystery his grandfather left behind, he becomes the disciple of a young exorcist and embarks on a path of cultivation. The first half builds suspense with rural taboos, paper effigies, and Taoist duels; the second half shifts into a larger fantasy framework involving the Five Witches Mountain seal, the Witch Sect, the Taiji Yin-Yang Tomb, the Golden Mystery Body, the Emperor's Tomb, and the Empress of Heaven, expanding the scope from one village and one house to conflicts among humans, ghosts, and major sects. It is a representative work of the Heiyan platform's "rural opening, fantasy later" supernatural genre.