The Barber

The Barber is a suspenseful supernatural novel by the Xiangxi Ghost King (real name Yang Ji), totaling approximately 1.46 million Chinese characters and serialized on platforms such as Tianya Club, Baidu Fiction, and Heiyan. The story is told in the first person: the narrator, "I" (Yang Chuan, nicknamed Chuanzi), was frail from childhood, and a fortune-teller predicted he would not live past eighteen. At age nine, when his condition turned critical, his family followed local custom and summoned the barber Liao Fan to give him a "yin haircut"; Liao Fan saw that the family home was built atop a "grave mound fort," with the skeleton of a giant serpent buried beneath—a feng shui setup designed to sever a person's fate. He later broke the formation, saved Yang Chuan's life by drawing on the corpse energy of a corpse-driving inn, and took Yang Chuan as his apprentice. From then on, as Yang Chuan grew and gradually learned the trade, he accompanied his master through the countryside, dealing with one eerie case after another: yin haircuts, corpse transformations, yin-nourishing coffins, corpse driving, and more. Built around the premise that "all things have meridians," the novel presents the barber's trade as divided since ancient times into two lineages: the "rite officials," who attended to the appearance of emperors and nobles, and the "hair-punishment officials," who cut hair as a form of punishment. Masters can read faces and diagnose meridians, knowing a person's illnesses and lifespan, much as geomancers locate dragons and identify acupuncture points; the book also introduces the concept of "meridian robbery," by which one can steal the fortunes of ancestral graves, of a person's body, of a dharma body, or even of a person's lifespan. Rather than frightening readers with ghosts and monsters, the work uses trade rules, taboos, secret arts, and feng shui configurations to create an eerie sense of the everyday. It is the author's latest representative work to have its film and television rights optioned, following The Big Circle and The Secret Notes of a Mysterious Incident Investigator.