The Corpse Fisher

The Corpse Fisher is a long urban supernatural novel by Qijie Di Xiaolong, a platinum author of Yuewen Group. Serialized on Qidian from September 1, 2024, to August 2026, it runs 731 chapters and roughly 6.5 million characters, long topping the male readers' monthly ticket rankings with average subscriptions above 100,000, and has been licensed for film and animation adaptations. The story begins when ten-year-old Li Zhuiyuan is sent back by his divorced mother to his grandparents' home in Siyuan Village. When the bearded family in the village holds a funeral, a woman named Little Oriole in the funeral troupe disappears after performing; Li Zhuiyuan falls into the river while fishing with his grandfather and sees Little Oriole standing upright underwater in a qipao, drawing him into a series of eerie events. His great-uncle Li Sanjiang is in fact a local "corpse fisher" who retrieves sunken bodies, and while protecting Li Zhuiyuan he gradually reveals the trade's rules and taboos: tools such as the guiding hook and the soul-returning basket, strange matters such as upright drowned corpses and vengeful spirits demanding lives, and the law of cause and effect between life and death. Naturally precocious and able to see malevolent entities, Li Zhuiyuan solves mysteries through calm, rational deduction rather than mystical guesswork. He befriends Qin Li, who can communicate with the yin and yang; Runsheng, strong and loyal; the clever Tan Wenbin; Yin Meng, skilled in poisons; and Lin Shuyou of the Guanjiangshou lineage, forming a team that "walks the river," solving case after case along the banks that conceal injustices and conspiracies. Grounded in folk legends, customs, and regional culture of the Yangtze River basin, the work's core theme is that "people know ghosts are terrifying, but ghosts know the poison of the human heart"—what is more frightening than ghosts is the venom of human nature, and corpse fishers are preserving the last dignity of the dead. Structured as standalone cases advancing a main storyline, the novel delivers both eerie horror and human warmth and youthful growth.