Taboo Master

Taboo Master is a long-running supernatural suspense novel by the web author Wu Yixian (who also publishes under the pen name Wu Banxian; real name Wu Zhichao). Serialization began in 2014 on Heiban Reading (Heiyan), and the completed work runs about 1.5 million characters. Its core premise: the world we inhabit is full of taboos—going out, bathing, eating, sleeping, marriage, childbirth all have their rules—and violating a taboo brings only death or a fate worse than death. From this arises an ancient profession that knows the rules better than Daoist priests and is feared by ghosts and gods more than exorcists: the Taboo Master, able to both break and create taboos. The story is narrated in first person by Han Qingtian, a boy from a mountain village. The Han family is a line of taboo masters handed down from antiquity, charged for generations with oversight and punishment, yet cursed with short lives because an ancestor violated a family taboo; heirs rarely live past thirty or forty. Han Qingtian lost his father young and was raised by his grandfather, from whom he learned by heart all the things one must not do and received a life-preserving heirloom kept in reserve. To find the lost crucial secret art and break the family curse clinging to him, he leaves the mountain village and encounters a parade of strange people and events—bone refiners, heirs of Lu Ban's arts, curse-casters, the crow woman, the cat slave, poison masters, soul-gatherers, underworld runners, shamans—and is drawn into struggles between the worlds of yin and yang and contests over divine artifacts. The work uses folk customs and taboos as its skeleton, writes horror with a light, bantering narrative tone, and beyond mystery and adventure explores human nature and moral duty through the device of ghosts as mirrors of people.