Chasing the Poison

Chasing the Poison is the second book of Tang Xiaohao's "Unusual Culture Trilogy," set in the same world as The Midnight Coffin Opener; it was serialized on Qidian from November 2013 and has been completed. The book builds its backdrop on the saying "corpse-driving in western Hunan, coffin-opening in western Sichuan, feng shui in western Shanxi": in the late Qing, as opium spread, some among the corpse handlers recast opium as "gold among medicines" that could cure all ills, forming their own faction, the "Medicinal Gold"; the rest, to clear their order's name, enshrined the "Eight Directions" as gods and began a hundred-year feud of pursuit against the Medicinal Gold. The story carries this century-old internal feud into the present: deep in the Golden Triangle lies the mysterious kingdom of Shangdu, known as a "criminals' paradise"; a buried history of opium, a batch of newly emerged drugs, and a group of human weapons who use drugs to surpass their bodies' limits and enter a "corpse-transformed" state draw in small-town nobodies, corrupt cops, and bloodthirsty strangers alike. The protagonist, Tang Shuxing, is a clever rogue scraping by in a small southwestern town; his childhood friend Ji Kefeng arrives with the old matter of their fathers' disappearance, and a murder case brings him to police attention, opening a trail to the transnational drug network "Mr. Hook." Through layered narration the book links the underworld, a Gu-hunting ground, the open sea, and border battlefields, unfolding around clues such as "Kaichang Hong," writing of greed's struggle with justice and of nobodies pushed along by their times and by a major case.