The Ghost Crossing Master

The Ghost Crossing Master is a supernatural suspense novel by the web author "Xing Yi De," his third full-length work after The Corpse Classic of Ghost Valley and A Jianghu Like a Dog. It has been completed as an online serial, running approximately between 2.6 million and 3 million characters (platform statistics vary, so no word count is given here). The first-person narrator is an ordinary young man who struggles to make a living. To supplement his income, he rents out his old family house, only to find that the woman who moves in behaves mysteriously. After she settles into the courtyard, trouble arrives one after another: eerie pits appear in the yard for no reason, strange wailing sounds rise late at night, and his formerly placid, ordinary life is torn open, plunging him into the borderland between the living and the dead. To protect himself and to solve the unending strange events, he is forced into the world of the occult. He begins by grasping at any straw—following a friend to the airport to meet a so-called "reclusive master"—and gradually learns to identify karmic impurities, set up formations, and handle cases, taking on jobs that cleanse grievances for the dead and relocate graves to ferry souls onward. He slowly discovers that behind the snarling, clawing spirits often lie tragedies and obsessions wrought by the living themselves. The book links its main plot through unit-style cases. The author says its core still rests on the word "fate": an ordinary person is shoved into this trade by fate, with no choice but to learn to stand firm at the edge of life and death again and again. The writing takes a light, humorous, streetwise tone, using a storyteller's voice to tell stories of "clearing ghosts' names," and repeatedly states one point: ghosts are not frightening; human hearts are.