The Uncanny Shroud

The Uncanny Shroud is a supernatural suspense web novel by 24K Chun'er, a signed author on Heiyan Reading Network. It was serialized from October 2017 to September 2018, running 146 chapters and roughly 368,000 characters. The story is told in first person: the narrator's family runs a shroud shop with little business, until one day an odd-mannered woman appears and orders a set of shrouds every seven days. She never asks about style or pattern, only insists on body measurements precise to the last fraction, and pays double without being asked. Tempted by this rare income, the narrator sews each order to spec—until one day he realizes with a shock that the dimensions match, one for one, the frames of himself, his father, his mother, and his sister: a family of four. The eerie orders unearth a long-buried grudge, drawing the narrator into danger far beyond the confines of a shroud shop. The threads run from old-town coffins and the dreaded yizhuang (morgue) to the Greater Khingan Range, Ghost Solitary Cliff, blood jade of the southern frontier, and the ruins of the Khotan remnant people, woven throughout with gu sorcery, spirit-walking (zouyin), gu breeders, underworld guides, and a wealth of folk and supernatural elements, gradually unfolding into a long-form tale framed as suspense adventure. The work is dominated by an oppressive, chilling atmosphere, leavened by the narrator's wry humor; the early stretch, where a nobody is helplessly swept into strange events, is especially gripping.