A soft spring breeze rustled the willow branches in the second month of the year.0

Li Yuan sat leaning against an old tree, his legs comfortably stretched out. The potent Snow Brew liquor he had been drinking gave him a pleasant buzz, letting his thoughts drift.0

Over the last couple of weeks, he’d occasionally wondered if he had made the right choice. Would it have been better to enter the Clock Mansion right away? After all, doing so might reveal more about ghost domains.0

But the Clock Mansion was completely foreign to him, and potentially dangerous. The living and the dead supposedly resided together there, which was hard enough to believe. There was also the mansion master and a council of elders, implying a strict hierarchy.0

All that pointed to a new and likely perilous environment, possibly even more treacherous than the carpenter’s workshop. Li Yuan wasn’t about to dive headfirst into such...0