The Breath of the Hopping Dead

Long before Wushan learned to fear the sound of stiff feet striking earth, a disgraced scholar named Feng walked down from Mount Emei with forbidden rites, stolen breath, and the first of his obedient dead behind him.

In the village below, Li Mei notices the wrongness before most others will say the word out loud. The river sounds muffled. Livestock die without blood. Villagers whisper about figures hopping through the trees after dark. Then her brother Li Jun vanishes into the mist and is found emptied by a terror the elders had hoped would remain buried in old temple records.

The Jiangshi have returned.

As panic spreads through Wushan, Li Mei is forced into an alliance with Master Wu, Chen, Zhang, and the few others willing to confront what the village archives reveal: the ruined Temple of the Eternal Breath once housed rites meant to trap breath after death, delay decay, and build a sovereign corpse strong enough to command the lesser dead. Feng did not simply revive a legend. He improved it.

Now, with the blood moon approaching, the dead gathering on the roads, and even familiar voices becoming untrustworthy in the dark, Li Mei must cross ravines, corpse-wash gullies, barricaded fields, and temple ruins to stop a ritual that could turn her village into the throne room of a new death-king.

The Breath of the Hopping Dead is dark historical folk horror about jiangshi, forbidden Taoist rites, stolen Qi, village memory, and the terrible cost of standing between the living and the dead when the old stories were true all along.