Null Nocturne

About This Work

Null Nocturne is a long-form serialized Asian urban fantasy blending nocturnal sorcery academies, ley-line wards, and yokai reclassification. On the night of March 16, 2065 — after the last MRT train has left Taipei — seventeen-year-old ordinary high schooler Gu Mingye boards the 0:37 train that exists on no schedule, arrives at Platform Thirteen, and finds the entrance to the city's other side: beneath dark-red eaves, a pale blue oil lamp burns where no lamp should. A whisper grazes his ear: "You took the wrong path." It is the first time since he was fourteen that he admits, to himself, that the voice is not tinnitus.

The work spans nine volumes: Platform Thirteen / Shadow Alley Hundred-Spirit Market / Blue Lamp Old Temple / Ley-Line Black Tide / Void Gate Night Patrol / Volume VI / Volume VII / Volume VIII / The Void Gate Opens. The central question is not "defeat the yokai" — it is "understand why the city needs these yokai and wards in the first place." Temples are ley-line nodes. Yokai are residual personalities left over from old-world compacts. And the Night Patrol Bureau is nothing more than the Void Gate Society's shell operation running along the urban grid.