Psycho #21

In a remote corner of 19th-century China, a weary thief named Chan’Hai is left behind as his companions flee from a mysterious threat. When he is abandoned and left to die, he awakens to a horrifying transformation—unaware of what he has become, yet suddenly driven by a bloodlust he cannot understand.

A dying man, M. Valdemar, requests that the narrator, a doctor and mesmerist, put him into a trance before death to study the phenomenon. As the man lies on the brink of death, the mesmerism halts the process—but when he is later awakened after seven months, his body begins to decay in horrifying, unnatural ways.

A police photographer becomes obsessed with a ghostly image he claims to have captured in a death photo, believing it proves that a criminal’s spirit rises at the moment of death. Determined to prove his theory, he deliberately seeks out violent deaths, pushing his limits until his superiors intervene and threaten to arrest him for tampering with investigations.

Max and Maxine, a pair of sentient puppets, find themselves caught between their puppeteer’s conscience and their own survival when she plans to expose the violence in puppet shows on a national talk show. As tensions rise and the stakes grow, the duo must confront the consequences of their creator’s ideals—especially when one of them begins to act on a violent impulse that blurs the line between performance and reality.