The Cicada Sheds on the Seventh Night

On a stormy night in Bingang City, forensic pathologist Jiang Linxia cuts a living cicada shell from the chest of a drowning victim. The autopsy report shows that the victim actually died of frostbite seven days earlier. When she receives an anonymous death notice titled "The Seventh Night of Cicada Song," six gruesome corpses appear one after another in the apartment block. New cicada-wing patterns mark their skin from beneath, and their times of death are precisely seven hours apart. Yet the surveillance footage always shows a spacetime rift at 03:07.

Jiang Linxia discovers that every victim is host to reverse-entropy fungi, whose DNA perfectly matches that of the victims in a mass freezing incident twenty years ago. Even more frightening, the "7" birthmark on her palm seeps into her blood vessels as the countdown progresses, and the autopsy mirror keeps flashing with the image of her own corpse dressed in a 1990s police uniform. At last, she realizes that in this bloody cycle spanning twenty-seven years, she is the final sacrifice.

Tens of thousands of cicada pupae gush from the corroded pipes of the apartment block, while death notices etched across time and space appear on the freezer doors of the funeral home. The forensic pathologist's scalpel is about to cut through the most horrifying truth: when the cicadas sing on the seventh night, can the observer sever the curse of immortality parasitizing human civilization before the time loop closes?

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.