At 3:47 a.m., Zhang Yuan wakes to find a bloody mark on his palm.
It isn't until a nap drags him into a bizarre dream that he sees the corpses frozen on a purple track, a teacher gutting a fish in a toilet stall, and blood-red words writhing beneath the countdown board on a blackboard.
In the dream, he discovers that he is the embodiment of the ancient mythical beast Mo's consciousness. His high school deskmate Ding Hao, Jiajia, the girl who vanished after falling off a cliff, and even the homeroom teacher with nose hairs sticking out of his nostrils are all entangled in a conspiracy spanning a thousand years.
The barrier between reality and dreams is crumbling. The Black-Hatted Man controls a school full of puppets corrupted by nightmares. A sacrifice beneath the blood-red sky. A wooden tablet left behind by the Night Warden points Zhang Yuan toward the "Five Locks" scattered across time and space: the purifying vase that seals the eye, the war drum that shatters the ear, the lotus flower that burns incense, the Buddha's alms bowl that silences speech, and the power of the mind that communicates with the divine.
Each shackle he breaks sends his memories further back: the light-and-dark twins split from the Creator God, and the cosmic code hidden in humanity's collective subconscious.
As the blood moon covers the world, Zhang Yuan stands atop the ruins. Behind him lies a fractured reality on the brink of entropy; before him, a vortex of eternal night devours all living things. This time, I'll make the nightmare... a prison for the gods.
This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.
