The Seven Calamities: A Book of Taoist Arts

While clearing out his grandfather’s old Jiangnan residence, modern-day young man Lin Feng unexpectedly discovers a long-sealed ancient book, The Dao Arts and Spirit Register, hidden in a secret compartment. A faded photograph from 1947 slips from its yellowed pages. In it, his grandfather stands before a ritual altar, Peachwood Sword in hand, while seven earthen jars wrapped in ink lines ooze eerie streaks of blood. When talismans spontaneously combust, a clock runs backward, and his phone receives a distress call from seventy years ago, the old residence’s space and time begin to warp, revealing the brutal truth that has haunted the Lin family for generations. It turns out that since the late Qing dynasty, the Lin family’s ancestors have used their own bloodline as a sacrifice to suppress the Maoshan forbidden art known as the Seven Torments: seven evil spirits that feed on human suffering. Every sixty years, a direct descendant must redraw the suppression talisman with their own blood and bone, or the balance between yin and yang will collapse and the human world will become a living hell. A black cat leading the way, a human-skin map emerging, a ghost opera from the Republican era coming back to life... Lin Feng is dragged into a deadly maze of intrigue and discovers that his grandfather altered his birth date to save his life, and that the Bagua jade pendant he wears is the key to opening the “Living Corpse Secret Scroll” inside a bronze coffin. As the jars shatter one after another and the city falls into a mass psychosis, Lin Feng must seize a forbidden relic in the ghost market between worlds on a stormy night, then confront his past self amid a curse that devours time in the library. In the end, he must face a choice: sacrifice himself to suppress the evil spirits forever, or destroy The Dao Arts and Spirit Register and unleash the Seven Torments in exchange for a century of peace for humanity?