A forbidden live sacrifice tears open a chain of cause and effect stretching back a thousand years.
A provincial archaeological team accidentally unearths half of a bloodstained bronze ritual vessel. Strange blood-red characters seep from the Taotie patterns on its fragments: “Covet the tomb and open it, and the debt of the beasts will be paid in blood.” That night, thirty miles away at a ranch in a mountain hollow, thirty ewes die in labor, giving birth to things neither lamb nor human, but monsters wrapped in bronze fetal membranes…
Wang Dayou, a hard-drinking shepherd, is forced to confront his family’s dark secret. Twenty years ago, his father buried a ewe alive on the dragon vein of Wufeng Ridge while she was about to give birth, hoping to change the family’s feng shui and fate. Twenty years later, the sheep’s grave splits open and mountain spirits wail. Wang’s flesh and blood turn into a soul-refining cauldron, while bronze poison insects engraved with the Huayang Guo Zhi crawl through his internal organs.
The wax-resist cloth of a Miao poison-mother reveals ancient Shu patterns. The Qiang shibi’s human-skin drum echoes the earth veins of the Yu Gong. A Daoist renegade awakens the sacred tree of Sanxingdui through the art of ritual dismemberment... As an inverted waterfall of blood submerges western Sichuan, a bronze womb throbs and gives birth deep inside the mountain. A deadly game spanning the witchcraft of the southwest, Daoist arts, and ancient sacrifices quietly unfolds.
Are humans taming beasts, or are beasts guiding humans across?
When the bronze vessel returns to the altar, can the blood-written Lianshan Yi reverse the cosmic furnace?
