After being unemployed for three months, outdoor streamer Yu Xian takes the bait when a big spender in his livestream says, “Get enough rockets, and I’ll show you the world.” Clutching a rusty flashlight, he crawls into the city sewers. Amid the mold and the stench of methane, his camera suddenly catches a bronze branch half buried in the sludge. Its tree trunk is engraved with nine divine birds, exactly matching the Sanxingdui Bronze Sacred Tree. Even more terrifying is the gray-green figure darting from the shadows: a hunched goblin clutching a stone spear fitted with a jade ceremonial blade. Ghostly light flickers in its eye sockets, reflecting a cinnabar mural on the stone wall: “The Eyed King commands the earth deities.”
A dull grinding noise rises from deep in the wastewater. Zhou Ye digs half a piece of oracle bone script out of a crack in the collapsed bricks. Beside the fragmentary words “The Cancong clan turned ghosts into servants,” someone has awkwardly carved the outline of the same pointed ears as the goblins’. Just as a hundred thousand viewers flood into the livestream, a private message from “Guardian of the Bronze Tree” flashes across the screen: “Three thousand years have passed, and they’re still waiting for the Shu king’s Candle Dragon lantern to relight the Ghost Capital...”
The trembling camera sweeps over floating rotten leaves. Beneath the water, a whole row of bronze masks suddenly catches the light. In the bulging “eyes” of those masks, Zhou Ye is clearly reflected, holding up his phone, along with the goblin “clan” slowly rising behind him, bronze swords in hand.
Nothing can connect to it