Three hundred years ago, the wandering Taoist Yang Xuan nailed his pregnant wife inside a suspended bronze coffin to seal a snake demon. Three hundred years later, Yang Yun, a student at Jianghan Polytechnic, slashes his wrist during the Ghost Festival, becoming the seventy-second sacrifice in his family’s demon-feeding scheme. When he crawls out of a graveyard, a bronze symbol identical to the snake demon’s is branded into his rotting palm.
In the Mountain God Temple beneath a blood moon, rows of suspended coffins suppress the reincarnations of past generations. A snake girl in a school uniform smiles in the dissection room; the coffin keeper’s grandfather hides green scales beneath his skin; and the bride in a glass coffin mirrors the vision of a woman slashing her wrist that haunts Yang Yun’s midnight dreams. When a school bus carrying faceless students smashes through the blood-feeding formation, Yang Yun finally sees the truth behind this curse spanning from the late Ming dynasty to the present day: in every lifetime, he has driven a peachwood nail into the crown of his beloved’s head with his own hands.
Bronze coffins awaken when they drink blood; Taotie patterns devour souls and drive them mad. The Ming-era corpse-forging kiln buried beneath the university district, Yongle Tongbao coins engraved with birth details, and organs on the dissection table that are always fresh... This scheme woven by humans and demons can only be broken through the most foolish devotion and the sharpest betrayal. And this time, the hand holding the knife has finally begun to tremble.
