In 1980, every soldier at the Saitula outpost in Xinjiang vanished mysteriously in a blizzard. Left behind at the scene were shamanic totems that bore an eerie resemblance to the Kharosthi bamboo slips stolen by Stein in 1908. An investigation team made up of an archaeologist, a border officer, and a mysterious artist is drawn into a time vortex spanning a century by an ancestral sheepskin thangka. When they find a ghost cave carved with shamanic runes in the Karakoram Mountains and uncover the secret of the Gate of the Three Realms with the guidance of a twin-fish jade pendant, they witness an even more terrifying truth: the ice corpses marching through the blizzard, the blood-red camel bells frozen in the poplar forest, and even the advance team that vanished on its way to Tibet in 1950 are all puppets of the Snow Demon, awakened by blood curses cast by priests across the ages.
The bronze divination disk from Lop Nur carried by Team Leader Wu conceals a double-sided pointer, which points to a chilling conclusion: something inhuman has long since infiltrated the team. Meanwhile, the protagonist, Lin Feng, a young man carrying the strange, blood-sigil-painted scroll Returning Home Through Wind and Snow and wearing a wolf-shaped thigh bone made from the remains of the first shaman, discovers that he is the last heir to the ancient royal bloodline of Khotan. When he offers his eyes to reactivate the seal at the prehistoric altar on Mount Gongger Jiubie, countless figures emerge in the river of time: Stein, who stole murals in 1908; the Peng Jiamu expedition team, which disappeared in 1949; and even the border soldier who wrote a diary in 1980. It turns out that this snowstorm curse, spanning a century, is a never-ending struggle between life and death.
