Antique shop owner Wu Ling hears a bronze compass begin to ring on the Ghost Festival night. His ancestral dragon-bone judge's brush unexpectedly unleashes blood-gu insects and walking corpses. As moving haunted houses and feng shui plots involving living people buried as stakes emerge one after another, he discovers that he is the final “living coffin nail” in a thousand-year-old dragon-locking formation. The paper effigy auction at the Mystic Sect's night banquet conceals deadly danger, while a locust-tree cocoon chamber in Fengdu's ghost market traps a rotting corpse with a face identical to his own. When the scales of the Nine Yin Candle Dragon break through Jiangcheng's ley lines, Wu Ling finally realizes that his grandfather's death and his father's disappearance were all part of a deadly scheme laid by the five branches of the Mystic Sect to revive an ancient blood sacrifice. He must either become a coffin and keep the worlds of yin and yang sealed forever, or wield his brush as a blade and tear apart this feng shui world that devours people.
