On a stormy night in western Hunan in 1935, veteran Lu Chengyuan takes on a sinister escort job to save his sister, who is dying of tuberculosis: he must deliver a corpse home. A vermilion talisman is knotted around the woman's neck, and her feet are shod in embroidered shoes that never decay. On the night the corpse procession sets out, the tung-oil lamps in the funeral lodge go out without warning. The eyes of twenty corpses gleam with German incantations, while beneath the rotting flesh at the corpse driver's cuffs, gears and maggots coexist.
Face-shaped witch bugs crawl from the black blood coughed up by Lu Xueying, piecing together the final code from before the church hospital burned down. The innkeeper's mechanical prosthetic leg, hidden beneath her qipao, is engraved with Miao forbidden arts and the insignia of the Japanese army. And beneath the stitches on the corpse's nape lies Lu Xueying's medical record from when she disappeared three years ago. When the blood moon swallows the mass grave and the corpse horde kneels before a Japanese army bunker deep in the mountains, Lu Chengyuan finally realizes that this conspiracy, spanning twenty years, began turning their flesh and blood into a vessel for witch bugs the moment he injected his sister with her first dose of penicillin.
Deep beneath the sunken mausoleum, a hundred Taoist-robed clones awaken in crystal coffins. In the soul-subduing bell of Mount Longhu, the souls of loved ones are being torn apart to fuel talismans. On the night the blood moon hangs overhead, mechanical hearts resonate with Daoist bones and rupture into something new. A Republican-era cold case and a future tide of corpses collide with a thunderous crash in a rift in time. When the plum-blossom birthmarks on the siblings' necks both seep with bloody code, they must choose: become vessels for the Mother Gu to devour all of China, or use themselves as bait to blow apart this “eternal life” fraud spanning three eras?
The secret art of corpse-driving in western Hunan collides with Japanese biochemical experiments and cybernetic Daoist magic. Amid gears of flesh and blood and the cycles of time, the bloodiest lie beneath Mount Longhu's century-old Daoist legacy is exposed. Open the first page of this book, and you will hear the mechanical witch bugs
