The curse has begun!!
In the twenty-fifth year of the Xian’an era, Lu Jiuxiao, a brocade-clad guard, is ordered to investigate the case of mummified corpses in the imperial mausoleum. But inside the Big Dipper coffin array, he finds a bloodstained jade pendant engraved with a twin-fish pattern, identical to the token left behind by his sister, who disappeared twenty years ago. The necks of all seven corpses, former court officials, bear the Lu family crest. The corpse oil seeping into the floor tiles forms the words “the seventh day of the seventh month, Bingchen year,” the very day his sister knelt in the storm and begged him to save her.
Lu Jiuxiao is forced to confront a century-old family secret: his Lu ancestors made a blood pact with a Miaojiang gu mother in exchange for generations of wealth and glory, promising to sacrifice one close blood relative every hundred years. In this generation, his own sister, Lu Jiuge, has already been chosen as a “vessel for the gu mother.” The corpse of a girl in an ice coffin opens her eyes and smiles. “Brother, you were the one who pushed me into the gu pool.” More unnerving still, the jade pendant in his arms resonates with a bronze star chart. The twenty-eight-mansion killing array revealed beneath the peeling dome of the underground palace has a position of ill fortune corresponding to the destiny of each Lu descendant.
To break out of this dead end, Lu Jiuxiao swallows a heart-linked gu, connecting him to his sister’s pain, only to glimpse the truth: at ten years old, she willingly cut out her heart to feed the gu. He transmigrates seven hundred years into the past to sever the chain of cause and effect, only to witness himself sending his sister to the altar with his own hands in every lifetime. When a laboratory from the cyberpunk age emerges from underground, the mechanical pupils of a clone reflect the future: the Lu family’s genetic engineering is still ongoing. The “sister” in the ice coffin smiles across time and space. “You can’t kill us all. We were written into the code of reincarnation long ago.”
