A stretch of time sealed in bronze, and a sacrificial cycle from which three generations cannot escape.
On a rainy night, Chen Ke, the young owner of an antique shop, receives a mysterious bronze bell. The protective talisman left behind by his grandfather suddenly seeps black blood. A yellowed diary yields a hospital record from 1968, documenting the absurd sight of his grandfather, who should have been alive, seeing his own corpse in the morgue.
To unravel the mystery, Chen Ke ventures into an abandoned church hospital with Lin Wanqing, a mysterious Taoist nun, and his childhood friend Wang Mang. Underground, they discover the mummified remains of a 1970s archaeological team. The moment the bronze bell resonates with an ancient Shu jade tablet, a rift in time and space tears open, revealing the truth buried for generations: every member of the Chen family dies in the same ancient tomb on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, and their bones are being woven into the meridians of a candle-dragon’s resurrection.
A thousand-year-old corpse on the soul-haunting ladder wears Chen Ke’s grandfather’s pocket watch. The Japanese soldiers’ corpses in the blood altar clutch Chen Ke’s wristwatch. In the bronze-mirror chamber, versions of “himself” from different eras are murdering one another. When Wang Mang’s right eye becomes the candle-dragon’s pupil, and the tattoos of an ancient Shu shaman appear beneath Lin Wanqing’s Taoist robes, Chen Ke finally realizes: the woman in the qipao who gave him the bronze bell thirty years ago is now standing outside the antique shop in the pouring rain. In the reflection on the counter glass, the corpse-curse, bronze in color, has already crept all over his spine.
The day the bronze candle-dragon opens its eyes is the day the blood sacrifice of time begins anew.
**In this century-spanning tomb-raiding mystery, everyone is a hostage to history, and every funerary artifact is a tombstone for the future. When the last trace of cinnabar fades from the protective talisman, whose bones must be used to light the eternal lamp that will show the way out?**
