When Lin Jinglan strikes the fourth-generation ancestral clapper in the midnight ghost market, a corpse hanging upside down suddenly begins reciting a story cut short thirty years ago. This is the curse of the Nine Heavens storytellers' awakened bloodline, and also an unsolved deicide case that has remained a mystery for a thousand years.
As the heir to the Yin-Yang Voice, holding a fragment of Records of Secrets of the Mountains and Rivers, he earns a living by recounting the tales of the Sui and Tang dynasties with a folding fan by day. At night, however, he is hunted by Corpse Speakers created by the Gate of Rebirth. The clues to breaking the case lie in three eerie pieces of evidence: a Ming dynasty storybook that seeps human blood, a bronze fruit bearing a human tongue, and the Yongle Great Bell covered in binary code. When Bai Zhi's six fingers touch the sound-pattern lock beneath the Forbidden City's paving stones, they discover that the so-called "dragon vein" is actually a quantum recording device left behind by an extraterrestrial civilization, and that emperors throughout history were nothing more than "human phonographs" playing a warning.
In this pursuit across time and space, spanning a cryogenic chamber from the sixth year of Hongwu and an AI teahouse theater in 2035, the soundwave arts of the Clapper Hall face off against the Earth Dragon Society's nano Luoyang shovels. The rapid-fire patter of storytelling turns out to be the password for restarting an interstellar beacon. When the mechanical prayer wheel completes its 108th turn, a nine-zhang-tall bronze giant deep in the tomb of the First Emperor opens its quantum eyes. Are the "forbidden storybooks" guarded by generations of storytellers prophecies of the apocalypse, or humanity's final love letter to the cosmos?
