Records of the Underworld: The Blood-Jade Bride

Ming-Qing Alternate History · Reincarnation Curse · Flesh Mutation · Chilling on Second Thought “The bangle on your wrist isn't jade. It's your own throat bone from three hundred years ago.” On a stormy night, Su Wan, eldest daughter of the Su family in Qixia Town, receives a blood-red jade bangle sent by her younger brother, who vanished ten years ago. Her birth date is carved inside the bangle. In the package, soaked in rotten blood, lies half a finger bone wearing a jadeite ring. A corpse surfaces in the well with her face. Beneath an old servant's skin is the frame of a paper effigy. The family genealogy in the ancestral hall records that she has died violently thirteen times. As the patterns on the blood-jade bangle crawl up her arm, Su Wan discovers that her flesh is gradually turning to jade. Her nails harden into blood coral, her tears become red jade when they hit the ground, and the intervals between her breaths grow longer. More terrifying still, blood-red characters appear on the plain silk in the dye house, revealing that her true date of death was the night of the Ghost Festival three hundred years ago. The townspeople are paper effigies made from the living. Nine tiers of bronze coffins hang in an underground palace. Hungry ghosts from the Avici Realm roam the streets at night... As the transformation advances, Su Wan sees in fragments of memory that she was once a shamaness who presided over a living sacrifice. Sealed inside the blood-jade bangle is the resentment of nine hundred boys and girls she sacrificed in her quest for immortality. And before every dawn, the townspeople who greet her with smiling faces reveal their true forms: blue-faced, fanged corpse-eaters. In this cycle of reincarnation, she must choose: Cut out her heart and restart the curse, becoming the new tomb keeper; Or burn away her soul and destroy the underground palace, plunging into eternal damnation alongside her past self from three hundred years ago? If karma has already sealed your fate, would you rather awaken in an eternal nightmare, or sink into a false dawn?