After his grandfather’s sudden death, eighteen-year-old Lin Chengdao takes a blood-soaked coffin made of willow wood to Mount Zhongnan in search of his granduncle, only to be drawn into a Maoshan secret realm. Strange phenomena in the coffin on the night of the wake, paper effigies bringing ill fortune in the bamboo grove behind the mountain, and the bizarre changes in his fellow disciple Qin Yi gradually expose the mystery of the blood coffin behind his grandfather’s final words: “Soak the willow coffin in chicken blood for seven days.” With the publication of The Secret Record of Yin and Yang, the Netherworld Hall’s scheme to resurrect the Corpse King using the “Yellow Springs Guide” bloodline comes to light. Lin Chengdao gradually discovers that he is the key to the mass grave of corpses in Qianshan eighteen years ago: his blood is the key to opening the Gate of the Yellow Springs. When the transmission ceremony becomes an altar for heretics, and the identities of his closest kin are shrouded in mystery, he stands with sword in hand, seeking the truth that has been locked inside the blood coffin for eighteen years, amid the tangled worlds of talismans and corpse aura. Who is the true “Yellow Springs Guide”? Does the blood-soaked willow coffin suppress a corpse, or the thousand-year-old Corpse King in his very bones?
