Lin Shen, a first-year archaeology student, receives a forbidden letter containing a sealed mark of Cthulhu. A silver-haired girl named Bai Lu, bearing a 1924 serial number branded on her neck, arrives, treading over dead fish and corpses. His phone camera captures a gigantic embryo moving beneath the earth. A blood pact with Su Wan, a shrine maiden, restrains the scales and claws of his transformation, while the laboratory of archaeology professor Qin Zhao displays the remains of his own clone, a hundred years old. When the corridors of memory reveal the marks left by time and space, murdering his parents on a snowy night, feeding blood to a baby in the deep sea, a burning wedding dress worn by a widow, eyeballs begin growing along his spine, beating in sync with the progeny of the Old Gods. On the eve of the Seventh Campus's collapse, three letters of flesh and blood arrive from the planet's core: a proposal ring from 1924, nuptial wine from 2003, and a starry pupil multiplying inside his chest.
