Beneath the Yellow River’s turbid waves lies a slumbering secret that devours people.
Zhang Qinghe, a corpse retriever, fishes a drowned body from the river: a woman in a dark red qipao, her flesh unrotted after a hundred years, with a ritual jade cong hidden in her belly. From then on, a bronze bell demands lives night after night, while the dead appear in his dreams, telling him to “give back the bride.”
Xu Bailu, a folklorist carrying a 1947 ferry ticket, comes to see him. Following the corpse’s clues, the two venture into an ancient city beneath the river. There are living people hanging upside down as sacrificial stakes, coffin wells marked with the dates and hours of people’s births, and a reincarnation stele carved with the faces of seven generations. A bloody truth slowly surfaces: for generations, the Zhang family have been “bell keepers,” tasked with capturing the reincarnation of the River Earl’s daughter and turning her into the “Yellow River Goddess,” feeding the resentful dead to the nameless whispers in the abyss.
When bronze patterns crawl out from beneath Xu Bailu’s qipao, and a bronze mirror reveals an illusion of her grandfather pushing her off a ferry, Zhang Qinghe is forced to face the curse. The woman in his arms is the seventh sacrificial offering. Beneath the Well of Rebirth, three hundred upside-down corpses open their eyes as one, while a bronze cauldron boils with the spirits of generations of the wrongfully dead. Destroy the reincarnation stele, and the Yellow River will swallow every living soul for eight hundred miles. Leave it intact, and Xu Bailu will become a vessel for an evil gu forever.
In the undercurrents, jade cicada eggs embedded with microchips drift and spread. Whose wrist will the new bell ring from?
