Ten years ago, Su Wangyan, a physician from the Xuanhu Pavilion, was caught up in a power struggle over the Marquis’s legitimate son because of her father. Half her face was carved away, and she was imprisoned in a funeral home to watch over the dead. Among the piles of corpses, she secretly studied the Marquis’s forbidden text, the Scripture of Rebirth. She became a “living dead” who could control corpses and wield poison as a weapon. Ten years later, at the first-month celebration for the Marquis’s eldest legitimate grandson, eighteen blood-red coffins carved with the family’s birth dates drift down the moat. Su Wangyan rises from a coffin, cradling her father’s remains. With seven infant Gu worms as her “betrothal gifts,” she forces the Marquis’s family to open the underground chamber beneath their ancestral hall. She will make those who killed her father use their own flesh and blood to “mend his bones.”
The Marquis’s second son, Pei Mingzhao, appears to be an idle young nobleman, but is in truth the commander of the secret guard camp. Ten years ago, he imprisoned Su Wangyan in the funeral home with a forged letter of divorce, claiming it was to protect her. He never knew that she had already transformed among mountains of corpses and seas of blood into the most dangerous avenger of all.
Within the Marquis’s household, the Marchioness uses bloodline Gu worms to control the men. The eldest daughter-in-law conceals murderous intent but is afflicted with a heart-eating Gu. Even Su Wangyan’s junior fellow disciple enters the game wearing the mask of a “poison bodhisattva.” Su Wangyan turns corpses into weapons and makes vengeful spirits “speak” to expose secrets, using poisonous Gu to force everyone to reveal their weaknesses. Pei Mingzhao, meanwhile, uses her to lure the snake from its hole, hoping to stir up the court with a blood edict.
When thirty wronged corpses from the funeral home come marching through blood, and the former crown prince’s remains are unearthed from beneath the moat, Su Wangyan and Pei Mingzhao become each other’s pawns and antidotes amid the bloody maze. She wants the Marquis’s household buried with the dead; he wants power over all under heaven. But bound by the strangling bond of a symbiotic Gu, they have no choice but to entrust each other with their backs. In this game, who will become the final player in command amid the mountains of corpses and seas of blood within the vermilion gates?
