In the late Qing and early Republican eras, Chen Jiuchuan, an outcast of the Xuanming Sect, roams Manchuria with a Huang Immortal. The scales in his left eye, the mark of a Liu Immortal, are mottled with bronze rust. A ghost-opera stage where paper figures claim lives, a blood ginseng king that seeps with the souls of Japanese soldiers: every uncanny event points to the bronze gates beneath Changbai Mountain. When the calamity of shedding his scales arrives, he learns that he is the “living seal” forged by his master. If he suppresses the flood dragon, every immortal spirit will perish; if he breaks the mystic seal, the people will be plunged into misery. As the incense in the spirit-medium’s burner beneath his Taoist robe burns to ash, the strings of his erhu are taut as the threads of life.
