As soon as the copper bell rings at midnight, all living people in Huangquan Town must close their doors.
Qin Wuwang clenched his ancestral Nuo noodles and listened to the sound of hundreds of ghosts dragging chains outside the door, knowing that he had lived another day.
This ancient town on the southwest border is a "folk custom village" filled with tourists during the day, but at night it becomes a Shura field at the intersection of yin and yang. The "Huangquan Book" guarded by the Qin family for generations records the secrets of the cycle of life and death, and also attracts the prying eyes of the "Ten Halls of Hell" - they want to use Nuo opera to summon souls, hang corpses in hanging coffins, and engage in underworld blood contracts to tamper with the destiny and resurrect the soul-devouring evil god Tao Zhu in the "Shan Hai Jing". In order to break the deadlock, Qin Wuwang was forced to wear a Nuo mask that could connect Yin and Yang and became the night watchman of the Underworld Archives Bureau. Every midnight, he has to sneak into the "Hundred Ghost Parade" and walk on the edge of rules and taboos:
Don't touch the bloody lantern, otherwise it will ignite three souls and seven souls;
The faceless Nuo God cannot be looked directly at, as those who look at him will become his substitute;
Once the bloody fingerprints of the ghost marriage contract are stained, a ghost marriage will take place within three days...
From the libretto of life and death in the "consecration" ceremony of Nuo opera, to the Five Poisons altar where the hanging coffin is buried; from the Yin and Yang pawnshop where souls are pawned, to the Huangquan Road where red and white evil spirits run parallel, Qin Wuwu discovered that every strange story is closely related to the lost folk customs. What's even more frightening is that Shen Qingya, the treasurer of the Archives Bureau, the Ming Dynasty imperial guard who controlled paper figures and lived for six hundred years, actually drew the "immortal poison" spell on his back; and the detective Lu Zhao, who always comes to the rescue in times of crisis, has the key to open the "Nine Nether Gate" hidden in his personal silver lock...
