When the Nuo mask devours not only gods and ghosts, but also humanity
In Mistveil Village, western Hunan, the ancient Wu Nuo rites have sealed an entity deep underground. The Old One known as the Mother of a Thousand Eyes is awakening from her slumber.
Nuo opera heir Chen Yan puts on an ancestral mask to save a loved one, only to swallow his first mouthful of indescribable flesh. Scales sprout wildly along his right arm. A Republic-era pocket watch emerges from corpse wax, and the sacrificial child from a century ago opens an eye marked by quantum entanglement amid the corpse spots.
After nightfall, villagers carve writhing idols. Bronze patina seeps across the forensic autopsy table. A battered Nokia plays a child’s wailing from a century ago. When Chen Yan’s mask fusion passes the critical threshold, he sees himself in a vision: the Wu Nuo’s son who died in a tomb in 1913, and the living vessel on the verge of mutation in 2023.
- Shen Jiuli: An Outer God’s eye is embedded in his left socket, and his obsession with resurrection tears apart the anchors of time and space;
- Lin Chan: Before her faith in science collapses, she plunges a Cthulhu compass into her lover’s heart;
- A Cai: The flesh-and-blood body of a puppet witch splits in two between the Mother God’s whispers and her love.
Devour a thousand eyes and become a nonhuman god?
Tear off the mask and wager everything against the annihilation of civilization?
As flesh-and-blood wings rip through the ancestral hall’s roof, Chen Yan’s fangs clamp down on the last shred of his humanity
“Remember how much of yourself you’ve eaten.”
In a closed loop of time, every salvation is another kind of sacrifice.
