He came with his girlfriend, Lin Yue, to the mysterious, isolated village of Bailiu to prepare for their wedding. He thought it would be the beginning of a happy life, but never imagined he was stepping into an endless abyss of terror.
From the moment they entered the village, the paper wedding dresses hanging from the ancient locust tree at the entrance seemed sinister, as if countless vengeful spirits were crying out. Behind Lin Yue’s parents’ warm welcome lay a secret, and the red envelope they gave [protagonist’s name] contained a note with a chilling warning. Late that night, drawn by the sound of weeping, he witnessed a woman in red. Lin Yue revealed that she was her cousin, who had hanged herself in a paper wedding dress ten years ago. Since then, a curse had plagued the village: any girl who brought an outsider into the village had to offer her man to the female ghost.
The villagers then carried a coffin through a terrifying ritual, trapping [protagonist’s name] in a room with the ghost. He thought he had fallen into endless darkness, but discovered that he had transmigrated to Bailiu Village in 1999. This was only the beginning of a terrifying cycle.
After that, the protagonist repeatedly traveled through different eras of Bailiu Village. Each one was shrouded in the blood locust’s curse, its villagers reduced to living corpses and its living people sacrificed. Little by little, he uncovered the secret behind it all: a hundred years earlier, the first Taoist priest had made an evil pact with the blood locust, offering the souls of everyone in the village in exchange for eternal life. Every ten years, he had to sacrifice a man and a woman to sustain the pact. Ever since, each supposed “breaking” of the curse had merely been another cycle devised by the Taoist priest to amass resentment and blood.
In the rifts between eras, the protagonist encountered the lingering souls of the cousin and Lin Yue. He learned that the only way to sever the curse was to find the heart of the locust tree in each era and destroy the fragments of its soul. But whenever he came close to succeeding, the first Taoist priest’s remnant soul would interfere. His soul had spread across every era, and the curse followed like a shadow.
Hehehehe~