On the night of her twenty-fourth birthday, Lin Xiaoyu, who can see things that ordinary people cannot, receives a trembling phone call. Inside Ankang Hospital, abandoned for twenty years, desiccated corpses have been arranged in a funerary formation. In a puddle curled around the feet of one corpse, she sees the reflection of the vermilion mole on the back of her neck, perfectly overlapping with a cursed mark. As she steps through the vine-choked revolving door, the motion-activated lights explode. The coins in her pocket clatter, the “life-saving chime” her master spoke of on his deathbed, but also the key that unlocks the blood-red pendulum.
Bloody handprints on the walls hold golden-sprinkled plane-tree leaves. A little girl in hospital clothes hangs suspended in midair, a gear-shaped scar around her ankle. The corpse that “walked in by itself” on the security footage has a medical record dated October 31, 1998, tucked between its fingers: the day a hospital fire claimed forty-nine lives, and the anniversary of Lin Xiaoyu’s mother’s death. More chilling still, Detective Captain Chen Mo’s eyes suddenly turn ashen, and he keeps murmuring that the funerary formation requires a “living sacrifice.” At the top of the clock tower, caught in the pendulum, is a head with a red mole on its temple, exactly like the one in her mother’s photograph.
On a stormy night, when the pendulum swings backward, every window in the building opens eyes that glow green. The morgue’s iron doors swing open, and amid the sound of heartbeats, countless voices whisper, “Forty-nine years… we’ve finally been waiting for you.” When Lin Xiaoyu finds the words “Bring forty-nine leaves to the clock tower at midnight” written in the golden dust on the plane-tree leaves, she realizes with a shock that her shadow is fading in the pendulum’s shade. Ever since she was born, every year’s medical records have listed “Lin Xiaoyu” in the name field, with her age running from one to twenty-three, like forty-seven afterimages trapped in time by the pendulum.
The blood-red pendulum swings…
