On a stormy night in Linjiang City, a "bloodless corpse case" shocks the abandoned opera house.
At the crime scene, Xie Shenyuan, director of the Special Investigations Bureau, meets Jiang Henian, the owner of an antique shop. The man's moon-white robe bears a century of loneliness, and with a flick of his folding fan, he unveils the secrets of ancient exorcist script. When the shadows of soul-guiding lanterns take the shape of kneeling figures, and the bloodied holes in the victims' backs form a deadly Big Dipper pattern, Xie Shenyuan's bronze compass and Jiang Henian's ebony divination blocks point to a shocking conspiracy from a hundred years ago: the "Eternal Life Lantern," forged through blood sacrifices of the living by the four great families of the occult, is quietly reigniting in the modern city.
On one side are a string of bizarre cases: frozen corpses at a funeral home walking together at night, ghost soldiers appearing on the last subway train, a century-old ghost drifting through an influencer's livestream... Every crime scene contains bronze fragments from a lotus lantern base, and the heart of every victim bears a star chart of Xie Shenyuan's fate.
On the other side is a forbidden bond: on nights when the soul-locking seal around Jiang Henian's neck grows hot, Xie Shenyuan's judge's brush always unconsciously traces the beauty mark at the corner of his eye. When their spiritual powers mingle to break the deadly formations, memories of their past lives surge back like a tide. A hundred years ago, when Jiang Henian was nailed into a coffin as a sacrifice, it was Xie Shenyuan's previous incarnation who placed a strand of obsidian prayer beads around his neck.
In this high-stakes gamble spanning the realms of the living and the dead, can the judge's brush and the soul-crossing lantern sever a century of karma? And when the forty-ninth soul-guiding lantern is lit, what will they choose: destroy the formation and separate the living from the dead forever, or reverse reincarnation and rewrite their blood-soaked ending?
