Born on a yin year, yin month, and yin day, the matchmaker Xiniang had her eyes sealed with bloody fingerprints as a child, and grew up in the shadow of evil spirits watching her. Terrifying changes swept through the village one after another: livestock had their eyes gouged out and their guts torn open, villagers died mysterious deaths, and even the village fool, Xiaohu, was found hanged at the entrance, his belly as empty as paper. Uncle Wang, the paper effigy maker, had warned her, “Never paint eyes on a paper figure.” But when Xiniang discovered that Uncle Wang had become a blind paper figure, and her grandfather risked his life to wield a coin sword, the truth tore through the veil: she herself was a paper figure, given eyes with her dead mother’s blood by her grandfather, to suppress the painted-skin evil spirit that had haunted the old pagoda tree for three hundred years. The bloody battle ended, and the village burned to the ground. On the scorched earth, Xiniang reopened her paper effigy shop, drawing talismans with corpse fluid to ward off evil. Yet on the Ghost Festival, the charred stump of the pagoda tree began to writhe again. “Grandpa,” wrapped in bark, tore off his face and was reborn, while the three hundred human skins hanging in the backyard whispered in the wind… When a bride in a red wedding dress opened the door, revealing beneath her veil a face identical to Xiniang’s, a rusty pagoda-tree core seeped crimson blood from the coin sword. This time, who would be the offering whose eyes were painted?
