Seventy-One Countdown

When a blood-red countdown appeared in her palm, nineteen-year-old Lin Xia finally saw the uncanny world hidden in the folds of the modern city.

A neck melting in a café, a bronze casket hanging in the ancestral hall of an old mansion, a corpse in a hospital basement growing younger instead of older: every death prediction led to an even deeper fog. Forced to join forces with Gu Mingyuan, a forensic doctor whose identity was a mystery, she discovered that her “Eye of Truth” was the key to an immortality altar erected a thousand years ago by the five branches of the mystic sects.

Traveling between a charred corpse in a textile mill in 1983 and a future ravaged by decay, they uncovered a chilling truth: the women in the Lin family genealogy who died young throughout the generations were all the same person; the corpses Gu Mingyuan had autopsied were coming back to life in his memories; and the robed figure wandering through the cracks in time had a blood-red countdown pulsing on their neck, identical to Lin Xia’s...

When the final piece of jade marrow was set into the bronze casket and the bells rang on her twentieth birthday, Lin Xia finally understood: the ability to foresee death was nothing more than a script, endlessly replayed by an immortal.