Ghost Blows Out the Light: Twin Spirits of Jingjue, Rebirth of the Ghost Cave

After Hu Bayi is discharged from the army and returns to Beijing, he hopes to make a living in Panjiayuan. But Wang Pangzi’s shouting drags him into a death loop spanning thirty years. Shirley Yang, carrying half of a broken Tomb Raider’s Talisman, a jade pendant carved with an eye totem, and the three of them bearing red marks that are mutating on their wrists, pulls them back into the nightmare of the Kunlun Mountains in 1974: the fire beetles of the nine-story demon tower, the living-dead experiments at the Kwantung Army fortress, and the body of a young girl in the tomb of the Queen of Jingjue, identical to Shirley Yang.

When a black sandstorm sweeps across the Taklamakan and stirs up the magnetic mountains’ stone markers, Hu Bayi discovers that the surviving pages of his grandfather’s Sixteen-Character Yin-Yang Feng Shui Secrets conceal a shocking secret about the Ghost Cave Clan’s “Twin Hosts.” The Kwantung Army’s “Wood Spirit Project” in 1945, the flash of fire when Tomb Raiders shattered the Dust Bead in 1962, and the disappearance of the entire scientific expedition in 1974 are all part of the Queen of Jingjue’s cycle of reincarnation. The red mark on Shirley Yang’s wrist slowly turns into snake scales; the jade pendant at her neck resonates with a bronze scepter, and the vertical pupils in her eyes reflect a coffin deep within the Ghost Cave. Inside lies another “her,” with no curse on her wrist, but the same eye totem.