In the twenty-third year of the Guangxu reign, the people of Yuehe Village forged bronze nails from the flesh and blood of nineteen pairs of twin baby girls, sealing a flood of resentment beneath the river’s eye. A century later, on the night of the madwoman A Xiang’s ghost wedding, scratching sounds come from the coffin beneath a blood moon. The rotting wedding dress returns to its place night after night, while villagers burst apart one after another, transforming into human-faced poisonous toads. Beneath a hidden compartment in the ancestral hall, the orphan girl branded a “jinx” discovers a century-old corpse of a beautiful woman with her exact appearance. The name of her birth mother is engraved on the golden bracelet around its wrist, and the cinnabar mole over its heart echoes the spell inscribed on the bronze nail.
In the fog, as spectral soldiers march, a hundred coffins tangled in water weeds emerge from the Yue River. Nineteen pairs of infant skeletons in glass coffins sing a soul-calming song, while the roots of the locust trees twist out a record of sacrifices from the Guangxu era. When rhinoceros-horn incense rekindles the past, she learns that she was the “substitute” in a twin sacrifice. On a stormy night twenty years ago, her birth mother smashed the golden bracelet and stuffed her younger sister, the true “Lady of the Underworld,” into a bronze coffin, allowing the curse to take root in their bloodline. When the midnight suona sounds, A Xiang’s rotting fingers pierce her chest. “Dear sister, it’s time you gave me back this skin...”
On the night the blood moon hangs upside down, nineteen human stakes awaken, and the cinnabar register at the bottom of the bronze coffin glows with a ghostly light. This ghost wedding, spanning a century, must finally claim a living person as its sacrifice. Amid the Yue River’s boiling resentment, the blood debt owed by generations must be repaid.
