Emergency physician Lin Mo is stunned to learn that his grandfather, Lin Jiuzhen, a legendary traditional Chinese doctor once renowned throughout the region and steadfastly bound by his ironclad “Three Conditions for Refusal,” has died after falling gravely ill. He rushes home for the funeral, bringing back only an old wooden chest stained with dark brown blood and his grandfather’s dying words, screamed in anguish: “Save Jishi Hall! The Three Conditions have been broken! Be careful!”
Back at Jishi Hall, the century-old clinic founded by his grandfather, Lin Mo finds it on the verge of closing down. On a rainy night, a worker named A Qiang, soaked and chilled to the bone, suddenly suffers a terrifying medical emergency inside the clinic: coughing up blood and pus, with dark red, living worms writhing in his phlegm. His life hangs by a thread! Relying on his emergency-room experience and hazy childhood memories, Lin Mo risks using ancient treatments such as bloodletting at the Ten Meridians. At the critical moment, the mysterious wooden chest begins to hum! Inside are a bizarre “Evil-Breaking Needle,” a fragmentary bestiary documenting forbidden “Yin Prescriptions,” and a freezing black token engraved with a beast’s head in ancient exorcistic script.
Before he can catch his breath, three men in black, fierce as demons, burst through the door, their target clearly the chest! With death threatening from two directions, Lin Mo is forced to use his own “pure Yang lifeblood” as a catalyst. Combining the fragmentary records with medicinal powder from the chest, he narrowly draws the mother of the “Red Thread Gu” out of A Qiang’s body and drives off the attackers.
But this is only the beginning of the storm. The police interrogate him; after waking, A Qiang identifies the foreman Zhang Mazi as the one who poisoned him; and Uncle Chen, the clinic’s manager, confesses that half a year ago he broke the rules out of compassion to treat a girl suffering from corpse syncope, bringing down the clinic’s fortunes through the evil spirits’ revenge... Every clue points to a mysterious organization skilled in sinister sorcery: the Gu Sect. More alarming still, when Lin Mo touches the mysterious token, he glimpses his grandfather fighting in a sea of blood, tearing...
