An unsolved murder from the Republic era becomes a bone bell that claims lives, and a century-old pact binds bloodstained shadows once more. When forensic consultant Shen Zhaozhao touches key evidence from a series of murders, her psychic abilities spiral out of control. The white bone bells clutched in the hands of three corpses let her glimpse an unsolved massacre from 1937: a bride in a floral dress is gunned down, and a pair of entwined lotus flowers is engraved on the bloodstained grip of a Browning pistol.
Following the bone bell’s guidance, she enters an antique shop hidden in a narrow alley, Bone Bell House. The mysterious shopkeeper, Gu Qingrang, wears a jade safety pendant around his wrist, marked with the same fracture as the keepsake left by her mother. More terrifying still, the bride in a blood-soaked wedding captured in the yellowed photographs covering the walls has a cinnabar mole on her collarbone in precisely the same place as Shen Zhaozhao’s birthmark. And the groom holding the gun looks exactly like Gu Qingrang!
To break the life-claiming pact that spans a century, Shen Zhaozhao is forced to become the hundredth “contracted one.” When the bone bell tolls, memories of her past life surge back: a bullet wound overlapping the one in her heart, the brittle sound of the jade pendant shattering, and a wedding vow swallowed by the flames of war... When the antique shop becomes a contract prison that devours the living, she discovers that all the dead are reborn versions of people connected to the Republic-era massacre.
The killer in this life is using a Browning pistol to recreate the slaughter. The entwined-lotus engraving on its grip and the Sanskrit on the bone bell fit together to form a deadly array. Before the bone bell tolls again, Shen Zhaozhao must choose: destroy the pact and free Gu Qingrang’s imprisoned spirit, trapped for a hundred years, or let the ghosts of the Republic era return through the bone bell and wreak havoc among the living? The Browning that will decide the outcome is in the very hand that pulled the trigger in her past life...
