I’m Chen Qinghe, a bottom-tier Taoist priest who guards the dilapidated Qingxu Temple and is so broke I can barely scrape by. My only “inheritance” is a bizarre, sinister Soul-Luring Lantern my master entrusted to me before he died. Its shade is neither cloth nor paper. It feels warm and springy to the touch, and is unmistakably made of tanned human skin. They say it can guide lost souls and glimpse the secrets of the underworld, but its oil is nearly gone, and its flame is no bigger than a bean, flickering with an ominous glow. Desperate for money, I take a job from real-estate mogul Wang Zhenbang: his daughter, Wang Xiaoya, is plagued by an evil entity, suffering nightly terrors and behaving strangely. The moment I step into the luxurious yet lifeless villa at Stillwater Bay, the human-skin lantern draws near the eerie Kuman Thong by her pillow, and everything changes! The lantern flares to life on its own. Its ghostly green light pierces the walls, revealing five dried corpses in Taoist robes, sealed alive inside them! More chilling still, the skin on the lantern shade ripples like water, slowly revealing the clear face of one of the corpses: my uncle-master, Xuan Chengzi, missing for ten years with no word from him! I flee in terror back to the temple. Among my master’s belongings, an old yellowed photograph falls out, dragging me into an even deeper nightmare: in the picture, seven spirited young Taoist priests stand shoulder to shoulder, their faces beaming. Six are clearly recognizable: me, my uncle-master Xuan Chengzi, and the five corpses in the wall! But the seventh person’s face is completely obscured by a thick smear of blood, dried long ago and dark as grime… Why did the human-skin lantern light up because of the Kuman Thong? Why were the corpses in the wall dressed in Taoist robes? Why was my missing uncle-master sealed among them? And who is the seventh person hidden beneath the bloodstain?
