This book is divided into two volumes:
Volume One takes place in the northwestern wastelands during the early years of the Republic. Detective Lu Shen goes undercover in a shadow-puppet troupe to investigate a bizarre series of murders, only to discover that the puppets are all made from the human skin of a sorcerer from the late Qing Dynasty, and are sinister and bloodthirsty. He survives a terrifying encounter with an underground pool of blood, where a mysterious gravedigger makes an appearance. Though he escapes by sheer luck, an unknown cinnabar mark is branded between his brows. Back in the city, nightmares torment him and red marks appear in the shadows. He realizes that the evil force follows him like a shadow, has already crossed the boundary between reality and illusion, and marked him as a prisoner who can never escape.
Volume Two takes place around the time of Liberation. The orphan Lin Ke is adopted by a gloomy, blind fortune-teller and forced from childhood to study a strange form of bone reading, leaving him with deep psychological scars. As an adult, he becomes a forensic examiner who believes firmly in science. But in a horrifying series of murders involving skeletal remains, he finds inside a victim’s skull the “ancestral mark” of the blind man, something he never wanted to see again.
To save himself, he is forced to return to the darkness buried deep in his memories and venture into the barren Gobi Desert in the northwest, where he encounters terrifying phenomena and beings that science cannot explain. At last, a horrifying truth comes to light: the bone-reading art he learned is part of a dreadful cycle that uses bones as payment to feed the creature behind the “Door.” And he himself may have been the carefully chosen “feed” from the very beginning.
