At 22, Lin Wanzhao takes a job at the secretive Qingyuan Sanatorium to search for her missing sister, Lin Chenyue. But she unexpectedly steps into the world of the “Night Watchers,” where they battle not ordinary patients, but “folk echoes” that have gone mad after being forgotten and devour emotional memories.
On her first day, she finds a medicinal sachet in her sister's old locker. The moment she touches it, the shadow of a nuo mask flashes before her eyes, awakening her gift for empathic touch. From then on, she works alongside Chen Shouzhuo, a steady, dependable mechanic, and follows Zhou Yinlu, a mentor who survived a fire. Using a combination of Chinese and Western medicine, including “cinnabar spirit-pinning needles” and “glutinous rice impurity-removing moxibustion,” they unravel eerie cases: Granny Chen, who recites the nuo opera verse “wear a red robe, ride a black horse”; a patient who imitates the contortions of nuo dancing; and a nuo mask pieced together with a witch's symbol that reveals “the Crest of Chaos”...
But the gentle and refined director, Gu Yuan, harbors twisted ambitions. Once powerless to save a loved one, he now seeks to control the “echoes” in order to “protect the world.” When the central contaminant arrives, half a peeling nuo mask and half the charred remains of a witch, Chenyue, who has been trapped all this time, has already used her abilities to connect with the benign memories within the “echoes.” The sisters work together from the inside and out, finally allowing it to “rest in peace.”
