Lin Feng, a history graduate student working hard in the city, was forced to return to his hometown of Linjia Village in the mountains after ten years of absence due to the sudden death of his grandfather Lin Jianguo. As soon as he stepped into the village, he noticed something was wrong: the villagers looked at him with evasive eyes, and the cause of his grandfather's death was vaguely classified as "relapse of an old illness." However, the oil lamp in the mourning hall that was supposed to stay on was mysteriously extinguished on the night he arrived. As he sorted through his grandfather's belongings, Lin Feng discovered something even more bizarre: Hidden in the wall of his grandfather's bedroom was a genealogy with missing pages, painted with incomprehensible twisted symbols; a wooden box was locked in the drawer, with the words "Do not open the west window on July 13th" engraved on the bottom of the box.
In the following days, strange things happened one after another: Late every night, a woman's cry could be heard outside the hospital, but when the door opened, there was no one there; from the old well at the east end of the village, a bloody rag was fished out, and the pattern on the cloth was consistent with the symbols on the grandfather's wooden box; several elderly people in the village disappeared one after another, but their family members seemed to have lost their memory and could not tell the specific time when their relatives disappeared. Lin Feng suspected that his grandfather's death was related to these strange things. He began to investigate secretly, but found that Linjia Village hid a secret that had been deliberately forgotten - a hundred years ago, there was a massacre in the village, and the victims of the massacre seemed to be related to the missing pages in the genealogy. What made him even more horrified was that he saw a sentence in his grandfather's diary: "What they are looking for is not a person, but a 'substitute'." As the investigation deepened, Lin Feng found that he was also trapped in a cycle: he always saw himself ten years ago on a rainy day, and the calendar in the village actually ran backwards from time to time...
