A speck of dust from the times, when it falls on an individual, becomes a mountain crushing their faith.
In the summer of 1986, high school student Chen Chuan dreams of going to university, but a telegram saying “Grandfather is critically ill” pulls him back to the isolated village of Chenjia’ao. Since childhood, he has resented his grandfather’s identity as a yin-yang master, believing that science alone is the truth.
Yet the moment he steps off the train, a strange chill follows him like a shadow. His grandfather’s terrifying warning on his deathbed, the dark figure lingering beneath the old locust tree at the village entrance, and the ancestral compass that can sense ill omens all cruelly proclaim the same thing: the world he has known for eighteen years is a lie.
On the night he returns home, the neighbor’s young son suddenly falls gravely ill, convulsing without pause. No medicine can help. As the entire village looks on in despair, this “educated man,” who only wants to get away, is forced to take up his grandfather’s mantle. Armed with half a tattered notebook and a compass pointing toward the uncanny, he chants a spell in a trembling voice and slams his hand on the table, sending terror through the room...
The child is saved, but Chen Chuan knows the real horror has only just begun. The black miasma driven from the child’s body has not gone away. It is hiding in the shadows of this old house.
And he, the “last yin-yang master,” the one who believes in nothing supernatural, must use his scientific mind to interpret the ancestral arts. Amid one bizarre folk mystery after another, from water ghosts dragging people under to ghost soldiers borrowing the road, from smoke rising over ancestral graves to corpses rising in ancestral halls, he must struggle to survive and gradually uncover the terrifying curse that has haunted his family for three generations.
In this fierce clash between humans and ghosts, science and superstition, old traditions and new ideas, can he defy fate and bring it all to an end?
With one compass and half a ruined book, he traverses eighty years of rural life, uncovering the strange tales and eerie mysteries of the folk world.
This novel feels okay, but the front and back parts are a bit inconsistent. The protagonist obviously has a mother, but the back part says that he doesn't have a mother.
It's pretty good, but the story is a bit short.
Good-looking, very good-looking