Lin Yan never thought that returning home to attend the funeral for his Hani grandmother would uncover the strangest secret of Qingkou Village - Grandpa Li, who had been paralyzed for many years, suddenly stood up in front of the mourning hall and read out village affairs secrets from thirty years ago in the tone of the late party secretary, pointing to the unsolved "forest farm disappearance case" that year.
After the century-old banyan tree at the head of the village was cut down, strange things happened more and more frequently: Grandpa imitated the old party secretary and denounced corruption, telling clues about the things buried in the mountains that only the deceased knew, but he had no memory of anything after he woke up. The village chief's secrecy, the villagers' fearful obstruction, and the vague record of "Winter 1998" in his grandmother's diary dragged Lin Yan into a puzzle wrapped in folklore.
When rusty account books and contracts with crossed out signatures were unearthed from the back mountain, when the village doctor revealed the truth about "stress-induced dissociation syndrome", and when the skeleton under the roots of the old banyan tree was revealed to the sky, the so-called "ghost borrowing" was nothing but a complaint that paralyzed witnesses had suppressed for thirty years. It was an occupied forest farm and a covered-up murder case. Finally, after the tree fell, an opportunity was found to reveal the truth.
In Qingkou Village after the rain stopped, the newly planted banyan saplings were tied with red ropes, and Grandpa Li kowtowed three times to the tombstone of the old branch secretary. The truths told through his "upper body" finally allowed the souls of the dead to return and reborn the village.
