A strange MMS message received late at night implicated unemployed reporter Chen Yu in a cult conspiracy that spanned 27 years. The red rag doll in the abandoned mental hospital in the west of the city, the inverted pentagram symbol in the blood pool in the basement, the mutilated skeletons of thirty-one experimental subjects - all clues point to the cover-up of the mass disappearance in 1998.
When Chen Yu discovered that the strange scratches on his back were exactly the same as those of the victim, and the silver ring that his mother clutched before her death actually appeared in the morgue of the mental hospital, he had to face a shocking truth: he was the 32nd sacrifice the Eternal Life Cult was looking for. The curse that the red rag doll will come to life, the sound of the gears of the mechanical heart, and the blood code in Lin Shuya's diary are intertwined into a network in the red light summoning array on the thirty-one tall buildings in the city.
From the baby skeleton in the freezer of the convenience store to the skeletal puzzle in the secret room of the archives, Chen Yu must uncover the secret of the souls collected by the red rag doll before the sacrifice day on October 22. When the button eyes of the last doll opened and thirty-one teeth formed a five-pointed star in the pool of blood, he realized: some horrors were destined from the day he was born.
